Composting Poetry

In the garden, compost is black gold. Since I started gardening, way back when…back when my kids were small and I was buried in diapers (cloth, this was the olden times), breast-feeding, (really olden times), canning, sewing, cleaning, cooking, I was gardening, too. It was necessary. Times were tough, the economy was tanking, lots of men out of jobs, (this was before most women worked…the real olden times), no one could afford to actually invest in stock. That was for the wealthy.

My husband took his lunch to work, including coffee. I cooked everything from scratch because there just weren’t packaged meals (aside from TV dinners). I even ground my own wheat and baked bread. Oh, but that was such a tactile experience that every now and then I still bake my own bread, only now I use a bread machine, thought I do like to get my hands in there. I love kneading bread. Somehow, trouble seems to get smaller and smaller until I can handle it. A lot like air bubbles in dough.

I extended the paycheck with coupons and by doing-it-myself. One of the best things I found to stretch my food allowance was growing a garden and putting by what I could. I grew green beans, carrots, peas, zucchini, sugar snap peas, corn, peaches, raspberries, tomatoes and peppers. I was given pears and apples. The challenge was time. Tending to the garden, peeling, slicing, pickling, water baths and pressure cookers took tons of time. The picking, the watering and even more, there was the kids, the house, the pets. I had to come up with shortcuts.

As always, I turned to books and when I fell into <em>Ruth Stout’s “How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back” I knew I fell into the answer. You can see how the name caught my attention. I had the aching back and no time. Ruth Stout (Rex Stout’s sister) mulched between and around her vegetables and flowers with straw, newspaper, grass clippings, coffee grounds, vegetable peels—whatever organic matter worked. This cut down on watering (a big money saver there because we had to use culinary water), weeding and fertilizing.

It turned out all this organic matter feed and improved the soil. I was amazed the next year the difference in the dirt I’d used mulch on and the dirt I didn’t. Now, Stout’s idea was to layer the organic matter where you need it first, without composting it in a pile or bin. This worked great, but it was sometimes hard to have enough mulch for all my gardens and often the vegetable garden didn’t always get the best layer of mulch.

Of course, through the years things changed: family grew up and away, I stopped canning, sewing and was able to bury myself in writing more and more. I started a compost pit for my flower garden. It just seemed to me to make so much sense. The leftovers, you know the carrot peels, the leafy tops, the bean snipping’s, the coffee grounds, the onionskins, the banana peels gathered together to make rich garden dirt. Every time we take something from the earth we put some part of it back—a tithe, of sorts.

That compost pile seemed like a miracle and a duty—put garbage in and receive this dark, rich, loam soil thick with worms that feeds my gardens with something akin to magic. Today I use both methods in combination, but more I’ve learned to use the same kind of thing with my poetry.

I gather, use, discard, reuse words, ideas and experience, but some don’t fit the poem I’m working on, so I put in a separate file titled: compose file. It might be a whole idea or just a word, phrase or sentence. It might be a whole stanza or just the end that didn’t work. It sits in that file until I begin work on another poem. Then I go to the file, sift and sort and read, let my mind get fertile, rich and loamy. It’s organic and real with hands on, just like the miracle of compost.