Compost—art, science, or inevitability?

You're likely wondering where you’ve landed, and what you might expect to find here.

Your guess is as good as mine. In my recent experiments making ink from the plants I find around the yard, and in the kitchen compost bin, I've made some colors, grown some mold, and filled a few idle minutes with amazement. My own. If I’ve learned one thing over the course of a handful of trials—guided, loosely by the beautiful book Make Ink by Jason Logan of the Toronto Ink Company—it’s that there is no predicting what color you will end up with when you toss a bunch of plant material into a pot, cook it down for an hour or three, and paint it onto paper.

My favorite bit of alchemy so far has come when I paint a vivid purple (distilled from a wilted vase of flowers) onto paper, and watch it dry to green or gray. I am sure there’s chemistry at play here, but I’d rather believe in the magic.

And so it is with life. It’s a beautiful jumble and I never know on a given day what thought will rise to the surface of my mind, but I am always having thoughts, often writing them on paper or tapping them into a keyboard, and sometimes I wonder what it would be like to talk about them with other people. And so here we are. You will find, over the course of time and as I get things laid out here, essays-musings-thoughts-ramblings on everything from what is growing in my compost bin to genetic scrambles to the story of the landscape where I make my home. And other stuff, too.

Read with me, think with me, and write to me. Better yet, come on over for a cup of tea and smell the dirt with me.

The truth is, I am not a very good composter. Or gardener. Or scientist. But I pretend at all of it. When it comes to compost, I’ve read books on the theory, talked to the masters, but still I can do no better than to throw my mixed kitchen scraps into a loose pile on the edge of my garden.

It’s a step up from how I was raised, a five-gallon bucket under the kitchen sink, left to fill until it smelled bad enough that someone noticed and hauled it out the back door, through the yard to the top of the garden. I suppose some of those scraps composted eventually, the ones that weren’t disposed of in nocturnal visits from skunks and raccoons. But mostly it just sat there in the corner of the garden, stinking and growing weeds. And it kept the raccoons out of the garbage, so there was that.

Here we do a little better, if only because the can on our kitchen counter is smaller than the bucket of my childhood. So we take it out more often—usually me, sometimes my teenaged daughter, if she is feeling helpful, sometimes my husband, if I ask—but it still goes into a loosely-made bin—three wooden pallets strapped together—that the wild critters can pick through at their leisure, and the dogs, too. Last year I harvested a dozen avocado trees from the pile, and distributed them to my friends. And this year there are onions, squash, a few avocados to replace the ones that withered in the heat wave in their pots on the back deck last month. One year a cantaloupe. Sometimes potatoes.

The people who write the books would know without a second look that we’re doing it wrong, that the science of the matter is to build a carefully layered collection of green and brown, a recipe mixed to cook itself into dirt over the course of a season, food not for skunks and raccoons, much less moles and voles, but for worms, beetles, grubs and fungi. Nothing should grow in a compost pile. The pile itself should shrink away, steaming hot in the middle, never really stinking, recycling itself back into the richest soil. But that’s not how it goes here, and I’ve come to terms with that.

Over the past few months, I've found myself waylaying refuse on its way to the compost pile. It all started with this pretty picture of oak galls, those pale speckled orbs that are both nest and first food of the gall wasp. I collected a handful these cast-offs on a walk through the woods, piled them in a still life on the table on my porch, posted a picture to Facebook.

“Are you making ink?” Catherine asked in a comment.

“I know nothing of this. Tell me more!” I replied, and she answered with a link to a medieval recipe for making ink from crushed up oak galls, a little iron, wine, and a touch of gum. And I was hooked.

I am as bad a researcher as I am a composter, so after perusing a few recipes from around the internet, I enlisted my kids to help me grind the galls to the finest powder we had the patience to create, and we mixed it in our forest classroom with the ferrous iron (also known as vitriol!) and gum Arabic that I had ordered from the internet, along with water in place of the wine. And we made ink! Brownish-blackish-grayish chunky ink. And the kids doodled and I told everyone I knew that I was going to write “with gall and vitriol” and I did and I have and I do.

And then one day on Facebook I saw a post from an artist in Toronto who makes inks in all the colors from plants and pigments gathered on urban foraging outings, and I bought his book and have followed none of his recipes, but have picked up his general theory (remember those composting books? Yeah, I read this one like that. But this one has prettier pictures). And I have a plan! I am going to make ink! From all the plants that live here on our land! There will be an invasive species series! And an endemic series! And maybe I’ll even make ink from toxic plants and write with a poison pen! Only time will tell how far I go.

And I have made ink. The first batch after the oak gall was from lichen peeled from branches in the burn pile we won’t be able to light until it starts to rain, another few months away. The lichen cooked up to a pale gray green. And the next day, when I knew I would again be in the kitchen for a few hours, I pulled the petals from a bouquet of wilted tulips, put them in a pot with some water, and let them simmer. And there have been moments with beets and with cabbage and more flower petals. And just as I have dreams of all the ink I will make (but may never), so I launch these virtual pages with ideas of the words and images that will fill them. We shall see. Thanks for reading this far, if you did!