Summer Compost

The view from the mountain from my desk. You can't see the changes yet...but they are there!

The compost bin required some assembly.

I am just starting to see the change of colors on the mountain this week.  It comes off as a spectrum of green, mostly.  However, recently it has been a fairly uniform wall, like a hedge that has grown well out of proportion.  Now it is noticeably more diverse. Up on the ledge the various hardwoods are slowly turning to their cold-weather state. The fluffy darker pines continue as if nothing is happening.

​No doubt species will have something to do with what our impending palette will be.  I suspect there are roughly equal numbers of sugar and red maples, for example.  There are also oak and ash.  Maybe there are a few birches too.  Each will have its own way of going about the change of seasons.  Also, some are on rock shelves that I can see from the porch. For others the soil or water may be more plentiful.  I know from my own explorations that there are a few small drainage streams wending their way to the Millers.  Their mini-biomes seem rich to my untrained eye. 

Anyway, I have noticed the trees noticing the beginning of the transitional season of fall. The weather is colder, too...just a little.  It even rained this week!  Most of the grasses are still very dead.  Yet one can have hope for August and September.  It has been nice not to mow...but only in a way.  I am very busy with church and family and don't mind dropping a task.  That said, it does feel strange.  The earth is changing in ways that seem obvious to some and less to others.

During the heat wave and drought, I put together a new composter.  The house came with one of those black vertical barrels featuring a small door at the bottom.  The critters figured it out well before I got here.  I "upgraded" to a rotating one, which may buy me some time.  Realistically, though, it is also a stopgap.  In the end I will be building a keyhole garden...hopefully in September.  Then I will fill it with leaves, vegetable bits, and finished compost over the winter. Then I will plant it out in the spring. 

This makes sense to me. Both the old and the new composters I have now are built for the suburbs. I don't really live there anymore. You have to accept that there is more wildlife than domestic and they will have their way. I would have just gone straight to some other plan but I don't have the time. The problem is that there are still stumps to pull where the keyhole bed will go.  One can only move so fast...

Thinking about compost has been a good exercise.  The magic of transforming "waste" into "fertility" preaches without my help.  I feel it.  The old and battered and used gets--not discarded but--stored in a sort of dark, warm sabbath container.  Then out of that rolling barrel--or bin or dirt pile--something new comes of it.  That new thing, though is very different.  A handful of finished compost derived from pounds of kitchen scraps, leaves, and newspaper is more altered than a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon a butterfly.  I think compost is a better metaphor for the transformation many of us look for.  We settle for butterfly. Who doesn't celebrate when we manage it! Still, compost is the harbinger of the new thing.  We change not so much to alter ourselves but to alter the world, right?

Anyway, that is all for now.  I am looking forward to the changes, seasonal, agricultural, and otherwise. Who know what will come of us or the world?  We shall see.  Let's do our best to make the location wherever we end up into a fertile place.

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The composter in its home.