My compost pile after six weeks.

Three months ago, my friend Jonathan suggested that I start composting.  Jonathan was a computer-network-professional turned hobbyist gardener after he experimented with growing lettuce and tomatoes.  The project had kindled a passion for the natural world and now he was trading in his profession for something more personally fulfilling: apartment gardening.

One afternoon, he invited us over for lunch and showcased his recent creation, a hand-crafted wooden cart, designed to be filled with potting soil and ripe vegetables by other urban gardeners.  He hoped to sell his garden-on-wheels concept and start a profitable business.  When I brushed the topic of composting, he enthusiastically offered to help me get started on my composting adventures.

To compost, you layer old food scraps, grass, dried leaves, and branches, turning them occasionally to assist their decomposition. It is essentially a controlled rotting process where microorganisms and earthworms help eat away at organic material.  In the end, you are left with a beautifully rich soil amendment, perfect for gardening.  We humans help aerate compost to speed up the biological reaction, but composting also occurs naturally without human assistance.  The soil provides a microbial ecosystem that recycles dead organisms and replenishes nutrients.  This larger idea—-that ecosystems are holistic—-sets composting apart as a direct challenge to the oil-derived fertilizers that support modern agriculture.

I was skeptical at first.  I live in a second-story apartment, with little outdoor space to store a compost pile.  The pile could go in the patio, but that might make my living room smell like rotting garbage.  Besides, what would our neighbors think if our box became infested with rats?  My friend assured me that composting was safe, easy, and odor-free.  You could help the environment, he suggested, by throwing less garbage into the landfill.

Each week, Hsinya and I produce about 5 lbs. of kitchen scraps, mostly inedible vegetable stems and fruit peels.  In the past, I disposed our waste into a plastic garbage bag and tossed it into the dumpster.  From there, the garbage man would transfer it to a landfill.  Because plastic never degrades, it would stay intact for perpetuity. If I composted consistently, I could reduce 250 lbs. of landfill waste each year.

I was convinced.  Our patio was stocked with four empty cardboard boxes that would ultimately hold our compost pile.  Next, I gathered soil, dried branches, and leaves from our apartment’s common lawn. For the next few weeks, I scrupulously collected food scraps to throw into the compost box.

Within a week, I started to panic. Jonathan, there’s hundreds of fruit flies swarming the cardboard boxes! Apparently, I hadn’t followed his instructions carefully.  When you compost, you must maintain a 3:1 ratio of brown to green material.  We lacked the type of brown leaves and dried branches that would make for a balanced compost.  Instead, most of our compost materials consisted of greens like carrot leaves and orange rinds.  No fly could resist the wafting smells of rotting fruit.

I piled soil and dried branches on top of the fruit peels to smother the fruity odor.  We stopped adding fruit for weeks until, finally, we managed to tame the fruit flies. This adventure was a test in patience.

To our relief, the swarms disappeared after two weeks.  After about two months, much of the compost scraps had completely decomposed.   A little persistence took us a long way.  The end result was just like Jonathan had described: our moldy waste had transformed into a glorious, humus-like earthy material.

Have you ever considered composting?