A Farmer and His Garlic

As part of his annual crop rotation scheme, Leigh Hauter over the years had planted garlic just about everywhere he could on his farm except for this strip of land on the slope just below his greenhouse.

The previous owners of Bull Run Farm had not done much in the way of erosion control. "There was very little topsoil left on that slope," he said. So he spent at least five years building the soil again with applications of compost made from horse manure and straw and the droppings from his chickens.

This year, Leigh and his farmhand disagreed over whether the soil was ready for garlic. Leigh said no, the farmhand said yes. "I was never really happy with what had been growing up there," Leigh said. "I didn't want to risk putting my garlic all in one place where it wouldn't do well." Eventually, though, the farmhand prevailed. Garlic it would be.

Leigh prefers a German porcelain variety of hardneck garlic. "It's done better for me, and it makes a larger bulb," he says.

Garlic is divided into two types: hardneck and softneck. They are both grown exactly the same. But the hardneck has a determinate number of cloves (sometimes as few as four, but large) and produces a "scape," a stalk from which a seed head grows. The scapes--tasting of garlic and delicious as food--are harvested before the seed head forms. Softneck garlic, meanwhile, is the kind most often found in stores with an indeterminate number of cloves--often layers of them--as well as a thicker skin. Because of its thicker skin, softneck garlic stores longer.

Garlic typically is planted in fall, then overwinters in the ground. Around August, Leigh orders 400 pounds of bulbs from a commercial grower in New York State. These will produce about 12,000 plants, resulting in 12,000 bulbs to be distributed to Leigh's 500 CSA subscribers.

First Leigh tilled the soil on the slope, adding some more compost. Then they planted the cloves--pointy end up--using a mechanical device pulled along behind his tractor. Two people ride on the device feeding cloves of garlic into a wheel that inserts the garlic about three inches below the soil surface, several inches apart, then covers them over. As long as you're driving the tractor straight, the method will create neat rows of garlic.

The final step is to cover the garlic with a thick mulch.

Garlic doesn't like competition from weeds. The mulch keeps weeds down as well as retaining moisture in the soil. Leigh uses hay from one of his neighbors who raises hay along with beef cattle. In exchange for selling some of the beef to his CSA subscribers, Leigh gets whatever hay hasn't been sold at the end of the season--typically 50 to 75 bails of it. The garlic field is covered over with a layer of hay about six inches thick, enough to block any sunlight that might reach the soil. "If the weed seeds don't get light, they can't grow," says Leigh.

The garlic, however, has no problem pushing its way through the hay after it sprouts. By spring the unmistakable garlic leaves--slender and pointy--are already several inches long. Leigh won't need to water the garlic much at all. "Even that drought we had a couple of years ago when I was worried about the garlic, it did okay." Nor will he be adding any additional fertilizer. Garlic likes lots of organic matter. But you don't want to feed it too much or you'll get too much foliage and not enough bulb.

When the scapes come up, sometime in June, they'll be cut and sent to subscribers as a treat in they're CSA boxes. Cutting the scapes also redirects the plants' energy toward making bigger bulgs. They'll be harvested when about two-thirds of the leaves have turned brown, usually around the end of June.

Goodbye, Old Fried

Sometimes it's hard to let go. This hat had served me well. It kept the sun off my face and marked me as a gardener. It became part of my identity. I wore the hat until it was in tatters. Finally, it was time to say goodbye to one straw hat that had served its purpose well. It goes into the compost heap to serve another day.

Something's In My Compost

We do our best to keep seeds out of the compost pile but something's always sprouting. Usually it's some kind of weed. We often see tomatoes. You can't hardly kill a tomato seed. But recently I noticed a melon vining it's way over the wire enclosure. Where did it come from? It must have been something we ate. But was it a farmers market melon, or a store-bought melon?

I was curious to see if it would set any fruit. So far we've seen plenty of blossoms and the vines are multiplying, spreading all over the yard. But nothing resembling a melon. I'm about ready to declare that this is simply one of those vampire melons, sucking all the nitrogen out of our compost heap and giving nothing in return.

