Night Treks to the Compost Bin

by Karen Laslo

It's evening, just getting dark, mid-September. My husband, Lin, and I sneak out into the backyard. We take one last look over our shoulders and then creep around behind the garage. Lin holds the flashlight while I dump the garbage into the makeshift, chicken-wire compost bin. We are addicted to composting and cannot stop doing it.

When we first moved to Chico we rented a house situated next door to our landlord. We thought about asking our landlord if we could build a couple of compost bins. But we were afraid to ask him because he might say no. And if he said no, we wouldn't be able to compost and, like I said, we were addicted to composting. The thought of not being able to decompose made us cringe. Better to build an illicit compost bin then to end up using plastic bags, dumping our garbage into the trash where it would sit stinking in the hot sun until the garbage truck hauled it away. So one day when our landlord wasn't home we got some chicken-wire and bound it together to make a large cylindrical compost bin, put some leaves in the bottom and started using it.

Our addiction to composting started several years earlier at our home in Sierra Valley, eastern Plumas County, California. After building our house and garage we put in a garden and planted some apple trees. Then we landscaped a small yard with flowers and trees. We wanted to grow everything organically and to do that we needed to make our own organic compost. Lin built four, 4x4x4' sturdy wooden bins, lined up next to each other so we could transfer the compost from bin to bin as it matured. We installed a faucet next to the bins so that water could be added each time we layered the materials to be composted. Every couple of months we'd hitch up the utility trailer to our old jeep and go to our neighbor's ranch to get horse manure for the compost. The horse manure speeded up the process of decomposition by adding nitrogen which made it heat up quickly. I still remember those outings with fondness. While we shoveled manure into the trailer we'd visit with our neighbors.

The wonder I felt for the decomposition process never ceased for me, the witness of that transformation that defines for me the deeper connections between life and death. In the first bin our garbage was still visible as garbage, mixed with yard clippings and layered with horse manure. But already ants, sow bugs, centipedes and other tiny creatures would appear, along with millions of microorganisms we couldn't even see, and all these were busy eating our garbage and heating it up. In the second bin the garbage looked less like garbage and more like the rich soil it was to eventually become. In the third bin, although an occasional avocado seed or a corncob could still be discerned, the result was no longer garbage at all but rather the decaying into new life that we call compost. Ah, but the fourth bin! I would look down into that last bin where the finished compost was heaped up, light and fluffy. It smelled like the Earth itself. Digging down into the bin I'd discover the source of this final miracle of transformation in the form of hundreds of earthworms. Careful not to harm them, I shoveled the compost into my wheelbarrow. Where would we humans be without the silent and essential work of all these tiny agents of decomposition? How easy it is to take them for granted as we go about our business each day, forgetting that without them we would soon bury ourselves in our own waste.

We had a division of labor on our homestead. Lin took care of the vegetable garden and I took care of the yard and the little apple trees. Sometimes when we were running low on compost we would argue about who needed it most. We had both seen the results of its use. In the yard the leaves on the lilacs were the size of saucers. They bloomed the first year I planted them so profusely you could smell their heavy perfume before you entered the yard. The same thing happened in Lin's vegetable garden where the crops thrived. We had so much basil we gave some to one of the local restaurants. Huge carrots and cabbages the size of soccer balls. Lettuce, potatoes, onions, beets, spinach, garlic - all grown organically with our own compost. We were grateful.

It was in Sierra Valley that I started my evening treks out to the compost bin in the dark after dinner. I would bundle up against the cold winter nights and head up the path Lin had cleared through the deep snow earlier in the day. When the moon was full the snow filled fields glowed and tiny ice crystals sparkled in the moonlight. I could see the tracks of rabbits and deer. On moonless nights the sky was so full of stars hardly any blackness showed between their sharp pinpoints of light. The dome of stars was so close overhead it seemed to touch down to the very edge of the prairie. The garden, silent now, was covered with a blanket of compost and a quilt of snow. After dumping the garbage into the bin I would stand still for a moment listening to the deafening quiet of winter until the sub-zero temperatures sent me scurrying back to the warmth of the wood stove.

My enthusiasm for composting did not diminish, in fact it grew. I tried to talk everyone I knew into composting too. I joined the Plumas County Recycling Committee so I could teach at their Saturday morning composting workshops. I joyously lectured on the value of composting. I hauled in buckets of finished compost to show my students. I had them help me build a compost heap. I gave them a myriad of written information on how to compost and endless diagrams on how to build wooden, wire and brick compost bins. This was the culminating experience of my composting career.

But then, as life is wont to do, it brought changes for Lin and me and we had to leave our mountain homestead. Thinking a university town might be a fun place to live, we moved to Chico. That's how we ended up having to hide our predilection for composting from our landlord. In time we bought our own home. We discovered, out behind the garage, that the previous owners had left behind one, plastic compost bin. While it's not as lovely to look at as our Sierra Valley bins, it still serves as a site for the ageless miracle of decomposition. And we don't have to sneak our garbage out back. We can compost out in the open where all of our neighbors can see us. And if one of them stops in the alley to ask me why I'm dumping my garbage into a big plastic black box I will surely tell them.

From the Spring 2001 issue of the Environmental News.