This weekend we bought a few vegetable plants at the farmers' market to grow in containers in the back yard. I want to grow more of my own food but since the overall landscaping plan for our yard is coming along ever so slowly, I don't want to put in a permanent vegetable patch until some other key components are nailed down. Like the path from the back door to the garage, for one. So I'm content to begin my amateur city-farming in containers this year.
I read up on container gardening online and knew that I wanted to start small - two tomato plants and two pepper plants were all we bought this time. I might get some basil and other supplemental herb plants, as those are relatively easy to stick in a pot and get growing, even in July. But the Internet advised that if I wanted to grow vegetables in pots successfully I needed to plant them in the right growing medium - i.e. not just straight yard soil. I guess that gets too compacted and won't let the roots do their thing.
Enter our compost bin. I was pretty happy when we got our big black plastic compost bin two years ago about a month after moving in. We've been filling it faithfully with our food scraps, but it was starting to seem like that's all we do - keep adding food scraps, over and over. And it never seems to get full, so I guess it's been working in there all this while, turning identifiable pieces of food like banana peels and onion skins into dark, nutrient-rich humus. Still, it felt a little bit out-of-sight-out-of-mind to just keep dumping food into the bin and carrying on about my business. Until this weekend, when, with vegetable plants to get into containers and the Internet's exhortation to use potting soil or compost rather than straight dirt, it was time to dig in!
I was a little hesitant at first to stick my hands in it. The husband took a wheel barrow and put a small amount of excess yard dirt from our neighbor's pile then wheeled it over to the compost bin. He took a shovel and moved the top layer over to the side and started digging out the darker, more uniform stuff from the bottom. Then we mixed the compost into the yard dirt with our hands, pulling out the identifiably not-yet-composted stuff as we went. I'm talking teabags, avocado skins, egg shells - all food waste that we had produced. I was worried it would feel and smell bad, or that confronting our waste directly by touching it would gross me out. But to the contrary and to my surprise, the stuff smelled rich and slightly sweet, and thanks to my morning addiction, the coffee grounds gave it a nice aroma. Even picking out the solid bits wasn't bad - we just threw them right back into the bin to further decompose.
We then added in the remnant potting soil from a couple of house plants that had died, and we ended up with a thick, moist potting mix to fill the vegetable containers. We planted the tomato and pepper plants in their new homes and as a final touch, we covered them with a little of the mulch from the flower and shrub beds that we finally got going this year. Voila! Now all I have to do is remember to water these new friends daily so they survive to actually produce some food later this summer.
The beauty of this process has been to experience productive results from our decision to compost in the back yard. Not like we were ever on the fence - we always knew that once we had our own home we wanted to compost for its environmental benefits. But now that I've actually used that compost, and with my own hands, it has moved from idea to action. Not only are we preventing waste from going into a landfill (good idea), we are using what was potential waste as productive soil for growing more food (good action). It's satisfying to know that our food scraps are providing us with a growing medium for plants that will produce more food, then more scraps, then more growing medium, then more plants, more food, etc!