Show us a melon, or it's into the compost with you!

I'll Take Those Three Ibuprofins

Whoever said gardening was easy?

It might not be immediately obvious, but getting our front-yard kitchen garden to look like this took the better part of the Memorial Day weekend. By the end of it, we were grilling burgers and hot dogs and sipping our gin-and-tonics, but I was bushed.

First, I harvested about 10 pounds of various mustard greens and turnip greens and Chinese greens from this bed, blanched the greens and packed them for freezing. Then I applied my usual cultivation approach to the bed--working my forked spade all around to loosen the soil, breaking up the surface with my stirrup hoe, stirring in some compost.

We are transitioning to summer. The bed is now planted with two varieties of pickling cucumbers to grow up trellises on the right, Italian marrow squash in the middle, and three types of radishes in two rows on the left.

The larger part of this bed has been lying fallow for the longest time while the onions, inter-planted with radishes on the right, grow tall. But it was finally time to transplant the tomatoes. Here we have Cherokee Purple, Dr. Carolyn and Big Boy, all comfy in their thick layer of straw mulch.

I had planted Tokyo Bekana greens, dill, arugula and lettuce behind the rhubarb, figuring they would tolerate a little shade. Well, I sort of miscalculated how fast and large the rhubarb would grow. It's very happy in its compost-amended bed. So the other plants never did much except go to seed. But I needed to clear them out of the way to prepare the soil and plant okra. (See yesterday's post.)

This bed was the scene of last year's arugula going to seed. I collected quite a load of seed pods. I'm hoping daughter will help me pick through them to collect the seeds. Then more time spent with the forked spade, the stirrup hoe and hauling buckets of compost from the compost pile before planting more tomatoes: Mortgage Lifter and Green Zebra.

I give the individual tomato plants plenty of room to breathe. They're spaced four feet apart. At the next opportunity, I'll install cages made of concrete reinforcing wire. I plan to plant some zinnias in front of the tomatoes--we always like to have some flowers in the garden--and our collection of peppers and Asian eggplant.

Visible in the far rear is the last bed I renovated for the summer. It's now planted with two Roma tomatoes and a large section of sweet potatoes. This is our first year growing sweet potatoes and I'm anxious to see how they perform in this particular bed. It's situated on the north side of the house, but in summer gets sun in the morning and late afternoon.

Yikes...just writing about all this work makes me hungry for another Ibuprofin.

Searching for D.C.'s Municipal Compost

Across the country, municipalities are engaging citizens in composting as a means of reducing the waste stream. Anywhere from 15 percent to 30 percent of trash being hauled to landfills is organic matter that could be composted and returned to the soil. There's no reason why the piles of scraps we produce in the coarse of cooking meals can't be recycled to enrich our soil, make more food, and help reduce greenhouse gases. It's a perfect trifecta in which people and the planet win.


So you might think we here in the nation's capitol would be on the cutting edge of the composting movement. As head of a local gardening organization in the District of Columbia, I routinely field questions from citizens eager to compost their kitchen scraps. Even non-gardeners are looking for ways they can do the planet a good turn. So where is the city's compost?


We caught up with the District's head of public works, William Howland, at a recent community and garden club meeting where he was speaking on the subject of recycling. We asked the question and learned that the District of Columbia--our nation's capitol, now presided over by a young mayor who swears we are going to be a green city--has no municipal composting program and none on the horizon.


What about all those leaves the city collects in the fall--10 tons of leaves? According to Howland, these were routinely trucked off to landfills in years past. Recently, there was a pilot program to compost leaves on city property in the Maryland suburbs. A project to compost leaves collaboratively with the University of the District of Columbia at a facility in Beltsville, MD, is being discussed.


Still, local garden legend tells of a municipal compost pile somewhere near the Capital. No sooner did I report on the local blogs that the District has no compost than a local gardener shouts back that this long-rumored compost pile does in fact exist. It has an address. I am soon in hot pursuit.


