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Dear Dot,
I tried a compost barrel that I would turn once a week. There was no good way to get the compost out and when roaches showed up, I moved the barrel to an extra lot. It is still sitting there today, three years later. It’s never been emptied. Or touched.
Is there an easier way to compost and maybe a timeline for when it might be ready to put on plants? And hopefully an easier way to access the compost when it is ready?
– Mary
My dear Mary,
If you ask Dot, the high priestess of composting is named Cass Marketos. Cass writes “The Rot” on Substack and has also written a book entitled Compost After Reading, which you can find here or here.
Cass lives and breathes compost, and, as she likes to point out, will someday be compost. As we all will. But for now, a few of us are composters and as such, Cass notes, are “tasked with stewarding the conditions of the compost pile. [We] determine whether decomposition will be hastened or proceed aimlessly, whether it will take place in an enclosed chamber or open heap, and whether it will be driven primarily by bacteria or perhaps fungi. Thus, composting happens anywhere that a composter takes it upon themselves to deliberately manage the process of decomposition. This includes a great variety of forms and approaches — all, in my view, legitimized by their intention and none excluded by the range of their outcomes.”
This philosophy strikes Dot as the perfect place to start. There is no shame in your untended barrel, Mary. No shame in the roaches, nor the bewilderment about when, exactly, this compost might actually be compost, and therefore useful to you and your garden. “Composting is simple,” Cass wrote in The Rot, “but, for the beginner, it can feel distantly complex, even magical. I encourage you to embrace that feeling. The composter performs a kind of spell, I like to believe, casting deep into the world for something far greater than themselves.”
And isn’t that the hook, Mary? Isn’t that what has you, three years on, still wondering about what alchemy is taking place in your barrel, what magic you might yet unleash on your garden?
So let us dig down to the basics to assuage your concerns and give comfort to those, like you, who fear they are unworthy of helping their heap. Keep reading!
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