Urban Compost and Garden Notebook

By JR Pattison

Gardening has always been an important part of my life. Not only because I like to eat, which I do, but because culinary art is about nutrition and health, as well as the art of presenting food and enjoying it. It’s the health part of nutrition that has a lot to do with growing food, because healthy food can only be produced from healthy soil.

We live in the city on a lot 25 feet wide by 130 feet deep. It’s a typical lot size for any city in the northeast with all the neighbors on the street having the same dimensions, except for an occasional house that may have a double lot, or an additional quirky triangle shaped corner piece.

So, with the house taking up about 60 feet, the patio another 15’, parking off the alley 20 feet more -that’s 95 of the 130 feet so far - add a small patch of grass and two ornamental trees and
there isn’t much space left over for gardening. Even so, I manage to find two spaces for veggies. One is a patch 4’x’4’ in a wood timber frame and another about twice that size.  Then for flowering plants, Jane has various spaces on both sides along the fence.

It’s really a matter of locating the just-right habitat in which to grow carrots, beets, onions and scallions, peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, pole beans, swiss chard and various leafy types like lettuce, kale and turnip greens… within this compact multi-use footprint.

In all of this, the soil is of prime importance. Good soil needs lots of organic matter to make it friable. It’s dirt with the added value of biodegradable plant material. I use last years’ leaves, wood chips, and composted kitchen scraps, including mango pits, and animal manure. A friend of mine brings by bags of rabbit droppings every now and then. And don’t worry about mixing it in too much. Leave that to the earth worms. They do most of the work. Any soil that provides a home for these working wonders is good healthy soil. This is why organic gardeners are reluctant to use insecticides containing any kind of poison which in turn might discourage our hardworking worm population.

By the way, I have discovered that the healthier the soil, the fewer the problems we have with pests.

People say I have a green thumb. Not so! I just spend a few minutes a day in the backyard thinking about what needs to be done next. I’m just out there often watching as plants poke through the surface, maybe pull a weed or two. It’s really more about dirt under the fingernails than the color of the thumb.

And then there is the magic ingredient: compost. No garden can be successful without it. This is the primo supplier of organic matter that makes healthy soil. It is nothing more than any material which will decompose over time like banana peels, eggshells, coffee grounds, wood chips, and all your kitchen scraps. We collect them in a ceramic jar on the kitchen counter.  Rather than toss this valuable material into the trash we add it to the compost bin where in the presence of sun, rain and air it will pick up the task, with newly acquired importance, now as a sponge-like nitrogen consumer.

Even though we add material to the bin frequently, its volume shrinks rapidly. Add corn husks and weeds of all kinds; if it’s green, toss it in. And don’t neglect the non-green material like leaves, nut hulls, wood-cut prunings and bark for mineral content.

After about 6 months of digestion some of the oldest material, usually at the bottom of the pile, will have turned into mature compost. This can be added to the soil to help recent plantings, now also with its newly re-invented importance, as a nitrogen provider.

And during the growing season I might plant climbing vegetables like peas and pole beans which grow on a trellis.

Hey, with so little space you sometimes have to grow things up, like the skyscrapers; they’re also part of our urban environment.