turning the compost

I’ve been thinking about compost, how it serves as a useful analogy for my life. Maybe yours too?

How, when I plant the tomato seedlings into their summer pots, I’m reminded of 40 years of doing this. (For the first 5 years we were here, I grew them in the garden, which worked fine until they got blight. I moved them to pots after that and once this upper deck was built in the early 1990s, it became the place where they grow reliably, tucked under eaves so that rain doesn’t splash their leaves and make them vulnerable to blight, given strings to climb, and lots of sun.) I’m reminded of the cultivars I’ve loved best: Black Krim, Cuore di Bue, Brandywine, Pruden’s Purple, various versions of San Marzano; and always a few new ones to try: this year, Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye. I put wood mulch in the bottom third of each pot, then a cup or so of alfalfa pellets, a third of a pot of compost, dug from the bottom of the bins, and full of worms and other eager little lives (and once, I disturbed a nest of mice), then a few shovels of Salish soil from the dumptruck load of 3 years back. When I tuck the seedlings in, I give them a handful of a mix of Quality Farm’s fertilizer: kelp meal, canola meal, rock phosphate, and some other good things. Because of the climate shift, meaning that our summers begin earlier (it was over 30 degrees here this past weekend), I’m trying a version of the olla, a terracotta pot buried in the soil and filled with water (its drainage hole covered) for self-watering. I’ve put stones in the little saucers I’m using to top the pots and I’ve been happy to see bees visit for a drink. (The ones in this photograph are dry because yesterday was so hot that the water evaporated. But when I checked the pots undernearth, they were still half-full of water.) There are 15 pots on that upper deck and 5 more will join them this afternoon. And then what? I have so many more seedlings. (If you live near me and want a few tomato plants — small ones, I started them late, but in a few weeks it will hardly matter. They grow as you watch them! — stop by.)

So compost: an analogy. Anything useful goes into the compost bins — organic waste from the kitchen, grass clippings, sometimes paper, wood pellet cat litter (with the solids removed and chucked in the bush), some weeds if they’re not overbearing, prunings, etc. And when I dig deep, some of it is still recognizable: pineapple tops, a whiff of coffee grounds, the crumbling ash from the woodstove. Like memories or experiences, half turned to soil.

The vines love the bucket of compost they receive this time of year. When I got up in the night to pee, I thought, What’s that beautiful smell, and it was the wisteria growing just beside our south-facing bedroom window.

It is entwined with a dog rose, the earliest of our roses to bloom, probably next week. The past few nights we’ve heard something jump from the little edge of roof to the railing holding these vines aloft. A weasel? A flying squirrel? The night is filled with mysterious visitors!

late 14c., compote, “mixture of stewed fruits, a preserve,” from Old French composte “mixture of leaves, manure, etc., for fertilizing land” (13c.), also “condiment,” from Vulgar Latin *composita, noun use of fem. of Latin compositus, past participle of componere “to put together,” from com “with, together” (see com-) + ponere “to place” (see position (n.)).
The fertilizer sense is attested in English from 1580s, and the French word in this sense is a 19th century borrowing from English. The condiment sense now goes with compote, a later borrowing from French.
–from Online Etymology

The other thing that really loves compost here is the salad garden I grow in a northeast corner of that upper deck. When I used to grow salad in the vegetable area, the slugs would always find it. Maybe it didn’t matter but moving it to tubs in a cool part of the deck means that we have the best greens from April until November. I also grow microgreens in the greenhouse all winter. Some of the arugulas are perennial –that higher leaf in the middle pot for example — and with a handful of compost tucked around them each spring, they go forever. There are self-seeded clumps in the vegetable garden too and the slugs don’t bother them much. Too peppery maybe? (There are still 5 or 6 tubs to come up to join these ones.)

The other night we were having dinner outside and I said to John, Every purple lilac here comes from little shoots at the foot of the one in my parents’ garden. What about the white one, he wondered. That came as a tiny stick from a woman on Garden Bay Road. You should write this down, he said. One day whoever follows us here might want to know where things came from. And maybe I will. It’s a kind of compost, really. Years of leaves and sticks and the earth itself, pulled apart by bears, tucked around salad, dense with nutrients, rich.