Apparently there is an art and, as one might expect, a science to composting.  To be clear, there is no art to my effort.  But I read extensively about the science of composting.  I chose a location that gets sun, but not a full day’s sun because here in San Diego that would most likely dry out the pile — and to function biologically, the pile needs to be about as damp as a wrung out sponge.  I dutifully watered my pile, and while I never checked the moisture content with anything technical, it never started stinking, which is an indicator that the pile is too wet.  I have also been pretty good with the carbon-nitrogen balance, not that I have ever weighed or measured anything I’ve dumped onto my pile.  The idea is, brown, dead plant material, ash, and newspaper are carbon contributors, while green clippings from the yard and animal waste (like chicken manure) are nitrogen contributors.  The C:N ratio is supposed to be 25:1.

I never turned my pile, but there are two schools of thought on that: in one school, you turn it; in the other, you don’t.  The Turning School of Compost Development says the turning evens out the composting process by mixing the less composted surface material with the more composted lower levels, resulting in a finer soil.  The turning also injects a burst of oxygen into the pile, which speeds up the aerobic bacteria and the composting process.  The Leave It School of Compost Engineering says that this very burst of productivity burns out critical components of the composting process, and disturbs basically every level of organism involved in turning stuff into soil.  Leaving it is doing it like nature does it.

But in my yard, nature hasn’t been doing it.

I have picked up a few tips along the way, little “oh, right” moments here and there.  The first came from a former student, Mike, who suggested I not dump oranges and orange peels into the pile because they are too acidic for some of the organisms at work there.  Great tip.  Stopped doing that.  Another good one: I read that two piles is essential because at some point I need to stop putting new stuff into the pile so it can finish.  That one seems kind of common-sense obvious.  I hadn’t been doing this, which might be why my pile still looks like a pile of debris.  I started a second pile last week.

Composting has many sustainable-living perks.  The two most relevant to reducing my wife and I’s impact elsewhere are the reduction in trash we send out and in the soil amendments we bring in.  The average American tosses 1,460 pounds of garbage into landfills every year.  Recycling helps, of course, but organics that won’t recycle will compost.  We throw out maybe one small bag of garbage each week (and it definitely does not weigh 70 pounds).  And even if the amendments we bring in are all organic and chemical-free, there’s still an industrial process behind whatever we add to our yard each season.  We’d rather make our own.

So, I think I’ll turn that pile this weekend.  Soon I should be getting some help stewarding the compost.  Apparently the chickens I just ordered will be a boon to the effort with their scratching and droppings.

The pile could use a boon.

I snatched up a few them and headed for the raised beds I’d built in the back yard, thinking that since they tower three feet off the ground it would be unlikely that any worms would find their way into them to keep the soil healthy — unless worms do things in the night that I don’t know about, crazy things.  I dropped one or two into each bed (some worms do not require other worms to make more worms) and watched as all but one found ways of tunneling into the soil.  This worm slid around from edge to edge, missing what I saw as perfectly obvious opportunities to dive under.  The soil had dried out in the desiccating winds that blow off the canyon behind our house, and the sun beat down, causing the worm to flip around violently and thrash against the surface.  I felt a strange sense of responsibility for the creature since I had abducted it.  And brought it to that box.  To work for me.

So, I unfastened the netting around the bed and reached in a finger to create a divot in front of the searching worm.  I then raised my hand and shaded the animal for nearly 10 minutes as it nosed around and into the hole and pulled the rest of its six inches in after.