Arte de Timo

In part 1 and 2 of my compost series I talked about building a compost pile, and finding a balance in so doing. In part 3, I’ll go over what I get from it, and hopefully transcend ideas of dirt and decomposition.

Obviously, my compost heap makes soil out of all the organic scraps and bits of matter I add to it, but, like so many other things I do, there is more to it than that. Composting is natures way of recycling everything back into raw materials for use in the garden. The resulting organic matter makes up a part of soil that can’t be created in any other way. But why does it matter? It’s just dirt after all, right?

Access to dirt is what humans have fought over for millennium, and in many mythologies it is  where we come from, and even return to in death. “Dirt” in the big river deltas enabled civilizations to form and humans to spread around the world. We have come a long way as a species, but we are still tied very closely to the dirt under our feet, and it is important to understand that connection.

I think most people who have gardened for any length of time know that the top 6 inches of soil is one of the busiest areas in or on a piece of land. It may not be the prettiest or most interesting, but it is the most important. Plants do send roots down further into the earth, some many feet, but the bulk of the fine, nutrient-grabbing roots stay where the action is. Deeper roots mostly do the job of anchoring the plant, drawing up moisture, and tapping into stores of heavier minerals like calcium. The top layers of healthy non-industrial soil literally crawl with life and fertility, even if all you see is dirt.

In a natural forest environment, it’s more obvious to see the importance of these top layers, and how they form. Layer after layer of leaves, pollen, dead bugs, and droppings all pile up on top of each other decomposing as they get buried. In a natural man-free setting, there isn’t any tilling, or amending going on.  Soil forms, supporting all the life around it in a dynamic system of litter and growth.

I have come to my own theory about these cycles that is a simple way to envision what is going on in and out of the garden. In the same way that your compost heap needs green and brown material, the soil also has different sources for its constituent parts. Nitrogen, according to most gardening sources is a main nutrient along with phosphorus and potassium. They make up the big three nutrients that scientists decided decades ago were the major building blocks of plant health. Nitrogen and nutrition in general are tricky things, though. Nitrogen is very abundant in the air and all around us, including inside all the various creatures of the earth, but nitrogen doesn’t like to be contained. It leaks out of anything that contains it pretty quickly. In fact, it is part of daily life. Food goes bad. Bodies smell. Dyes fade. Everything jettisons Nitrogen, and very quickly.

In the garden, we  amend the soil week in and week out in an attempt to keep the nutrients in soil, but it’s expensive and it usually erodes away well before the plants are done with it. Plus, nitrogen is just one part of a very complex puzzle. Despite what we have been convinced of, plant nutrition depends on a whole host of dynamic elements beyond those three numbers on the store bought bag of fertilizer. So, what’s my solution, then?

Let the bugs hold on to all the Nitrogen and nutrients they want. They will give it back when needed. Trust me! Worms, animals, bugs, and all the little creepy crawlies all are little balls of fertilizer. Animal life, strangely (or to the point, not so strangely,)  is made up of exactly the things that plants need and can’t make on their own. Pretty neat how that works out, huh?

For example: In the Pacific Northwest, the major source of natural nitrogen that is available in the forests is from the salmon that run up the streams each and every year. Scientists have found through carbon testing, that as the fish move into the forest and die, their nitrogen slowly works its way into the trees through the guts of bears, birds and all the sorts of composting little creatures that live in the forest. Of course there are lots of natural nutrient cycles going on, from floods to atmospheric fixing, but the big cause of ecosystem strength in those forests and their corresponding oceans is this link between the animals, plants, and soil. I love that it is so clear, and such a ringing case for natural fertility. The salmon make the forest rich and full.

In my home and garden I often catch myself thinking about the fertility I am salvaging by composting my kitchen scraps and yard waste. It’s not a normal thought, sure, but it is a result of seeing how much growth comes from the scraps I am dealing with. Garden specialists I have talked to almost always consider compost as a brown, barren substrate. I find it odd that gardeners think this way, but it makes sense in our human world of doing things. The gardening infrastructure in this country has become so dependent on amendment industries, that gardeners only think in terms of miracle growth products and blank dirt patches. There is so much going on in a well activated garden, I find it almost funny that soil health has only recently become a hot and almost subversive topic in garden circles.

Most people have come to think that growing food has to do with those brown dirt patches adjacent to freeways all over the west. (If you are wondering why they are brown, and devoid of plants and animals, do some research about the use of bromide in agriculture. ) For me, compost is a literal and symbolic opposite to the system that kills the ground, injects it with petro-nitrogen, and manufactures green, food-like products for people to consume. Compost is about rich, dark, soil that grows, reuses, captures, and creates energy for us to use as food. Composting is about understanding our proper place on the planet.