And now I can tell the world that the nation's capitol does, indeed, possess a pile of what gardeners call "leaf mold," meaning the composted remains of leaves collected in the fall. We're not exactly sure where it comes from. And having finally located it, I can say that there has never been a compost heap more difficult to find or more completely obscured from public view.


This pile is next to a public works vehicle garage and trash dumping site at New Jersey Avenue and K Street SE, a scene of scruffy industrial buildings and dusty lots wedged between an elevated freeway, a busy commuter route and some railway tracks. Since it is not far from an area where development is being spurred by the addition of a new baseball stadium, there are also, oddly, spanking-new apartment buildings rising overhead as well.


I thought I had landed in an outtake from "The French Connection." Before me stood a vast collection of dump trucks, snow plows, salt spreaders and street cleaning vehicles. The lot was jammed with private vehicles as well, yet not a human being in sight. I circled, probed, and circled again looking for this compost. I discovered that to get into the lot, I had to choose one of two ramps leading into and through a rather scary looking brick building lorded over by a tall smoke stack.


Finally I spotted two men working on a water tanker.


"Where's the compost?" I asked.


"There! Over there," they said, pointing to a big, yellow front-end loader off in the distance.


I drove to the spot and, sure enough, there in a far corner of the lot were three different piles of material: sand, mulch and a dark, rich-looking compost. The front-end loader was blocking the path into the area. I had to take my 1997 Toyota Corolla "off road" to get closer.

So here's a picture of what the District of Columbia's compost (or "leaf mold") looks like. Good stuff, if you can get past the bottle caps, pieces of plastic trash bags and other debris that come with it. I returned the following day to fill a trash can and some 5-gallon buckets. It's time to top off the garden containers at my daughter's charter school.


It was a moment of personal triumph: I had finally tracked down our own local, publicly financed compost. And it's free!


But I can't help being nagged by a persistent question: Can't we do better?

One Man's Trash...

We find all sorts of odd things laying on the sidewalk in our neighborhood: hub caps, car batteries, mattresses, dead rats, broken beer bottles, broken bicycles, clothing, used condoms, semi-empty food containers.

Sometimes you see motorists toss whole bags of trash out their car window and onto the sidewalk. Sometimes you see the entire contents of an apartment on the sidewalk. We never like to see people evicted from their apartments. The sidewalk is where all their stuff ends up.

We often get rid of our old stuff in a similar fashion. If we have an old lamp, say, or a set of chairs we no longer want, we don't bother with a yard sale. We just display it on the street corner. It's gone within a few minutes. That seems to be one of the ways people communicate in the city. Here, I don't need this any more. You can have it. And then it's gone.

So I wasn't particularly disturbed when I saw this box of vegetables the other day. I was walking my daughter to school and the box was half in the street, half on the curb. This is the kind of vegetable box that would be delivered by a food wholesaler to a restaurant or a grocery store. How did it end up it the street? Who would have tossed it there? Or did it fall off the truck?

We didn't bother ourselves over it. We just kept walking. But there it was again the second day. And the third day it had moved onto the sidewalk. By day four, it had found its way across the sidewalk and was nestled up against the front of an apartment building, half-buried in a pile of fallen leaves. Now I had to investigate.

I opened the box and saw that it was filled with celery, about 40 pounds worth. That would have made a lot of soup, I figured, or maybe one very large Waldorf salad. The celery was getting a little long in the tooth, not very appetizing. But obviously nobody else wanted it. It needed a home. And suddenly I had an idea...

Now the box is sitting in a corner of the garden. My chore for the day? Get out the big cutting board and my sharpest serrated knife. This celery might have been destined for the salad bowl at one point. But now, it's got a date with my compost pile.

On Falling Behind

I may have mentioned before that one of my heroes is Ward Sinclair. Ward was a colleague--on the other side of the newsroom--at The Washington Post back in the 80s. He covered agriculture, but left the paper to buy a small farm in Warfordsburg, PA.

While Ward was busy farming, he also started writing a column in the Post's food section called "Truckpatch." The columns became a small book, and one of the chapters has remained with me ever since. It was called "A Farmer Can't Be Listliss," and in it Ward printed his "to do" list.

