Furthering Our "Gentleman's Agreement" With Mother Earth

The seeds have arrived, and now the compost in which to nestle them for sprouting.  It may well be that I will forever be buying the richly fertile stuff, but if I am at all successful I plan, in the future, to be buying less. 

Last week I went to school -- for a day or so -- to study the fine art of composting:  that Rumpelstiltskin-like process whereby the humblest of raw materials -- leaves, weeds, manure, kitchen waste and the like -- are spun into agricultural gold by the bacteria and fungi they attract and the heat their feverish activity generates.  There is, I learned, more than a little complexity and care involved -- assembling the right proportions in the "recipe," managing and responding to the temperatures that rise and fall as nature's work follows its way.  Toward that end, as the weather permits, I will fashion a circle of fencing material to contain the garden waste (there seems to be no shortage of "garden waste"), and any day now I expect to become the proud owner of a composting thermometer -- a 3-foot-long spike of a gauge that is inserted deep into the pile to monitor the natural oven it will become.  The details have to do with how high the temperature, for how long, how often to turn the pile, and how one knows when the process is "done." 

That will be for me a growing edge that will require more than a little experience.  We aren't utter novices at the process.  For the past year-and-a-half, we have diligently emptied our kitchen scraps and paper shreddings into the composting "spinner" -- a modified food shipping barrel mounted on a platform -- located just outside the garage.  That we have yet to empty anything out of it, only adding ever more materials and spinning, suggests that something like decomposition is going on.  The contents keep getting smaller.  While I expect the garden to sample some of the fruits of its labor this spring, even if it is rich and beautiful and absolutely perfect, we will never produce enough in the barrel to satisfy our need.  Thus, the fenced pile, the thermometer...

...and the newest addition to our country-living arsenal:  the chipper/shredder that was delivered only today.  With its twin mouths I intend to re-purpose the trimmed brush into mulch and recycle nature's smaller detritus into food for the compost. 

If the goal is to lose as little as possible from the circle of life -- returning in trim and stalk what we take out in harvest -- perhaps the tools and the training will help us feed the earth as well as we are inviting it to feed us.

That, at least, is the bargain we are attempting to strike.