Use of Compost Blossoms in Valley, but to Some It’s Still a Dirty Word
A peculiar light comes into Ben Katz’s eyes when he hears the word compost. “Super-earth,” he calls it. “The soul of soil. You take matter that people see as worthless and transform it into something as precious as gold.”
Katz, a Topanga Canyon theater director who also has a business setting up residential compost systems and designing and maintaining organic, edible landscapes, has been making and using compost in his vegetable gardens for more than 20 years. He has three bins of compost material in various stages of readiness. But, he acknowledges, not everyone is comfortable with the idea of large heaps of decaying leaves, grass and kitchen scraps in the back yard. “It can be intimidating,” he admits.
Sherl Hopkins, demonstration projects coordinator for the Common Ground Garden Program administered by the University of California’s Cooperative Extension, makes the point more strongly: “Say compost and people hear garbage, rodent, insect, smell.”
Nevertheless, according to people in the landscape field, more and more San Fernando Valley residents are becoming interested in the idea of turning home and garden wastes into food and mulch for their petunias. Hopkins, who gives public seminars on composting at the Sepulveda Garden Center in Encino, recalls that “four years ago, I couldn’t get anyone to talk about the subject. Now when I announce a workshop, I get 50 or 60 people.”
Green Thumb Nursery in Canoga Park reports that sales of compost containers have doubled in the past year or two. Just as significant, says department manager George MacAller, is the fact that “a lot of people are coming in to look--even more than are actually buying.” In response to the demand, the nursery has added a large composting display.
Reasons for the surge in interest range from the philosophical to the pragmatic. Sun Valley garden designer and compost purveyor George Patton says the 1990 celebration of Earth Day reawakened the public’s commitment to the environment. His clients want compost, he says, not only to improve the quality of vegetables in their gardens but also to “carry out their ecological responsibilities” by diverting refuse from landfills.
To Patton’s client Win Phelps, a Granada Hills television producer, composting represents “the way we should behave toward Mother Earth. Compost has the ability to put soil in a kind of balance and harmonious health you don’t find much in the world these days.”
While Katz’s clients echo these opinions, Judy Horton, a detail gardener and Los Angeles resident for whom Katz revamped a compost system, adds a practical note: “Composting is just good horticulture. I notice a huge difference in plants I grow in soil amended with compost. They’re bigger, healthier; they bloom more, and they need little or no fertilizer.”
Michael Pollan, author of “Second Nature,” a critically acclaimed book of garden essays, expresses similar sentiments. “For the gardener, composting should have the same status as planting, harvesting and pruning. It’s that important.”
Broadly defined, compost is a mixture of mostly organic matter that has been allowed to decay and mingle over time. As Patton explains, “Any natural ecosystem has leaves and other living debris constantly falling on the ground. Rainfall and bacteria cause it to decompose, and that increases the concentration of minerals in the soil. The earth works because of this process.”
The benefits that well-prepared compost brings to a landscape are discussed at length in John Jeavons’ classic organic gardening handbook, “How to Grow More Vegetables.” Rich in humic acid, compost improves plants’ abilities to absorb nutrients, increases necessary trace elements in the soil, and generally upgrades soil quality, loosening and aerating heavy soils and making sandy soils more water-retentive.
Alex Costa, superintendent of landscaping for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, says his agency recommends composting to help conserve water. “When it’s turned into the soil of a garden at a depth of four inches, there’s a 25% water saving,” Costa explains. “If it’s used that way and also applied as a surface mulch, there’s closer to a 40% water saving.”
Although compost designers don’t share a single approach or even a list of preferred materials when building a garden recycling system, all agree that the process requires a balance of organic debris that is rich in carbon and nitrogen, along with a good amount of water and oxygen. This combination, according to Hopkins, generates the heat needed to kill weed seeds, diseased plant material and most chemicals that might have once been sprayed in the garden. It will also stimulate microorganisms and speed decomposition, thereby preserving some nutrients that would otherwise be lost.
Most popular composting methods depend on layering materials, either in an enclosure or in a free-form pile laid directly on the ground. Hopkins, whose approach was developed two decades ago at UC Santa Cruz, advocates layering “as a measuring device, so that people make sure to put in equal volumes of carbon and nitrogen.” In general, he points out, dry, brown materials such as dead leaves, wood chips and straw are rich in carbon, and green materials such as grass clippings and kitchen waste are high in nitrogen.
