There's nothing like a shovel full of rich, dark, black compost. It's light and flakey and so so good for you. Well not exactly good for YOU. I mean it's good for the things you grow, and they're good for you -- the city trees and flowers that nurture the spirit and the air we breathe, or the home grown organic vegetables that nourish the body. Good fresh compost is something I think a lot about these days.
My current compost obsession began as one of those innocent conversations with Adam Szpala, my household contractor. We are trying to complete the renovation of a century-old house in Jersey City, a project that I am slowly learning is actually never done. I felt it was time to move beyond the black plastic compost bin we got at Loews. This all seemed easy enough, "Can you make me a compost box for the back yard?" I asked Adam. "Sure," he said. "It'll be about 500 bucks plus a bit more for materials." And of course things escalated from there, as so often happens with "simple" household construction projects.
Of course it couldn't just be a box, it had to be a three compartment affair, you know, one for each stage of the composting process. It had to be constructed with space between the wooden side boards for good air circulation so the organic materials would break down. That probably was a good thing because it would mean using a bit less wood, which was of course the pricey cedar, not the much cheaper but totally toxic pressure treated wood. The box would sit next to the neighbor's garage. "We'd better put a roof on it so the compost doesn't become a sodden mess every time it rains," said my husband Rich, the compost king in our household. I could hear the cash register ringing with each decision. The backyard compost project kept growing and with it, the once modest price tag. While we were at it, we decided that we had to fix the fence out back, too, but that's another story. But The end result, while pricey, has been a sturdy long term productive compost center that will allow us to get really serious about our composting. The massed flowers in our front yard have become a neighborhood landmark. The compost we feed them no doubt contributes to the success of our daffodils, irises, lilies, zinnias, rudbeckia and dahlias that give us almost continuous bloom from April to September.
[The origins of my obsession with compost go way back, to the 1920's I suppose. In some ways compost is in my blood. My Grandmother Gibson was the original organic gardener in our family. My mother told me the other day, "Granny used to order red Niagara crawlers in the mail for her compost pile." My grandmother was famous for the extensive gardens she kept at The Ridge, her suburban Toronto property. And as any good gardener knows, you've got to have compost if you want healthy plants. My father's job was to mow the lawn twice a week with the old push me pull you lawn mower and collect the grass clippings for the compost. (Turns out that I and all of my brothers still use the old fashioned kind of mower - no gas guzzlers for the Gibson gardeners.) Granny inspired my cousin Donald to create a compost pile for his school science project and got him some of her famous red crawlers to put with the straw to make his school science compost. At the end of the season, a very dry one apparently. the science teacher came to inspect the compost. Alas all that remained was a pile of dry straw, no worms, no compost. The science lesson for Donald was that you need a certain amount of moisture to make compost, and without it the crawlers high tailed it back to Niagara.
When my parents built a summer cottage in the Eastern Townships outside of Montreal, along came the compost traditions. It was the early 1950's then and there was no garbage collection in the small village where we lived. Food scraps went on the compost heap, as we called it, and we burned paper and cardboard in an old oil drum. The few glass jars and tin cans we accumulated went to the country dump every now and then, there were no plastic containers in those years. Many bottles like those for milk or soda were returnable and reusable. It was a simple eco-system, we weren't generating tons of trash that had to be carted away to huge landfills, and, by the end of the season, we had compost for next year's gardens.
So here we are, it's 2012 and I am writing this in New York City. According to the Lower East Side Recycling Center, the NYC Department of Sanitation collects 13,000 tons of garbage every day. Of that, approximately 4,940 tons are organic and could be composted into nutrient-rich plant food for the city’s trees and gardens. The average New York City household throws out over two pounds of food waste per day. That, is a mountain of trash and in a landfill, organic matter breaks down without oxygen, creating methane, a powerful, harmful greenhouse gas. By composting, we can take the organic matter out of the garbage equation and recycle it back into the earth to support green growth in the city. PlaNYC, New York's 2007 green blueprint for the city, envisioned the planting 1,000,000 new trees for the city in the next decade. Imagine if the organic trash in the city was transformed into compost to feed all of those trees instead of mouldering in landfills.
In 2007 Two Twelve designed Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC branding, launch materials and plan document. Since that time, we have been committed to helping other public and private organizations communicate their sustainability goals and performance to constituents and shareholders. The information designers in our Visioning group have been busy creating reports, plans and tools for clients as varied as Building America's Future Education Fund, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and Citigroup.
We also have a Green Team at Two Twelve that keeps us on track with our environmental mission as we manage our design process and operate our work place. The Lower East Side Recycling Center helps us by making it easy to compost. We collect our organic waste in the office in a covered plastic container and when it fills we freeze it. Every week we take the container to the organization's collection site at the Union Square Greenmarket. They compost the waste that they collect and sell it cheaply as compost or soil to city gardeners.
As I mentioned, Rich is king of compost in our house. That is perhaps because he is the son of Bob Kiamco, crowned king of engineers back in Cebu in the Philippines. With his engineer's mind, my father-in-law has elevated the science of composting to an art. He has a rotating bin composter in which he has made compost in a near record 14 days. He says that the key is regulating the temperature so things will "cook" nicely. He gets the temperature in the bin to 165 degrees - yikes - by adding sawdust from the lumber yard and rotating the bin regularly. The result is that he has piles of compost for the vegetable and flower gardens that he and his wife Benita tend in their suburban Chicago backyard.
In our house, we have some old white enamel pails to collect our green waste and it's amazing how quickly the stuff accumulates. Each time we empty and clean the pails, we add newspaper to help aerate the green waste. This season we will be experimenting with our brand new backyard compost box. At the moment we have sticks and brush in one bin. The middle one has piles of last season's leaves. The third is the active one where we put the household waste and the garden debris that accumulates from weeding. We'll add leaves to that one every so often to keep it light and airy and we'll turn it with a fork regularly to maintain the decomposition and keep it from getting smelly.
This month we celebrate Earth Day 2012. If you are not already, perhaps this is the time to start composting. The Lower East Side Recycling Center has lots of useful information - the basics about outdoor composting and also how to create an indoor compost bin. So think about getting off the garbage grid and making some of that rich dark black stuff for you and your plants.