Like my rain barrel, my compost pile is an active meditation on what it means to participate in nature. I find it is a pleasant responsibility that alleviates part of my trash-guilt, and gives me a sense of what human maturity would foster.

Sometimes I forget that my perspective has changed over the years, and I forget to check where I am. My son does a great job reminding me to do that.

Has anyone seen this? I was out there last Saturday for the flea market, and was walking by. I stopped to tie my shoes, and then looked up to see the sign and yellow bikes. I was a little in shock. I didn’t think there were any progressive schools left in California that had money left to do things like this. I felt a little like I was in Europe or something. They have huge arrays of solar panels too. What a great development for the school.

Here is a video tour of my compost bin (I promised a video). The bin is over a year old now, and hasn’t shown any sign of material or design flaws. It may have dry wood termites in it, but there is enough redwood that it might take a decade before they do any harm or spread anywhere else. Otherwise I think its working pretty well.

In compost part 1 I talked about reaching a balance. That balance is as much about adding things to the composter as it is about having the right composter for the household. Bins come in many shapes and sizes, so it is important to think carefully about what is needed before the compost piles up.

I built mine with balance in mind. I wanted something that could take care of all of our food waste, and all of our yard waste, yet wouldn’t take up a ton of space, or time to keep going. Turns out my design was just right, and not only can the composter handle all of our yard and kitchen waste, but it actually needs it to function well. The approximately 40 cubic foot bin was the perfect size to reach a balance for my household. It does take effort, but it isn’t too bad and is comparable to taking out the trash.

I hinted in part 1 at the idea of brown and green compost materials, so let me explain them a little. Green material is a term used to describe organic material that is high in nitrogen. Brown is something with little nitrogen and high carbon content. As you might guess something like fresh grass clippings would be considered green, while fallen leaves, brown. But why is it important?

Nitrogen is what I would call the meat, and carbon the roughage and carbs in a compost diet. Most organisms use nitrogen for the complex molecules needed in energy storage and transfer. Some examples are proteins, chlorophyll, and fats. Consequently, those are the things that microbes, bugs, animals and even us humans like to eat, but without the roughage, none of us biological creatures would be energized. I won’t get into the specifics of biological compositional analysis (not that I have a background in it), but think of how you would feel if meat was the only thing you ate.

The needed ratio of carbon to nitrogen is something like 9 to 1 (Correction: 25 TO 1), but I don’t think its super important as long as you have quite a bit more brown material than green in the composter. If you add kitchen scraps and green grass to your compost heap, and nothing else, you will end up getting a lot of nitrogen-rich molecules floating around. These will take the form of smelly fumes, and will probably spur a lot of unwanted growth like from various slimes, and maggots. In any case, too much nitrogen leads to a lot of foul activity. Sure, the waste will still compost, but you won’t like the experience. Trust me, I know from experience.

So what kinds of compost materials generate a good balance?

My bin takes all the leaves (brown) from the various trees we have, along with our kitchen scraps (very green), and anything else considered a natural waste, like fallen fruit (green), weeds (green and brown), or yard trimmings (very brown). Occasionally, I’ll even throw in shredded bills (very brown). This seems to make for a good balance. You would probably be surprised by what else I throw in there, though (like two dead rats I caught in a trap I set out. Gross and very green, plus nutrient rich.)

What surprises most people is that there really aren’t very many limitations to what will compost. There is a myth that centers on not adding meat or dairy to a compost heap. I challenge that myth. I compost everything from the kitchen except bones (these actually don’t compost well). Meat, dairy, bread, paper, you name it, it all goes in and disappears.

The only thing that didn’t break down well in my hot heap, surprisingly, were the leftover tortillas from my MFA thesis reception. I had bought them from the “regular” supermarket in bulk, for cheap, and as a result were loaded with preservatives. Those things stayed true to form in my heap for weeks, while everything else from the reception like the paper plates, beans and cheese slipped away into soilness.

I think the premiss of the myth revolves around the idea that meat takes a while to break down, and in that time becomes foul, drawing in animals. My experience is that with enough compost going on around it (a foot or two of material on all sides) almost anything will rot away before it becomes a problem. The size of the heap is the key factor. Nothing composts well in anything less than 3 or 4 feet of space, so meat would just magnify the problem of a composter that is too small (which I think is often the case.)

So, after all this what do I get from my composter?

In part 3 I will talk about what comes out of the heap, and what I think is important to know about your nitrogen in the garden. Didn’t I tell you compost was complex and fun?

This holiday my family spent a lot of time on the road traveling. It gave me a lot of time to think, which was nice, since thinking is one of my favorite things to do. Sitting in a car for all those hours inevitably got me contemplating cars, travel, and our problems with them.

