Cooling Down to the Hot Topic of Compost
For seven years my only hands-on connection to live vegetation was a zebra plant I shuttled from apartment to apartment. So a dangerous combination of excitement and naivete led me to rent a house with a yard.
The term “yard” is a little optimistic. What I really have are two postage-stamp-size plots of grass in front of the house. Still, I pictured myself passing idyllic afternoons picking flowers and fresh-grown herbs. What I got was hours of sweaty work trying to reclaim the earth from invading ivy. In the meantime, the herbs died. So did my zebra plant. I won the ivy battle, though the casualties were heavy: three 60-gallon containers full of leaves and vines. Undoubtedly, there would be more to come.
Since I strive to be a hip, reducing-reusing-recycling kind of woman, I latched on to a fax that came to the office. The county’s Department of Public Works offers a free back-yard composting workshop.
Composting. Of course. So simple. Never mind that my back yard is a courtyard shared by a cast of characters too bizarre for television. I’ll find space out front, I thought. Over by the patio, maybe. I’ll get one of those little containers and compost my heart out.
When I arrived at Gates Canyon Park in Calabasas, the half-dozen apprentice composters were very excited. They had taken a six-week class in composting and this was the first workshop they would lead. They started with a lecture about Assembly Bill 939, legislation that requires cities and counties to cut the “waste flow” to landfills 50% by the year 2000.
Then came the testimonials. Compost saved their yard. It conserved water. It saved them money. It won gardening contests. One gentleman, whom I suspect is really a master composter, said he found the process almost spiritual.
Composting, they all said, is very simple. They then proceeded to make it sound very complicated. Do coffee grounds count as green material? Did you need two-thirds brown material or only half? What is brown material, anyway? Should you layer or mix? So much for the Zen of composting.
It took me two hours of baking in the Calabasas sunshine to figure out that there are two ways to compost. The first, called “active” or “hot,” is the composting equivalent of microwave brownies. The temperature in the stack gets up to 140 degrees and you can have usable compost in four to six weeks. You have to stir frequently (at least once a week), and you can’t add anything to the pile once it starts cooking.
The other version, “static,” is the composting equivalent of pickling. You put the stuff together and let it sit for six to 12 months. You can keep throwing things on top, but the experts recommend topping everything off with dry material.
Either way, the recipe is: Take a bunch of dried-out stuff, like dried leaves, wood chips or shredded paper. Add an equal amount of stuff that’s still green. You can put it in a big pile or a special-made container. Just make sure it gets the secret ingredients: air and water. And voila! Compost happens.
Then I asked about my scenario: Could I compost all this ivy and make beds for my basil? Well, said an expert, we don’t recommend it--at least not for beginners. Ivy is hard to kill and will sprout in your compost heap. What about the magnolia leaves that drop by the hundreds? Too waxy, she said. Maybe if you dry all this stuff out for a few months, and then run it through a chipper . . .
Suddenly I’m doing complicated math, trying to figure out how many bags of TOPGRO I can buy for the cost of a chipper, and how many I’ll have to buy anyway before I make a flowerpot’s worth of compost.
The apprentice composters tried to ease my panic. I could still get rich soil--”black gold”--they said. Try worms. Put them in a container under your sink and feed them kitchen scraps. Sure, I said. Worms. Under my sink. I smiled. I nodded. And I considered moving back into an apartment.
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WHERE AND WHEN
What: Composting workshop and demonstrations.
Location: Gates Canyon Park, 25801 Thousand Oaks Blvd., Calabasas.
Hours: Workshop runs from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday. Regular demonstrations every Saturday.
Price: Free.
Call: Los Angeles County Department of Public Works, (800) 552-5218; workshops are also offered by the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation, (800) 773-CITY.