The list is too long to re-print here. It is mind boggling. There were fences to mend, cold frames to fix, equipment to paint, coolers to sanitize, greenhouse flats to scrub, irrigation parts to check, potting mix to procure--and on and on. Ward's "to do" list made a profound impression, and shaped my idea of what farming is about.

As I look around my own little urban farm here in the District of Columbia, I see that I am falling further and further behind on my "to do" list. Matters became pressing with the cooler weather, as that brought out a whole new wave of weeds in the vegetable beds. Suddenly my rutabagas and turnips were being overrun with chickweed. I spent the better part of a day on hands and knees digging out the chickweed, and still the job is not completely done.

Then came a weather forecast for temperatures dipping close to freezing. The basil patch, already long in the tooth, would have to be harvested immediately. Turning the basil into pesto and freezing it (shown in picture above) again took another day.

As I look around, I see so many other chores that need tending to. The lima beans were never completely harvested. The dried seed pods call for attention. The trellises for the beans and the cucumbers must be disassembled and returned to the garage. The annual flower bed needs to be cleaned out and turned. There's garlic to plant, bags of old leaves to be shredded and worked into the compost pile. The yard around the vegetable beds has not been mowed in a month (the electric mower broke).

Then a peach tree arrived. Earlier in the year I had planted a dwarf peach in the garden at my daughter's school and it never broke dormancy. I was told to expect a replacement in the fall. Here it was, and it needed to be planted. Which meant a trip to a secret location to fetch soil to fill a container.

I cannot mention the location of this stash of immaculate compost, lest the whole world pounce on it. It's in a place where the U.S. Park Service dumps its truckloads of wood chips, gleaned from its work in ou urban parks and woods. The chips eventually break down in huge piles of compost, leaving this treasure tucked away among the oak trees, just waiting for those few pennywise gardeners willing to spend a few extra calories to haul it away.

I rarely see anyone at the secret compost stash when I pull up with my plastic buckets and hand truck. But this day as I pushed my hand truck down the trail an elderly Russian-speaking couple came into view. They were busy digging into the side of a tall pile of compost, filling big white garden bags with a long-handled spade.

The man was hobbled in one leg and leaned on a cane. It was the woman--his wife, I guessed--who loaded the heavy bags into a rickety old wheel barrow and pushed it back up the trail toward the roadway. As I passed the man he smiled broadly and muttered a few words in Russian, of which I could just make out "xorosho, xorosho," good, good. And since I don't remember enough of my college Russian to ask what he thought was "good, good," I imagined he was perhaps happy to see someone else taking advantage of the compost hidden out here in the woods, or maybe he just liked the looks of the compost, or maybe he was already calculating the great benefit the compost was going to bring to his garden.

I started filling my buckets and trucking them back to my car. The second time I passed the man I smiled and said "xorosho," and he smiled and repeated "xorosho," as if we were sharing some secret. And it gave me great pleasure to know that while the rest of the world was scurrying about in their daily tasks--toiling away at their desks, stuck in meetings, battling traffic--there was still a place where a couple of gardeners could revel in secret compost and spend some time in the labor of shoveling it into bags and buckets as if it were a pirate's bounty.

This, it seems to me, is precisely where modern agriculture has broken down. We handed the business of working the soil over to huge machines, industrial economics, factory-made fertilizers and pesticides, assembly-line animal husbandry--all in the name of efficiency and convenience. What was lost in the deal was any personal involvement, any sense of human scale, in the working of the land.

How do we humans relate to a 1,000-acre filed of corn, a tank of anhydrous amonia? Of course we cannot. The choice of an industrial food system is a bargain with the devil, because we sacrafice part of our soul--the part that needs to be connected to the earth and the affirmation of life that springs from it. Our modern food system feeds us, but it does not sustain us.

There has been nothing invented to replace the feeling of digging in soil, or of feeding compost to the earth, or of watching life emerge where one has toiled. So I am not regretting my long to-do list. As long as it is there,--as long as there is work to be done--I am connected to my little piece of the planet, I am doing good. And that is xorosho.

