Archives of Our Lives

I come from a long line of people who want to be good gardeners but who really aren’t. (I shouldn’t be so harsh; we would’ve been better gardeners if we hadn’t grown up in wretched Mesa Arizona where to be a truly good gardener you have to make it your life quest…we just had too many other quests I think. But we tried. My parents really tried to make it work.) (Although, that said, I once had a grandpa who grew tomatoes legendary in their deliciousness. And I currently have a grandmother who compares garden notes with me every Sunday on our weekly phone calls.)

I remember so many Saturday mornings where our jobs were to help my dad run the rototiller, or to dig up portions of the back yard, or to water what measly sprouts we did have.

Or, the most vile of all chores, to take the bucket of kitchen waste out to the compost pile in the back yard.

It was stinky and had flies swarming around it and it looked disgusting. To a preadolescent me there was literally nothing worse than having to haul out a bucket of slop to throw onto the compost pile. If even a drop of slop juice (there was always slop juice at the bottom of the bucket) dripped onto any part of my exposed skin I would gag.

I hated our compost pile.

But now that I’m older, wiser, and earning/not-earning-very-much-of my own money, I see the value in it.

Here are the top 4 reasons why I’ve recently become obsessed with getting a compost pile of my own:

1. Compost is a necessary component of a square-foot garden (which is another goal of my life), and making my own will be freer than buying it at the garden centre.

2. Compost makes my kitchen garbage can absolutely odorless (because I’m dumping all the potentially stinky stuff outside).

3. Compost alleviates a huge portion of guilt I feel when all my good intentions (read: fresh fruits and veggies) go bad before I get around to consuming them.

4. I want to be a hippie. So sue me.

Last summer when my parents were here I expressed my desire for a compost bin and my woe that Poor Kyle wouldn’t make me one. My dad, in all his dadly glory, got a shovel out of our garage and dug a nice hole for me in the backyard. He said it was all I really needed.

I loved it.

But sadly I outgrew it in just a few months, and the hole began to mound up, and it was starting to look pretty trashy and gross out there, and with our fence semi-torn down all the neighbors could see into our back yard and witness our filth, and I really wanted a cage or bin or little house for it so it would be hidden and contained, but alas: Poor Kyle still wouldn’t build me one and power tools intimidate me.

I figured all hope was lost for me and compost until I read somewhere on one of my hippie blogs that you really can compost at any level—EVEN ON YOUR BACK DECK IN A BUCKET.

“I have a deck!” I thought. “I have a bucket!”

It was a breakthrough for me.

So I got me a bucket, put a layer of dead leaves at the bottom of it, and started dumping my kitchen scraps in there.

Poor Kyle refused to let me LITERALLY have it on the back deck right by the door (where I wanted it for ease) because, let’s be honest, it does attract flies and the like. Plus it’s unseemly.

So I did the next best thing and planted it right off the deck where if I aim just right I can get all the scraps inside without ever stepping down the stairs.

So here is how to compost if you don’t really know how to compost:

Step 1: Generate food waste:

Step 2: Use a non-eco-friendly plastic tomato crate (guilt sold separately), or any other bowl, bucket, basket, or barrel to hold your scraps in the kitchen sink instead of the arguably cuter but more bulky compost collector that your mother in law bought you a couple summers ago.

Step 3: When the chosen vessel cannot hold even one more morsel of waste, pick it up, carry it out the back door, and dump off the side of the deck into the designated bigger vessel:

(It helps to chop up the waste into smaller pieces but sometimes I am lazy and drop in my old squishy apples whole.)

Step 4: Rather than dirtying a good shovel, find a nice stick (preferably from the mass amounts of dead trees scattered about your back yard, which will make me feel a lot better about my own backyard failures) to use as a stir-stick, and then stir it up on occasion.

There are all sorts of lists out there on what can and can’t go into a proper compost, but it basically comes down to this: no meat or animal by-products, poo included, except you can use egg shells, the end.

Fingernail clippings, shedding hair, Sunday morning’s newspaper, dryer lint—they’re all good.

I’ve become so crazed about my compost bucket that I even started stealing the packets of instant coffee from hotel rooms in my recent travels to bring them home for my compost. Like a crazy coffee stealing lunatic. (I should note, by the way, that I learned this trick from my own dear mother who has been stealing coffee for compost since as long as I can remember.) I imagine my compost gets all excited, like the coffee grounds are a special treat that it looks forward to every time I leave home. Like ice cream or a squished penny.

Poor Kyle’s going out of town this weekend and I plan on telling him that if he really loves me he’ll bring my compost the instant coffee from his hotel.