By Tim King
Special to the Leader
After several years of going without, I’ve once again started a compost pile in my yard.
Last fall I built a small cylinder shaped bin with a few metal poles and wire fencing. It’s about five feet tall and three feet wide. I started it with some of the shredded leaves I collected in the fall and have been adding to it ever since.
To those who know me well, the fact that I have gone without a compost pile for this long will be surprising. When we bought our first house, my very first project was to build a compost bin in the side yard. Before we had even fully unpacked, I traveled to the hardware store to acquire several wooden pallets that formed a 4-foot-by-4-foot box. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective.
Year after year, I was amazed at the endless appetite of the pile. Any amount of fall leaves, kitchen scraps and grass clippings would seem to vanish over time. Eventually, I even built a second box to hold the previous year’s bounty. This way, I could continuously load up one bin while the second one finished cooking.
For my money, there are very few practices that are as virtuous as maintaining a compost pile. Chastity aside, what better example is there of temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness or humility?
That said, there are any number of gadgets and gizmos out there for composting. I’ve seen tumblers of all different sizes and black plastic bins that remind me of space capsules from NASA. While I’ve never felt the desire to spend money on something that will occur quite naturally on its own, I’ve heard that some of these devices actually do a good job of speeding up the process. No doubt they are also better to look at as well. To each their own.
As you may have guessed by now, my need to compost is deep rooted. As a kid, I can remember gleefully playing in the leave pile each fall at my grandfathers’ house. We would tirelessly leap off the edge of a hill into a soft cushion of leaves below. It wasn’t until some years later I learned that this backyard amusement ride was actually nothing more than his compost pile.
Later, when I was a bit older, my father would enthusiastically bring my sister and I out to the yard to watch the steam escape into the cold fall air from his newly mixed pile.
And more than once, we witnessed the miracle (thanks to a treasured Christmas gift) of the pile cooking, even in the middle of winter. After an excited scratch of his head, he’d take what looked like an elongated meat thermometer, jam it through the middle of the pile and utter words like “amazing” and “unbelievable” as the gauge reached one hundred plus degrees…while the outside air temperature was in the 30s.
So it was with a heavy heart I planned to leave behind my compost pile when we finally decided to move to Maine. After eight years of shredding, mixing, decomposing and sifting, I had a very well established system that was producing several wheelbarrows filed with “black gold” each spring. It was going to be difficult to let that go.
After trying to come to terms with this, I did what any compost aficionado would do – I secretly packed it up and took it with me.
Well, not all of it.
During the last few weeks before the move, I dug deep into the pile and sifted out a fair amount of the very best stuff. I then proceeded to fill up four large plastic moving crates and stack them neatly with other crates in the shed. All of those were moved (by us) quite a few times before finally coming to rest in Scarborough.
It wasn’t until our arrival in Scarborough that my secret was finally revealed.
My father in law, who was helping us move, noted that a few of the crates seemed a little dirtier than the others. I sheepishly looked away as my wife patiently explained to him that the reason for that was that the crates were filled with…dirt. I’ll never forget the look on his face, when he learned his aching back was (partially) the result of moving 40-pound crates of dirt from Massachusetts to Maine. To each their own, indeed.
For the next few months, I would ever so cautiously add a measure of compost to each of the new plantings I set out around the yard. As I had also uprooted several perennials, including a few “King Family Heirloom” Rose of Sharon shrubs, daylilies and daisies from our previous residence, it felt only natural to provide these transplants with the familiar taste of their previous homes.
As careful as I was, eventually, my stash of prized compost ran out. Maybe it was out of grief or maybe it was out of respect, but it took me two years to set about getting a new pile going.
Now, once again, I am on the lookout for things that will help add diversity to my insatiable compost pile. Spent coffee filters, tea bags, shredded newspaper, grass clippings, vegetable peelings and leftover salads are now coveted and immediately added to the mix.
I know that eventually, each of these things will surrender to the heat of the pile and be transformed into a dark, rich medley of organic mulch. But it will take some patience – most good things do.
Tim King is a freelance writer who sees the forest and the trees from his home in Scarborough. He can be reached at sylvan.sauntering@gmail.com.