Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Composting classes

Last night K and I got a babysitter for the first time ever and went to a lecture by Eric Schlosser at Belmont University. It was a refresher course for two organic local-food-buying, non-junk food eating women (us) but it gave me a renewed vigor regarding composting.

Schlosser was talking about the guy who started the organic food movement in Britain, Sir Albert Howard, and how we are all interconnected to the soil. That in turn got me thinking about composting. I have a little compost plot in my back yard. It isn’t beautiful and in the summer it draws bugs but I love watching the eggshells, coffee ground, paper towels, broccoli stalks and other vegetable scraps turn back into this black soggy gorgeous earth. I love that I am teaching my son this by doing it with him. I love watching the birds twitter around it looking for goodies. I love that my trash never stinks.

In fact, our household makes very little trash. There is usually a week every month we have NO TRASH to pick up. I wish this was so for the rest of the neighborhood. I drive down the street on trash day and some of the bins are full to bursting and they have NOTHING in their recycle bin on recycle day, some don't even pull it out.

So all of this has me thinking about having a composting class at my house this summer for people in my neighborhood- especially kids- because they love to learn this stuff. Then as time goes by and more people in our neighborhood are composting start to have a gardening class. I always have a liberty garden with lettuce, spinach, herbs, cucumbers, pepper and a few tomatoes (tomatoes don’t love me and don’t grow very well for me). Very little work is required to grow a small garden as long as you’re composting because you are providing all the nutrients the plant need to grow by composting your scraps.

So that is my idea for the day, start a composting workshop at my house this spring and get people to have less trash and more beautiful rich healthy soil. I want to help people to begin to see that everything is everything else, we are earth and sky, that without bugs and birds and possums and bats and trees and lovely dirt we can’t thrive. We are merely surviving when we buy into this technological insanity and disconnect ourselves from the beauty and wonder of creation.

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