'Tis the season for turning over new leaf

I suspect that our compost tumbler isn’t creating sufficient heat, despite getting sunlight from late morning through the afternoon. The two chamber bin is sprouting seedlings on the side that’s currently being fed. The side that should be finishing still has corn husks in recognizable sheets. Normally, my reaction to such a situation would be to decide that home composting isn’t worth the bother, especially the part about reducing the sizes of the particles to be composted. These are not normal times and I think I’m about to exercise that aspect of my personality the Better Half refers to as stubborn and I call persistent. We are going to see if this old dog can learn the trick to successful composting.

black bear inspecting compost tumbler

Photo by J. Harrington

From the preliminary research I’ve done online, keeping chickens is one option to composting and I believe the Better Half would approve, right up until the time the local pack of coyotes, or one of the neighborhood bears, ate the flock. We’ve foregone the chickens solution for some time, but that was before the complexities of composting became clearer. The online directions for making compost seem so simple and straightforward. Of course, some of us never bother to read the details and figure out the proper ratio of browns to greens. Perhaps that’s a project for the next rainy day, making a cheat sheet and, maybe, ordering some compost starter?

Now that the pail for holding food scraps and coffee grounds is a size that better matches the opening on the compost tumbler, I spend less time avoiding the mess I used to make with an oversized bucket. This is all beginning to feel suspiciously like organic chemistry lab back when I was in college. Blindly  following instructions one didn’t really understand rarely made for a happy grade on lab work, and the text book and lab seemed to live in entirely separate universes.

Potato

Jane Kenyon - 1947-1995

In haste one evening while making dinner
I threw away a potato that was spoiled
on one end. The rest would have been

redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail
it became the consort of coffee grounds,
banana skins, carrot peelings.
I pitched it onto the compost
where steaming scraps and leaves
return, like bodies over time, to earth.

When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay
fork to air the pile, the potato turned up
unfailingly, as if to revile me—

looking plumper, firmer, resurrected
instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow
until I might have made shepherd’s pie
for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day
dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning
hand-me-down clothes on the line.

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