Hopkins also stresses that chopping ingredients--by running a rotary lawn mower over them or using a weed-whacker or a machine called a chipper/shredder--increases their surface area and speeds decay, as does regularly turning the compost pile.
Katz and Patton, practitioners of Biodynamic gardening, a method conceived by Austrian philosopher-scientist Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s, add inoculants (available by mail order or in garden stores) to their compost. Sometimes compared to sourdough starter for making bread, inoculants contain bacteria in a suspended animation that are ready to break down organic matter.
Hopkins, who cites an “abracadabra” aspect in the Biodynamic approach, disputes the effectiveness and necessity of inoculants. “There’s enough bacteria in any piece of lettuce to get a compost pile going,” he says. But he agrees with Katz and Patton that encouraging people to compost is the most important goal. “Pick your method and go with it,” says Hopkins who, in addition to holding scheduled seminars at the Sepulveda Garden Center, will meet groups there to discuss composting and to show bins that range from a $35 homemade device to a $600 high-tech drum composter. Hopkins has also written a simple guide to setting up a back-yard compost system that includes plans for two easy-to-make containers. The guide is available through the Common Ground program or the Sepulveda Garden Center.
Katz and Patton have files of articles on compost for their clients to read. And Katz recommends that anyone wanting more information should visit Seeds, a new organic gardening store on South La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. Both Katz (for $30 an hour) and Patton (for $35 to $50 an hour) prefer teaching people how to establish and maintain a workable compost system, rather than simply designing it for them.
Pat Tomlinson of Topanga Canyon explains that as a neophyte gardener, she hired Katz to set up her compost because “I didn’t want to waste time trying to reinvent the wheel.” What followed, she says, was “a hands-on learning experience” in which Katz, after arranging a lattice of sticks on an enclosed area of exposed earth, laid down the first two or three layers of brown and green material, inoculating and wetting them. Tomlinson finished the pile as he watched.
“It wasn’t as hard as I expected,” she says. “With what I know, I can keep it going myself, and he’ll come back if I need him.”
General misconceptions about compost--that it takes too long to decompose and requires too much space, smells bad and attracts bugs and rats--are among the obstacles in getting people to accept it. Even with enthusiastic clients, Katz spends time explaining how to bury kitchen waste under a layer of dirt to discourage flies and eliminate odors, to avoid adding meat scraps, which attract rodents, and to turn the pile periodically to add oxygen and thus further head off any malodorous anaerobic decay. Most compost specialists agree that a 3- by 3-foot space in a convenient but inconspicuous location would generate high-quality compost in three to six weeks if prepared properly.
For those who are still resistant, composting may prove to be an inevitable part of the future for Los Angeles and California. The California Integrated Solid Waste Management Act of 1989 mandated that all of the state’s cities and counties develop plans to divert 25% of all waste from landfills by 1995 and 50% by 2000. Home and garden waste makes up one-third of the total produced in Los Angeles County, according to the county’s Department of Public Works. But there are several projects being developed to reduce this substantially.
Kathi Delegal, the department’s environmental affairs coordinator, points to a pilot program for voluntary back-yard composting that is expected to be under way in Altadena within nine months. Hopkins is a technical adviser for the city’s Solid Waste Management Office as it undertakes experimental composting projects.
“By this time next year,” Hopkins says, “we should have in production one pilot program somewhere in L. A.”
He says the plan calls for a central location, such as a park or golf course, where people would drop off small amounts of residential refuse and receive in exchange finished compost for their gardens.
“Individuals alone can’t do the whole job,” Hopkins says.
They can, however, make a difference.
Tomlinson proudly describes weeks when “there’s hardly enough trash here for the garbage man to take.” She adds that her reward for her efforts is a garden full of pesticide-free vegetables and a lot less guilt. “My throwaways now go into making great food,” she says.
But perhaps her strongest satisfaction comes from putting her personal principles into action to help clean up the earth.
“I didn’t just talk about it,” she says. “I finally did it.”
