Soil thou art: Composting II

It's the New Frugality: instead of paying someone to haul away your grass clippings and kitchen scraps, compost them and grow your own vegetables. It combines healthy activity, wholesome food, and keeping the Great Biocycle cycling. It may even save a couple of bucks.

I used to seek composting advice, but gave it up years before the Internet. Now, as I troll the Web just to see what they're saying out there, I can't help but notice: Don't compost meat! is what they're saying, just like they've always said. True, there are farmers and slaughterhouses and so on that find themselves with carcasses and parts that they have to compost. Ok, they get to compost meat, but it's best left to the pros. For home composters the word is almost invariably that meat, eggshells, and anything the cat dragged in are no-nos for the compost.

I fretted about this for a number of years, then one day after Sunday dinner said, "What the hell!" and tossed, along with congealing mashed potatoes, coffee grounds, uneaten rolls, and soggy green beans the remains of a chicken—bones and all—into the bin, and waited for the Apocalypse.

It never came. Or, at least it didn't come right away. Oh, sure, perhaps the compost was stinkier than usual on those still summer nights. Critters would nose around more, so I began to bungee down the lid. And perhaps, now that the mix was somewhat richer with the occasional gristly short ribs or deflavored chicken or turkey carcasses after stock-making, once in a while one would see maggots. But, hey, compost-making is not pretty...

(By the way: though I suppose I'm a bit of an outlier with the if-you-can-eat-it-you-can-compost-it attitude, I am certainly not alone...)

I have always done my composting in the context of a yard. First, it was the backyard of my long-suffering roommate Tim, who owned the house we lived in. I appropriated a garden area and—to prepare the ground for planting in the spring—started in the fall collecting kitchen scraps in a bucket, and burying the bucketloads in shallow graves around the plot spot. By winter there was a certain amount of hacking away at the frozen soil (this was southern Wisconsin) to get the stuff underground, but there must have been little enough that I didn't have to do that too often. (I was a single guy: a home-cooked meal was an entire can of Campbell's Manhattan Clam Chowder, a couple pieces of whole-wheat toast with peanut-butter, and a beer. No scraps there, and I'm not sure Tim or Ralph participated much in my scrap-saving scheme...)

How did it work? Well enough: buried treasure by the following year. I worked the new stuff into the soil during the spring digging, keeping it more-or-less in the path. The next year the path became the bed, and the old beds the destination for new buryings. (I realize this elides the question of where the kitchen scraps and so forth went during the gardening season. Heh, heh.)

Clearly, such a method is discrete, produces no odors, and requires minimal equipment. However, since barely-rotted stuff is just under the soil, it better be basically vegetable, or critters will get curious. Also, since the beds are often interlarded with still-composting matter, the growing plants may be in competition with the wannabee compost for soil nitrogen (used by the composting organisms to work their magic). A method best employed, I would think, in a small yard where a compost bin—even more a compost pile—would be intrusive.

After Tim's, except for the occasional apartment stints, I had larger yards of my own to work with, and so eventually arrived at my current system (after the odd concrete-block structure or two), which I described in my previous composting entry. Perhaps this is the point to mention Ruth Stout. Her book, How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, is a fundamental gardening document. I came upon it early, and though I can't get the salt hay she favors, I have been using straw mulch forever (since I can get bales of it at the hardware store). Ruth Stout's method is weed and moisture control combined with continuous surface composting. If your planting beds are permanent, as they should be, then the worms can take care of the mixing. (Oh, all right: you can scrape off the mulch in the spring, maybe add some stuff and rough it all up with a shovel. Gardening is like cooking—lots of ad-libbing.)

One more thing: you need a tiny scrap bin on your kitchen counter—say, 12"w x 6"d x 8"h (very rough dimensions), and rectangular, not round. You want to put it against the back wall or in the corner, and a cylinder or bowl just invites missing as you toss scraps into it. It should be big enough to hold a day's worth of casual scraps: sandwich ends, fruit rinds, coffee filters, vegetable trimmings, cereal remains (with milk!), and—yes!—meat. Of course, if you have a cat or dog you might want to dump the baby bin immediately it gets meat into the big bin, otherwise you can do it last thing at night. Nor will the baby bin get smelly for several days, so there is no urgency about taking it outside if it is only half full.

This kitchen-counter baby bin may seem optional, but it is not. You have to be able to toss scraps somewhere as you generate them; without the bb I guarantee they're going to wind up in the wastebasket and garbage disposal. And thus do little things make a big difference.