Compost!

Here’s just part of the second load of dark gold this season.

I know composting is warm and fuzzy and poetic, all about returning the earth’s bounty back to the soil. But take a look at the mechanics of composting, will you?

You prune your garden and throw the scraps in the composter. Or you find plants that have died and chop up their remains into the dark bin. Next you wait a few months for the stuff to break down and then you feed it back to the plants in the garden. Some of the plants might be seedlings of deceased plants in the compost. It’s like you’re feeding a plant the reprocessed remains of its parents or–worse yet–itself.

In human terms you’d call this something close to cannibalism, not far from what happens in the 1973 science fiction thriller Soylent Green. It had been a few years since I’d seen the film so I had to refresh my memory of its plot: Charlton Heston plays a prickly detective named Thorn. (Thorn, as in “thorn in your side” or Thorn as in something botanical–my conspiracy theory is coming full circle…)

In the course of investigating a murder, Thorn happens upon the realization that the rations many of the residents of 2022 New York City were eating–Soylent Green–were reprocessed from humans, hence the famous penultimate line from the film, “Soylent Green is people!”

We’re all civilized folk, however, so cannibalism isn’t something that we generally take part in. (And for me it’d be doubly difficult because I’d have to give up being a vegetarian…)

Still, all unseemliness aside, I’m getting hooked on vegetable cannibalism–composting–and I’m feeling good about it.

Kitchen scraps, most of the garden clippings, all these things end up in the big black bin. The first batch of Soylent Black took about six weeks in high summer. The next batch got close to ready but then I fed the composter lots of new scraps, pushing back the time it would be ready to use by a couple months.

And then in October, with what passes down here as heavy autumn rains, a large branch that constituted about a quarter of the grapefruit tree snapped. It seemed like a waste to toss the unripe fruit, so into the composter it went. Four or five weeks later it looked like this, with most of the whole fruits looking almost like the day they were admitted to the composter.

So to the list of foodstuffs like avocado pits and corn ears–things that don’t break down readily–I’ve added whole citrus. By contrast the fruits that were broken open were beginning to compost, so I fished out all the whole uncomposted grapefruits, split them open with a shoved, and then added them to the next pile of things to start composting.

One of my mother’s Ohio-isms was the phrase that someone’s eyes were bigger than their stomach. In our case it was that our pile of compostables from an intense weekend of clearing our overgrown plants was bigger that the space we had in the barrel.

But no problem, really. We chopped these up into two big yard trash cans that will sit around for a couple weeks, maybe a little more in this cold weather, until the volume of what’s in the composter now miraculously shrinks. (If you’ve composted you know exactly what I mean, with the compostables seeming to turn into water and vapor, leaving almost nothing behind.)

You may be looking at this and saying that it’s a lot of work, and it can be. But like so many other things in the garden, it’s amazingly gratifying work, both for the gardeners and the lucky plants that get a share of the soylent black.