Metro Pulse/Gamut/Composting

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The obsessive satisfactions of composting

by Jack Neely

Every spring brings an opportunity to plant a garden, and it’s something I look forward to. It’s satisfying to work in the dirt, break it up, fertilize, plant, water, weed, and, at long last, pick vegetables better even than the ones you can buy at the farmers’ markets. I never much liked corn, or tomatoes, or spinach, or asparagus, or brussels sprouts, not much, until I grew them myself. You can get them at their best only in your backyard, during the warm months.

But maybe even more than planting a garden, I look forward to reviving the compost pile. It is, with me, another springtime institution.

It begins each year as a plain trash heap, the Halloween pumpkins and the Christmas tree, some random dead sticks. To that, in the spring, I begin to add shrubbery clippings. I prefer not to haul clippings, even the woody stalks, out to the street. I don’t like the idea that city taxpayers that I don’t know should have to pay to take away my pieces of our bushes that my wife and I decided we didn’t want in our backyard. I also don’t like the idea of it all sitting in a landfill somewhere, where according to some studies, even biodegradable material sometimes squats in a state of perfect preservation for 40 years or more. I don’t like to drag stuff to the street and ask somebody else to make it disappear—especially when it’s so satisfying to take care of it yourself.

So I chop my lawn trash up into pieces of a fathom or less in length, and pile them together with the skeleton of the Christmas tree and what little remains of the pumpkins. And, as I watch, the original pile always grows smaller. It seems to shrink at a more rapid rate as you get into May. What happens after that is still so remarkable to me, after all these years, that I want to call strangers off the street to come look.

For most gardeners, composting is a simple, practical thing, a way to manufacture nutrients for the garden, cheap. They’ve found methodical ways to civilize the old-fashioned compost pile, contain it within a plastic bin tucked discreetly in the corner of the yard. They remove the useful compost in a sliding drawer. It looks like a magician’s trick, and the people who have them are proud to show them off. But I think they take all the fun out of it.

To me, a compost pile is a wild, free thing, a phenomenon of nature, something to enjoy in itself, for what it is. It draws you like a bonfire. When it’s working perfectly, in fact, a compost pile is very much like a smokeless bonfire: it takes a large bulk of material, reduces it to nearly nothing, and turns it black. Sometimes you’ll swear you can hear it crackling.

Around May, when it gets dependably warm, is when I start to get serious about my heap. I throw a couple of pints of dirt on it, just to give it the right idea, and then haul out the garden hose and soak it down three or four times a week. When I’m obsessive, I use a pitchfork and stir it around a little.

As it begins to work, I’m more and more liberal about what sort of trash I throw into it. Banana peels and apple cores are standard, of course. Some people stop there, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But a compost pile has much more potential than that.

A compost pile is a profoundly satisfying thing. At a time that we had little kids of an age that stage of development when they believe themselves to be rich and spoiled and free to reject most of the food their servants had prepared, the compost pile was a way to console broke parents about wasted resources. You put the uneaten broccoli and cornbread and macaroni and cheese on the compost pile, and soak it down with their undrunk glasses of milk. And you believe that it’s possible that the vitamins and minerals wasted by the kids at the table tonight might be given a second chance when they reappear in next year’s corn crop.

There a couple of years when I loaded nearly everything into the pile: meat scraps, moldy lasagna, fish heads, scrap lumber, dead squirrels. They say you’re not supposed to put dead animals, or dead animals parts, into a compost pile. For the record, I don’t any more. But when I did, the compost pile devoured it all indifferently. It was like a damp, smelly god.

And it shrinks, sometimes so alarmingly fast, you feel a parental responsibility to feed it. If it gets too small, it might die. So, you look around for what else you’ve got. At that point, it’s cooking so fast it’ll consume a telephone book, an old wool shirt, a hockey stick, and, if you’re not careful, one of your slower pets.

You don’t want to get too close, yourself. But when it’s working at its peak, you’ll want to invite your friends over to gather around it. Bring marshmallows, put them in, at stick’s length, and watch them rot. It’s a much healthier way to enjoy junk food.

Like a kid making his first surreptitious fire, I was fascinated with my first successful compost pile. I’d throw all sorts of things in there, not for any earnest motive to manufacture usable compost, but just to see what would happen: worn-out tennis shoes; moldy basement furniture; textbooks McKay’s won’t buy; embarrassing T-shirts; an old baseball; an abused screen door; an ugly adjustable cap; a few bad novels, some of which I wrote myself.

Sifting through the remains in the fall, you might find a small bone, a nail, a hinge, or an odd rubber flap that you don’t recognize at first was once the business side of your old Chuck Taylors.

The tomato patch begins to seem effete in comparison. Decay can be more astonishingly robust than life and growth; everything returns to dust, just like it says in the Bible. Sunday school classes should take one on as a rare opportunity to demonstrate scriptural principles. A compost pile gives you some perspective. Dr. Bass, I’m sure, is familiar with the phenomenon.

The following spring, just for form’s sake, I’ll sometimes fold a token amount of the compost into the tomato patch or the corn patch. And I love fresh tomatoes, fresh corn, fresh jalapenos. But on some warm days, they seem like supporting players, my best excuse to start a compost pile.