Garlic Harvest

In the course of weeding one of our garden beds, I forced myself to consider the small garlic patch that had been overrun with crab grass.


"It's all brown and dried out looking," I told my wife. "What do I do now?"


"Sounds like it's ready to harvest. When did you plant it?"


Last fall is when I planted it. But for some reason I was not expecting it to be ready for harvest until this coming fall, or one year later.

As you may have surmised, this is my first experience planting garlic. I just assumed it had given up the ghost after being throttled by all that crab grass.


There was just one thing left to do: Dig!


So out came the crab grass and the garlic. The bulbs were smaller than I'd expected, certainly smaller than what you normally see in the grocery store. (Maybe because of all the weeds?) The garlic sets were a gift from our farmer friend, Mike, so I no longer even know what variety they are, no idea what they are supposed to look like. Duh. Could have taken notes...

I tossed one to my wife.


"That's garlic!" she exclaimed. "They look great!"


Good enough for me. I dug up the rest of the garlic and set it aside. My daughter came out to help weed. Then we spread some of the compost we've been working on since March and turned it into the bed with a stirrup hoe.


The compost is deliciously fine and light and fluffy, like spreading goose down. It has exceded all my expectations, and certainly has been worth all the effort collecting leaves and grass clippings and weeds and kitchen scraps. Not to mention all those mornings turning the pile. (But really, I have no complaints. Turning compost is good for the soul.)


My daughter insisted on hoeing. She wants a vegetable bed of her own. I think we might just put some of our many extra tomato plants here. I planted several dozen, thinking I would sell them at the produce market. They are beautiful seedlings now that certainly will be producing fruit into October. Can't let them go to waste...

Can Microbes Save Planet Earth?

Temperatures have already hit 90 degrees here in the District of Columbia. You have to get up at the crack of dawn if you want to get anything done.

It's a peaceful time of day, especially on the weekend. Anyone with any sense is still asleep. But this is when I like to come out and turn the compost pile.

I have three simple wire bins side-by-side. Throughout the year, I fill them with shredded leaves from the fall and grass clippings from the spring and summer and kitchen scraps year 'round. The pile I started earlier in the spring will probably be ready to use by fall, so I've started a new pile.

Gardening for food comes down to the soil. It must be a healthy soil to raise healthy vegetables. And the best thing for building a healthy soil is compost. Gardeners call it "black gold."

As I turn the compost, I see all kinds of small creatures scurrying for cover. These are the decomposer, without whom our planet would be piled high with dead plant and animal debris. From microscopic bacteria and fungi, protozoa and nematodes, to larger mites and spiders, sow bugs and earthworms, there is a whole world in a handful of soil, billions of living souls we hardly ever pay any attention to.


Yet without them, life as we know it would cease to exist.

It's a bug-eat-bug world down there, and what they're all after is the nitrogen and other nutrients that plants and animals graciously return to the soil when they die. You might say the decomposers are involved in a giant recycling operation, which eventually results in good things for us to eat.

We know lots more about these creatures than we used to. Darwin was far ahead of his time. When he wasn't contemplating his theory of evolution, he had his face in the soil, studying earthworms. Darwin's friends thought he was crazy. There was nothing worth knowing about soil--so they said. But Darwin was convinced that earthworms moved mountains. He was convinced that every bit of soil on the planet had passed through an earthworm at one time or another, and been made richer in the process.

We know that Darwin was pretty much correct. Now that we have powerful microscopes and advanced chemistry, we can say with good authority what most of these microbes are doing down there and why they are such a vital link in the chain of life. Funny, though--the more we know, the less we use that knowledge. Mankind is only beginning to relearn the value of compost in the food chain, that we don't really need artificial fertilizers and pesticides to feed ourselves. That artificial fertilizers and pesticides are killing our soil and poisoning the planet.

We just need to make better use of microbes, who perform the same tasks, only better.