I wondered why we, as a society, protect the status-quot when it comes to travel. We deny every chance that comes up to go beyond the 150 year old gasoline powered automobile, whether its trains, or electric cars, or higher standards. Cars really are a pain in the butt, even for as much mobility they offer us. They often require multi-year loans to pay off, only last about 10 years, cost thousands of dollars a year to maintain, and even more to fuel up. The internal combustion engine is inefficient, loud, dangerous, large, heavy, and complicated. Why do we bother keeping it around?

Our culture demands smaller, better, faster and cheaper with everything else, but we seem to be more than happy with our uncomfortable metal bricks on wheels. So maybe we aren’t all that happy, but what options do we have? For our trip we had the options to drive our Prius for 10 hours and $70, or use up 5 hours, our dignity (from the horrible “search” and general treatment we would get in the airport), and $500 flying. There is no train to our destination, so we couldn’t take one even if we wanted to. There has been talk and hopes of a single bullet train in our general area, but that will never get built. There is also the bus route, but that lies somewhere in between driving and flying, and usually only offers the worst of both; high cost, uncomfortable travel, and extremely long travel times.

After depressing myself with this conclusion about our one practical option to be uncomfortable, inefficient and environmentally dirty, I remembered some sound bite I had heard about this company that was trying to change the map of personal travel. They had the idea that electric cars would work for a population if you got past the cost and limitations of the batteries. Their model is to sell the car along with a lease for the batteries. The lease offers car owners the chance to swap them out as needed at battery swapping stations on long trips, or just for convenience reasons. I like the idea, but their implementation and leasing structure would only work in fresh markets, expensive ones, or very small countries.

The other thing I remembered was something out of Popular Mechanics. There had been a dream a while back about making cars into platforms for various propulsion and cab options; modular cars if you will. That seemed like a good idea, too, but only amounted to a half-assed pipe-dream from some car makers. So what happens if we combine those ideas?

As I drove along, it started making a lot of sense to me, and I proved a point to myself. The point being that we lacked vision in our down-turned, feeble, economically driven mindset. This lack of vision is something that we all seemed to acknowledge in our loss of Steve Jobs, but why isn’t it something we try to overturn; investing in, encouraging and supporting those who have some? Why aren’t we all seeking out new ways of seeing our lives? Why aren’t we experimenting and adventuring? Everyone I see in the public eye and milling about in society, just seems to be shelled up in bouts of irresponsibility, fear, and short sightedness. So why can’t we have a new way to travel that provides us more options?

Here’s what I came up with: The main “hurdle” of electric cars as reported by the media is their range, but like the SUV, this idea is about owning and driving around everything all the time. What if we bought electric cars with a range of 50 miles and an empty front compartment with a 48 volt plug. 50 miles would get us to the vast majority of the places we want to go, and for the other small percentage we just plug in extra power in that empty space. If we need hundreds of miles, then we plug in some rented batteries, or if we need to go off the grid then we plug in a turbine generator. All the parts and infrastructure are already in place. Think about it.

There is an auto dealership in just about every city in the country, so they could be used for the generator installation and battery swapping. Our roads are already in place, and it seems the US will never fully switch to anything else. And the biggest benefit of this sort of car is that an empty box and a plug will take advantage of what we do best in this country, innovate and compete. With a few standards for plug and power connections, we could see all sorts of plug-in options. I could even see external adapters that allowed for car daisy-chaining or on road recharging. We could have toll roads with overhead power like what we have for electric muni-buses. I can see a different world when I think about it.

What we need is some societal vision and daring to do things differently. Our problem is how we think about cars, not the electric car technologies. We are trying to make them replace an old limiting technology instead of seeing the immensely liberating opportunities they could bring us. Electric and gasoline power are totally different. Where one is heavy and slow to change, the other is light and adaptable. Our mindset with cars is based on a 150 year history of what they can’t do, instead of all the millions of things they could do if we moved forward.

Compost is a great topic with all sorts of room for discussion and investigation, so I am going to take on the topic in parts.

It is also a BIG topic. Understanding compost requires a few layers of biology, a layer of agriculture, a layer of physics, and some thrown in construction, environmentalism, gardening, and spirituality. Well OK, its not that complicated of an idea, but it touches on a lot of important issues.

First and foremost, composting is the rotting of organic material (Not the little green label on food, but things made of molecules that contain carbon) into humus (Not the yummy tan colored food, that’s hummus. Humus is the part of the soil that is organic). Composting happens pretty much everywhere that organic materials occur; forests, oceans, gardens, the dump, behind your refrigerator. You might say that composting is the biological version of entropy; if there is something that can be broken down in nature, it will.

