Why Composting Is Hard Work, and Growing Food No Longer Is

It is a blur, these past 16 years since I left my corporate job and started my freelance writing business.  Since I had my children.  The past ten years since I started my garden.  Since I grew roots and then wings.

I thought of that this week, when I snapped this photo.  My teenager, with her heart rate monitor for PE class strapped on and a workout due for uploading, appeared pitchfork-in-hand to toss the compost pile for her first time ever.  Her heart rate hit her target zone within moments. ("Tossing compost is a good workout!" she said.  "Um, yeah, how about same time next month?" I replied.)  Half-decomposed materials flew from one pile to another.  And I ended up with a wheelbarrow full of about 50 pounds of the good stuff, my usual monthly output from that garden debris pile.  (The EnviroCycles yield another 25 pounds or so per month from kitchen scraps, and the worm bin adds more.)

I remember the big things, and lots of the little things over these past years, mostly thanks to the fact that I wrote about them, but I find more and more of it is becoming a blur.  The years are running together, with a handful of key lessons boiling up to the top.  Kindness.  Honor.  Passion.  Purpose.  Intention.  Patience.  Trust.  The seeds that we planted grew, and that seems to be all that matters.

I walked around the community garden yesterday morning, pulling up the plants that had bolted, that were sending up their flower stalks and signaling it was time for their next stage, which, in these beds we grow for those in need, would mean the compost pile so the summer tomatoes and peppers and basil can now get their long-awaited turn. And I saw one bed still shoulder-to-shoulder with mixed lettuces that I had planted from the first bulk order I had ever placed for seeds, an action that made me feel so completely that I had made the transition from gardener to urban farmer that I changed my LinkedIn profile to reflect this (even though I see the title, for me, as more of a personal descriptor rather than a career path).  

We cut these abundant patches of lettuces like hair, and the harvesting of them is fast.  It feels less precious, more basic, than the careful picking-of-the-outer leaves we had been doing on more generously-spaced lettuces in other beds.  It feels less connected to the local food hoopla or the know-your-farmer rhetoric now co-opted by industrial operations.  It feels ordinary.  It feels routine.  It feels natural.  It's just food, and people have been growing it for thousands of years.

Back at home, I see long swaths of hairy vetch and crimson clover and Austrian winter peas, all ready to be chopped down and laid to rest so that microbes can manage the rest of the job, in preparation for an entire truckload of biodynamic planting mix that's on its way from Farmer D.  So much is coming out of those beds now--daily salads and big-as-bats leeks and armfuls of herbs--that I think perhaps I may not even join the CSA this year (sorry, Charlotte and Wes, but you did this to me!).  Perhaps I'm finally at that point, where the efforts and outreach of all these years have brought me to where providing food for my daughters is habitual.  Everyday.  Easy.  Perhaps I need to honor more conscientiously what I have rather than augmenting it from elsewhere.  Perhaps it's time to focus on the next stage of this journey.

The knock-out rose bush I planted last year has exploded with flowers, and vases throughout my house abound with them, along with tall spikes of purple sage flowers and fistfuls of lemon balm.  And I realize, as I'm out there snipping, that we have flowered as well.  

Perhaps it's time to just sit with that. 

Why Composting Is Hard Work, and Growing Food No Longer Is