The Virtues of Composting

In 1977 I bought my first house in Durham, North Carolina. Its primary asset was a well-established compost pile. It was about 6 x 4 feet with fencing attached securely to metal poles at each corner. I covered it with black plastic and marveled at the proliferation of banana slugs, pumpkin vines and, ultimately, compost. You can see the compost pile on the left of the quilted piece that I made in 1980. Since that initial pile, I am pleased to say that I have created compost piles in two more houses in North Carolina and two in northern California.

Compost is all about transformation. The mix of ingredients you put into the bin are ready at hand and by no means exotic: leaves you’ve raked up from the front yard or the street, grass clippings and garden trimmings, vegetable and fruit peelings (like cilantro, parsley, and celery that have gone yellow in the fridge), dead or dying houseplants, tea leaves and coffee grounds. I stay away from pasta, bread, bones and other kinds of protein; these can go into your yard waste container if your garbage people allow it. Avoid large tree branches or super-leathery leaves because they take too long to disintegrate. Sprinkle with water to keep the pile damp but not swampy. Cover it up. Stir it every so often. Wait for a while and, like magic, this assortment of ingredients turns into a dark, rich crumbly stuff called compost. Add it to your garden as mulch, fertilizer, and soil amendment all in one.

The first thing you need to do is to buy a plastic compost bin or create your own using wooden palettes or fencing and stakes mentioned above. Plastic bins are often available at a cut-rate price from your county’s waste management authority. Check out the resource list below. I put my bin in a side or back yard where it can’t be seen from the street.

The second thing you need to do is find a good way to collect the peelings in your kitchen. While I’m cooking, I keep a metal bowl next to the chopping area and put all the peels into that.

The bowl gets dumped into a blue plastic container with a lid (mine is from IKEA) which fits underneath the sink. I can easily empty it into the compost bin whenever it’s full or getting a little stinky and cover the contents with dried leaves already in the bin.







I am truly dazzled by what happens to this mixture of disparate ingredients. While making supper requires some effort from me, compost mostly cooks itself. I win in every way: my garden soil is greatly enriched, much less of my waste goes into the city landfill, and I get to feel so virtuous.

BUILDING YOUR OWN COMPOST BIN
I Googled ‘building a compost bin’ and got many responses. Among them were
www.peoplepoweredmachines.com/composter
www.backyardgardener.com/compost
REDUCED-COST COMPOST BINS
Bay area:
Alameda County 510-444-SOIL (the Rotline)
www.stopwaste.org
Central Contra Costa County Solid Waste Authority 925-906-1806
www.wastediversion.org
West Contra Costa County Integrated Waste Management Authority
www.recyclemore.com
San Mateo County RecycleWorks 888-442-2666
www.recycleworks.org
Santa Clara County Recycling & Waste Reduction Commission 408-918-4640
reducewaste.org
New York City area: (if bins are available in NYC, maybe they are everywhere)
For Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens Compost Projects
www.nyccompost.org/resources/orderbin.html
BUYING A COMPOST BIN
I Googled ‘Compost Bins’ and got a huge number of sites offering to sell me one. Some are inexplicably expensive. I think the least expensive was about $90. You might also check with your local nursery for availability in your area.
www.compostbins.com

Lurking Fruits and Veggies

At this very moment, on Tuesday, June 16, 2009, I have a lot of fruits and veggies sitting in my refrigerator. Green onions, two fresh Serrano chiles, Roma tomatoes, jicama, two ears of corn, part of a red onion, papaya, mango, apple, grapefruit, an orange without the zest, mint, basil, cilantro, romaine lettuce, iceberg lettuce, half a red cabbage, a carrot, radishes, an avocado, and yellow patty pan squash. Most were purchased for use in other dishes. Because I always buy a little bit more than I need, just in case, I always have leftovers.

There are at least four ways of dealing with them:

1. I can let them sit in the bottom drawers until they get soft and mushy and I can, without guilt, consign them to the compost bin.

2. I can use them in a reprise of the dish for which they were originally bought.

3. I can practice what my friend Anne in Albuquerque calls “cooking from the fridge.” She and her husband George are experts at it. She looks at what she has and decides how she is going to put the things together—a soup, pasta sauce, stew, omelet or frittata. And she does it brilliantly: she has a wealth of cooking experience and can draw on dishes she has made in the past to inform her.

4. Or I can make myself a cup of tea, sit down in my favorite chair with a couple of the cookbooks I’m currently “testing,” check out the indexes, and see what might work.

The truth is, I do all four.

The compost pile is such a lifesaver sometimes. “Waste not, want not” was a big part of my Mid-western heritage. The compost pile allows me to believe that I’m not really throwing the radishes away; I’m turning them into soil that will help my garden.



The reprise can work, but it is a little boring. I’d rather, if given a choice, make something new.

I do “cook from the fridge” occasionally, especially for lunches on the weekend. But for whatever reason, it is not the option I turn to very often. Somehow a drawer-full of produce doesn’t inspire me to create. I feel as tired as they do. But suddenly a fruit salad springs to mind, maybe with a hint of candied ginger and fresh mint. And maybe a cabbage, radish, and carrot slaw. Or guacamole. Or an iceberg lettuce salad with blue cheese dressing. Anne, are you out there sending me ideas? Maybe there's hope for me after all.

Now the fourth. That’s my favorite. The cup of tea, sitting in my chair with cookbooks on my lap. Let me tell you what I found. A Jicama Slaw recipe in Chocolate for Breakfast that uses the jicama, serrano chiles, red onion, and cilantro. Spicy Corn Frittata with Tomatoes and Scallions in Fresh Food Fast that uses tomatoes, two ears of corn, green onions, and more cilantro. And I remembered the Grilled Asparagus recipe in Bradley Ogden’s Breakfast Lunch and Dinner which I have used with patty pan squash in the past. Pretty good, eh?

I’ll let you know how it goes over the next couple of days.