Once the maintaining properties of life leave an object, the doors are opened to a range of organisms that want to recapture any stored energy from that object. In nature, things just keep on rolling, so any creatures whose biological defenses fail become, quite literally, dirt; and that is a good thing. It can happen fast or slow, and through a whole range of processes. Sometimes there are feathered or furry creatures involved, but at a certain point, almost assuredly, some ants come into play. If there is enough chemical energy left in the object for it to become food, then some ants will find it, and eat it. This goes for a piece chocolate you drop, to a damaged flower seed. Eventually though, in all the dark quiet places of the world the more important processes take over .

Fungi and bacteria are the heart of the composting process. They are always in a battle to find food, so living things develop strategies to defend against their onslaught. We, humans shed our skin and hair, we have kamikaze immune white blood cells, acidic stomachs, oils, saliva, you name it, all in an attempt to keep fungi and bacteria away from our energy, i.e. cells and tissues. When those things fail, I think we know of some of the things that can happen; infections, stomach problems, and disease. It’s pretty ugly stuff.

Finally, once things settle down and a little moisture is mixed in, the real work begins; active microbial decomposition. All those brilliant fiber structures, cell membranes, complex molecules, and energetic chemical bonds that make up our beautiful living world are cracked open, broken down over and over again, and become raw materials and energy for a host of microbes.

In the garden, it is the compost’s job to take advantage of this process and turn all the left over organic material back into something that can be used in the garden. It can be as simple as piling up leaves in the Fall, to carefully layering “brown” material with “green” material to build a hot “heap.” Striking a balance can be tough sometimes, when things like, speed, space, smell, and output are considered.

When I first started composting, I was living in a townhouse with a small patio, and I didn’t get the balance right in many ways. Space was limited, I didn’t have access to enough “brown” material, and my inputs were too high. I’ll confess, the outcome was not pleasant for anyone within nose-shot. Not only that, I had good humus mixed in with fresh food material, making deployment of the compost impossible. Here’s some pics of the experiment:

The ideas were sound, but my execution was not so great. The most important thing was that I learned about how a biological composting system functions, and how that sort of composter might work. When building something from scratch, its always good to have some hands-on knowledge to go along with the ideas. I did go on building fortunately, and I now have a good functional 2 yer old system up.

In Compost – Part 2, I will post about the composter I have now, along with my techniques, and what I gain from the activity. Part 3 will be about the ramifications of composting on several levels, and why I do it. Oh, and I have a video to stick in somewhere, too!

If you’ve been on this planet and listening to it,  or feeling the weather change year to year, or simply watching the news, you probably know that humanity is struggling to grow up. We seem to be trying to figure out to how to come up with some long term life plans. This struggle is something that I have thought about since I was old enough to understand how destructive we humans can be. It is a struggle I have internalized and have tried to sort out in my own life. I have long sought to figure out how to live free of the shortcomings of modern self abusive,  resource intensive, and un-sustainable life style.

My art has started to directly address my thoughts and ideas about where we are failing, but I think the theme has been subtly embedded in my work since I started painting and drawing in my childhood. In fact I would say that social and environment responsibility has been the core motivator of all my art work and writing through out my life.

This isn’t a new realization or admission my any means, but as the world spirals faster and faster towards an environmental and social meltdown, I have become more urgent in my working toward solution. I am struggling more with finding sustainability and change toward a healthy and responsible life.

My birthday last week both impressed on me that time wears on with us humans still having far to go to grow up, and that huge strides can be made in the course of life if honorable and responsible living become the core of all life decisions, and values. For my birthday I received a great book that  seems to hit this nail on the head.

The book Natural Living: The 21st Century Guide to a Self-Sufficient Lifestyle is a trove of knowledge about everything from gardening to keeping animals, cooking, canning, knitting and everything in between. The book mostly just touches on the key points of all these topics, but its enough to keep someone like me going in my quest. It will definitely augment my ongoing projects as they become bigger and better.

In all this I have learned that living a sustainable life is like any other skill or endeavor. It requires practice, learning from others, a support network,  failures and perseverance. Lying deep in all these struggles, too, lie issues of freedom. To change, we need freedom over what we do and how we consume, yet we live in a time and place where we give up those freedoms too easily in the face of comfort and excess, and maybe disillusion.

Since I have moved into a mortgaged house, where I have more space and ability to make changes, I have realized that like so many science fiction tales stress, we live within ever changing and ever encompassing systems of control. What I can do in “my” house is actually very limited on many fronts as you may know or guess, but it does offer another step in my explorations and struggles.

Breaking free of some of those controls is a challenge, but the systems do begin to unravel as you work back toward a simple life with the seasons and soil as your guides. It is a paradox isn’t it, though. To regain a freer life we must submit more to the aspects of our lives that we actually have no control over.