PLAYTHINGS : Mulch Ado About Nothing

“Oh, great!” says Mrs. Silverstein, my neighbor, peeking over the back-yard fence the other day to check out my new compost pile. “Now he’s into collecting garbage.”

I try to explain that the garbage will turn into mulch. “Yard trimmings take up 20% of our landfills,” I tell her, but she clearly doesn’t appreciate the joys of cultivating waste.

Maybe composting is a yuppie thing. You can’t help but notice that it’s no longer restricted to tree-hugging, commune-starting hippies. Beemers and Volvos sport “Compost Happens” bumper stickers, and Los Angeles even has a new composting workshop: Once a month, on Saturday mornings at different spots around town, qualified composters will show you how to keep your compost pile pest-free and neighbor-friendly.

But there are lots of Mrs. Silversteins, even in the garden business. When one Hollywood advertising exec asked his gardener to put the grass clippings in his new compost bin, the gardener cleaned the bin out. It was full of garbage, after all.

Monchai Yaopruke, head of the city’s compost program, says the workshops are attended mostly by the young and upwardly mobile. (As USC anthropologist Diego Vigil notes, most people are “too busy trying to make a living to think about things like compost.”) But Yaopruke says compost clashes stem from a generation gap rather than cultural differences. His in-laws look at his compost pile and “think I’m crazy. But my son, he loves to play with the worms.”