The Joy of Composting Redux

…and Double Digging, Too!

November petunia

“No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, November!” ends a poem by Thomas Hood. I remember reading this to my children on some gray November days that must have been much like the days that inspired Hood to write those words. That’s not an accurate description of our part of Nebraska this year, though, and especially not on a warm, sunny day like today. There is still fruit; today before pulling the mostly frozen tomato plants from my garden, I picked a handful of ripe cherry tomatoes. There are flowers, not only the unexceptional chrysanthemums and marigolds in sheltered places, but a few of the more tender annuals, like petunias, continue to bloom here and there. The trees have remarkably more leaves than usual in November, and birds are out and about.

My very small garden beds yielded a constant supply of tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers through October. Despite generally warmer than normal temperatures, though, a freeze last week nipped enough plants to make this a good day to clean up the vegetable patches. After pulling the plants, my husband and I dug compost into the soil. The space this freed up in the compost bin was soon filled with layers of dry leaves and the plants we had pulled. The remains of this summer’s tomatoes and peppers and leaves will renew the soil and nourish next summer’s garden.

A post last April about composting said:

Composting is a literally down-to-earth project, something that helps us connect to the Earth and to the basic functions and patterns of living things. The reminder of this connection several times a day as I set aside scraps and garden clippings for the compost pile ends up being a sort of prayer woven through the day, a sense of connectedness to God’s creation, a reminder of our role in caring for creation.  Through these things, it’s a reminder of humility in its true sense: who we are and whose we are.

Compost ready to use

Seven months later, those scraps and clippings and spent flowers have been transformed into a constant source of nourishment for other plants. If setting these things aside was a sort of prayer, the resulting compost is an allegory of how God receives our humble daily prayers and transforms them into something greater that becomes a constant source of nourishment for us and those for whom we pray.

This week brought more reports of record warm temperatures this year and of a pattern of new record highs outpacing record lows by a significant ratio. The preliminary data for October from the Mauna Loa observatory  shows 387.18 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (with 350 ppm being considered the upper safe limit).

A deep connection to the Earth, a love of creation, makes us grieve when we become aware of what is happening, but the joy in this same connection can serve as an antidote to despair. Both our spiritual practices, like prayer for humankind and our planet, and our practices of stewardship, like composting, give us a way of coping spiritually and emotionally with climate change while doing what we can to improve the situation.

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Last month, while most of the garden was still producing fruit, I used a couple of empty rows of one bed to try double digging. This is an old garden practice that I had never tried, but which had intrigued me ever since I saw a Victory Garden podcast about it four years ago. (You can see it here.) It’s a great way of amending soil. I used regular compost instead of composted manure. Double digging involves turning the topsoil along with loosening the subsoil and adding compost down deep. For me, double digging was very satisfying. With several small, orderly steps, a fairly large area of soil gets altered in a way that makes it more productive for several years. Now that other areas of the garden are bare and the ground hasn’t frozen, I plan to do more of this.

The Joy of Composting

Late on the night of the Great Vigil of Easter, my husband and I pulled into our garage, and Gary popped the trunk open. We had driven up together to Grand Island that evening; since I had wanted to be at the church well ahead of the beginning of the service, he had dropped me off and gone off to spend some time somewhere – he said he might go to Starbucks -- until it was time for the Vigil. Evidently that had all been a ruse, because in the trunk were two things for which I had been shopping this spring: a kit to make a raised garden bed, and another kit to make a composting bin.

The two gifts went together. Our house sits on two half lots, side by side; we have no back yard to speak of, and a small side yard is all the space we have for gardening. A couple of summers ago when our contractor finished using stacks of materials that he had used while working on our hail-damaged house, we suddenly had a couple of large rectangular areas where the grass had died – instant beds for vegetables! Last summer, we expanded one of the areas. The soil in these beds needs a lot of work; meanwhile, we have a trash bin full of yard waste hauled away from our house most weeks during the growing season. I began thinking that if I could figure out where we could put a compost pile, we could reduce our waste and have what we needed to improve the soil. When we started looking at making another bed with a raised bed kit – eliminating the problem of the lawn encroaching on the garden – we realized that a good compost bin or pile would give us something to mix with soil to help fill up the raised space. After seeing a couple of bins that seemed small and unobtrusive enough to sit in the back corner of our lot, a compost bin began looking very practical.

Last weekend I put together the kit for the bin and put in the initial layers per its instructions: a layer of dry leaves and twigs to provide carbon, and a layer of moist soil to provide micro-organisms to help get things started. (My bin is a Soilsaver; the instruction booklet is called “A Sense of Humus: Your Guide to Composting with the Classic Composter”.) After this, we are supposed to add alternating layers of browns (such as dried leaves and twigs) for carbon and greens (grass clippings, weeds that have not yet gone to seed, tea leaves and coffee grounds) for nitrogen. Things should start “cooking” when we get enough mass in the bin. I’m happily anticipating our first mowing of the lawn this weekend, when I can let some grass clippings dry for a day or so and then add them to the bin in alternate layers with the dried leaves from last fall that are in corners and under shrubs. Meanwhile, I’ve been adding a combination of dried leaves, a few early weeds, spent flowers from Easter lilies, and vegetable peels, tea leaves, and coffee grounds from the kitchen.

What’s been surprising is how much fun this is! The practical value has really been overshadowed for me by the sheer joy of composting. It’s stirred up pleasant childhood memories of playing outdoors using whatever was at hand – making mudpies, crunching dried leaves underfoot or crumbling them over soil, playing with flowers (weeds and garden flowers were equally fascinating and fun to use in various ways), and breaking up small sticks just to hear them snap and see what was inside.

There’s something very elemental about paying attention to the “waste” from the garden and the kitchen and using it to nourish new plants, some of which will produce food for us this summer. There’s a bit of Easter in seeing things that we would usually discard become the source of new life. Composting is a literally down-to-earth project, something that helps us connect to the Earth and to the basic functions and patterns of living things. The reminder of this connection several times a day as I set aside scraps and garden clippings for the compost pile ends up being a sort of prayer woven through the day, a sense of connectedness to God’s creation, a reminder of our role in caring for creation. Through these things, it’s a reminder of humility in its true sense: who we are and whose we are.

Hastings College has started its Earth Week activities (leading up to Earth Day next Thursday). At a roundtable discussion last night led by SEAC (the Student Environmental Action Coalition), there was some discussion of the possibility of composting on the campus, working with the food service to reduce the amount of waste hauled off to the landfill. It made my heart glad to be reminded that practices like composting that most people my age did not know about when we were younger are practices that will be a normal part of life for younger generations. There’s hope in this that adds to the joy of composting!