[ 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 »

from leaf to mulch

For my first attempt at par­tic­i­pat­ing in Pam at Digging’s Foliage Follow-up Day I looked under the grape­fruit tree for inspi­ra­tion. As the leaves fall from the tree they go from green to brown to gray before they finally become part of the com­post that enriches the top of the soil. That last stage pro­duces some gor­geous arti­facts, where what’s left is mostly the thicker veins of the leaf. Even as the leaf tis­sue between the veins becomes com­post or is con­sumed by the lit­tle crit­ters liv­ing in the mulch, the struc­ture of the leaf still remains.

Here’s a series of pho­tos of those last rec­og­niz­able traces of formerly-living leaves. Most of the below take advan­tage of the fact that the shadow can seem much more sub­stan­tial as the thing itself. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the last­ing power of a leaf that is about to become com­post? Some­thing about the cycle of life?

February 16 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: compost • grapefruit • leaves • mulch | 18 Comments »