A countryman of Darwin's was Adam Smith, who spent his time contemplating markets and proclaiming that free markets were pretty much the solution to all man's ills. Prosperity stretched out over the horizon, and seemingly forever, if only we surrendered our common wants and needs to an "unseen hand" that would guide us all into a land of riches.

I wonder if Adam Smith ever had an inkling that his market theory would eventually run into global warming and pollution on a planetary scale. I wonder if he were here now, would he stop to consider the microbes at his feet?

Making Food is Hard Work

Another of the rites of spring is starting a new compost pile. I've been extremely busy lately--the warmer weather brings on a flurry of activities--and with the intermittent rains my lawn just kept getting taller and taller.

Not such a horrible thing, as the grass clippings make an excellent addition to the compost pile. The green clippings add lots of nitrogen to the compost, like and injection of lighter fluid--the bacteria love it, and heat the pile until it is steaming. That's very good for decomposition

But the process involves getting several different tools out of the garage, setting up a leaf shredding operation to add the necessary brown--or carbonaceous--matter to the compost for proper balance (I go around the neighborhood in the fall and collect the bags of leaves the neighbors leave at the curb). Mowing is no easy trick either, the lawn being interrupted by numerous vegetable and flower beds. And that still leaves the weeds that have begun to encroach on the beds. They need to be pulled, the edges trimmed and reshaped with a spade.

All of which is to say that before you can harvest those wonderful lettuces and greens and other vegetables, you have to work on the soil and the weeds and maintaining the tools. Food does not just happen, even though it might appear so if you are just strolling the produce aisle at the supermarket. There is much human toil involved. That is one of the advantages of shopping at a local farmer's market: You actually see the faces and meet the people who are responsible for bringing your food forth from the soil with their own labor.

Whenever I despair of the work involved in my food I remember Ward Sinclair. Ward for years covered the agriculture beat at The Washington Post. Then he succumbed and became a farmer himself. He bought a piece of land in Pennsylvania and sold his product at the farmer's markets here in the District of Columbia, as well as to several restaurants. He also started a column in the Post's food section called "Truckpatch."

To my mind, Ward's "Truckpatch" column was probably the best thing ever written about food in a newspaper. His personal essays brought home so vividly how the food we either take for granted or glamorize in slick magazines begins with the muscle and sweat of an individual who is committed to the soil. Most farmers, especially the small truck farmers we see in the farmer's markets, do not make a lot of money. They are just crazy about the work. And there is so much of it.


After all these years, one particular column Ward Sinclair wrote, republished in the book Truckpatch: A Farmer's Odyssey, sticks in my mind. It simply details all the chores that lay before Ward on one typical spring day as the new planting season approached and he contemplated his schedule.

Knowing how to plant a seed, nurture it, harvest it, and take the finished product to market is only a part of the demands of the truckpatch, he wrote. The to-do list requires the farmer to be mechanic, carpenter, supply specialist, labor negotiator and employer, writer and graphic designer, plumber, banker and a host of other arts.

Oh, it would be simpler to call in an expert and have the job done right. But there is neither money nor time enough for the farmer to rely on others. When a tractor goes dead, he can't wait on help from afar. When wind rips the cover off a greenhouse, it must be replaced immediately.


So the to-do list is the farmer's master. It determines how his time is allocated and in its cryptic code language reminds him every day that the work on the farm is never done if the place is to flourish and succeed.

Ward Sinclair, ran a farm near Dot, PA, with his partner, Cass Peterson. They started one of the first farm subscriptions, or CSAs, in the United States. Ward died too young in 1995. Whenever I think that growing food is too much work, I remember his words.

Compost: Making the Sale

I love talking to groups about compost and last night I did my schtick in front of the Capitol Hill Garden Club. Who, you ask, gardens on Capitol Hill? This club, you should know, is one of the largest in the Washington, D.C., metro area. Many of the members have been gardening for 30 years or more. And I got a very warm welcome.

