[ Lost in the Landscape ]

soylent black

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.

December 07 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: compost • compost bins • composting • films • Soylent Green | 7 Comments »

my new composter

I often get the impres­sion that to get your ticket punched as a real, seri­ous gar­dener you have to take up com­post­ing. Still, I gave up on pol­ish­ing my halo a dozen years ago. The old-fashioned com­post pile I had took way more main­te­nance than I was inter­ested in…all the has­sles, espe­cially keep­ing the beast stirred and watered.

Since those days tum­bling com­posters have really come into their own as an alter­na­tive to the piles that just sit there like Uncle Ervin on his Barca-Lounger in front of the TV. The promise of a com­post device that sim­pli­fies keep­ing the mix stirred and aer­ated sounded almost too god to be true, but I’ve been tempted to give them a twirl.

The oppor­tu­nity came up as I headed to the back aisles at Costco to pick up some cheese and bread. On my way to the back of the store a big tum­bling com­poster tried to reel me in with its dark trac­tor beam.

The thing with this store is that you usu­ally have your choice of the one item they offer for sale, which in this case was the 80-gallon Life­time model 60021 tum­bling com­poster. (Costco offers sev­eral other mod­els online.) Even with a price tag less than $100 I resisted at first. But I went home and did a lit­tle research online. Judg­ing by the cus­tomer reviews peo­ple gen­er­ally seemed to like this model, with the main com­plaint being being about an inter­nal aer­at­ing tube that kept get­ting bent because it was made out of PVC. It seemed like a valid but rel­a­tively minor con­cern, so I decided to give the com­poster a try.

When you buy this model, you’re really buy­ing a com­poster kit, not an assem­bled com­poster. I doc­u­mented the time I started, before I opened the box, before I assem­bled the nec­es­sary tools (which ended up requiring–among other things–an elec­tric drill and socket wrenches), before I read the instruc­tions that rec­om­mended that it would take two adults to assem­ble it. John is still hob­bling around on crutches right now, so I decided to go it alone.

From the doc­u­mented end time you can see that it took me about an hour and fifty min­utes to put it together. That includes time spent tak­ing a few pieces apart after I’d installed them incor­rectly, as well as a few min­utes when John came out to super­vise my work and ogle the new toy. I’m gen­er­ally pretty handy with mechan­i­cal things, if a lit­tle impa­tient to read all the way through instruc­tions. I also did okay heft­ing the big 65 pound box the kit came in, and had the added ben­e­fit of a power screw­driver. Adjust your expec­ta­tions for assem­bly time and effort accordingly.

Things fit together eas­ily and made for a sturdy, double-walled, insu­lat­ing com­post­ing cham­ber. Appar­ently the com­pany read the cus­tomer com­plaints about the PVC aer­at­ing tube, because by the time they made my ver­sion of the model, the flimsy inter­nal part had been replaced with a rigid piece of per­fo­rated metal pipe.

The com­poster now lives out­side the kitchen, along­side the trash­cans and recy­cle bar­rels. It shouldn’t be hard to keep the com­post bar­rel fed and tum­bled. Once the bar­rel is filled it’ll need a few weeks for the com­post to cook to per­fec­tion, a time when you shouldn’t be feed­ing it more clip­pings and scraps. To do things right, hav­ing a sec­ond bar­rel at the ready for those times would be the way to go. Within a few weeks I should have a bet­ter idea whether this model of com­poster lives up to my expec­ta­tions and war­rants my buy­ing a sec­ond one.

So, will I become a real, seri­ous, com­post­ing gar­dener? I’d say it’s off to a good start.

May 05 2010 | Categories: gardening | Tags: compost bins • composting • recycling • rotary composters | 13 Comments »