I had less than an hour, so this was not the kind of venue where you can do a hands-on composting demonstration. Over the months (they invited me to speak last summer) I worked on a Powerpoint-slide show that would give the what and the why of composting. It's a fascinating story, how humans for thousands of years were spreading compost and manure (the Greeks talk about making compost heaps) on their crops. Darwin was convinced that earth worms ruled the world (or at least the underworld). But then in the 19th century German scientists started pushing for an industrial process that would turn gaseous nitrogen into something that could be spread on farm crops to feed an exploding human population. It's only within the last few generations that we have come to believe that fertility is something we buy in the form of turquoise pellets, and that composting is only for hippies and tree huggers.

The sad truth is that chemical fertilizers are ruining our soils and choking our waterways. People are receptive to composting and gardening "naturally" or "organically." But especially in urban areas, they aren't sure how to make compost without investing tons of money in manufactured bins. There are rodent issues, neighbors to consider. It's a very thorny problem, and I'm just starting to get a grip on all the details. But that's what we need to be doing, especially in our cities: figuring out how we can recycle all that stuff we normally send to the landfill, or put at the curb in plastic bags.

On a more amusing note, I did a little hobnobbing with some community gardeners last week, courtesy of our local department of the environment. An environmental specialist is meeting with community gardeners to talk about Integrated Pest Management, or how to deal with unwanted bugs and plant diseases without using pesticides. Except the environmental specialist is not really a gardener. So I was told to expect questions. Sure enough, everyone wanted to know how to deal with cucumber beetles. They weren't very receptive to the idea of planting something other than cucumbers if they have a recurring infestation of cucumber beetles.

Somehow, we need to get the idea across that there isn't an organic spray to replace every chemical spray. Organic is a holistic approach that requires plant diversity, opening you mind to the needs of the environment, providing food and nesting places for wildlife, choosing the appropriate plants for local conditions, thinking globally instead of where can I get my hands on a good spray.

After my presentation last night, an elderly woman on crutches approached me to make this observation: "I started gardening 35 years ago and I had the worst soil. So I just took my leaves and spread them around the garden. I've been doing that every year, just spreading the leaves around. And you know what? I've got the most wonderful soil you've ever seen."

Go on with your bad leaf mulching self, girl.

To be continued...

Composting with Style

As a sign of her everlasting love, my wife recently returned from a trip to the local World Market with what looked like a miniature trash can. It is metal, white and quite decorative, with the heft of a coffee can and a snugly fitting lid with handle. It can only be one thing: Our new counter-top composting receptacle.

Those of you who do not compost obviously are unfamiliar with certain housekeeping issues involved, such as, where do you keep all those potato peels, apple cores, used paper towels, coffee grounds and other kitchen scraps that accumulate daily and need to be saved in between trips to the compost heap in the side yard? In the past, we had simply used a stainless steel mixing bowl. But although our catering business is small, we generate kitchen scraps at a prodigious rate, especially since we make all our food from scratch. Think about all the skins and trimmings just from onions if you are preparing your own stocks and broths; the ends of celeries; the skins of rutabagas; the peels of carrots. Start adding the crusts from breads; the butt ends of baguettes; the filters full of used coffee grounds; the lemon that went mouldy; the orange rinds; the mushrooms that got lost in the crisper drawer. It all starts to pile up pretty fast, and heaps of it sitting in a bowl on the countertop did not suit my wife's sense of decor. So she spied this mini-trash can at World Market and snagged it. "I want my bowl back," she said.

Some of you are probably thinking this hoarding of bits and pieces from the kitchen is taking composting to an extreme, and I assure you it is not. As much as 25 percent of everything we send to the community landfill consists of kitchen scraps, things we can easily recycle by feeding them to our compost pile (or compost container, for you urbanites). Compost loves a diversity of ingredients and kitchen scraps provide a good balance of nitrogen and carbon, just right for the bacteria and other microbes that specialize in turning your garbage into humus for the garden. Of course this time of year your decomposers might not be particularly active. I've also included a photo of our own compost pile looking pretty much frozen over. I have to use a spade to pry open a spot to dump our scraps. There may be bacteria active way down in the middle of the pile. They will continue to work down to temperatures of about 50 degrees. And fear not: warmer temperatures are on the way. Look for a thaw soon.