This compost

I turned the compost heap over yesterday. It was beautiful, dark and rich and as sweet as a good fruit cake. Full of life, too, earthworms and slaters, which scurried away from the  light( sorry, little slater). It was a slow, quiet, meditative job for me.




And as  I do, I thought of the great compost poem by Walt Whitman, and went to seek it out.


Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distils such  exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal,annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

' this compost' by Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, the 1892 deathbed edition


A tale of black turtle beans:


A week or two ago I went  to buy black turtle beans from the food co op. At the cashier, I said, why do I feel no confidence when  these organic beans are from China.

He agreed.

 Not even the Chinese want to eat food from China, I went on. Look at baby formula.

He explained that the supplier had changed the source, and they were stuck with them. If I were you, he said, I'd buy the regular ones from the USA.  A lot of customers weren't happy with the Chinese ones.

Oh. I hadn't seen them, I said, so he showed me where they were, and I changed them.
On the way home I reflected that there wasn't much of the earth left where the soil was untainted. I even have doubts about the soil in Australia ( and in truth I'm not that fussed on buying organic food anyway).

Whitman's poem is about how the earth takes all our sickness and corpses, and corruption, and cleanses  them. It's a feeling  you could only have in the nineteenth century. Now, I feel we are overwhelming the world, burdening it with so much that it can't recover.


Anyway, today


Today I put the compost around the the strawberries, and the raspberry bush, and the blackberry. I gave  some to the chard, and the lemon and lime trees. Everything likes compost.

This Compost by Walt Whitman

I'm upset because I can't find my copy of 'Leaves of Grass'. *   It's always in a shelf in the attic, but I can't find it there. I'm worried that in my enthusiasm to reduce the number of my books I may have inadvertently thrown it out. But almost everything is on the net - even someone reciting Walt Whitman's poems. And a new copy of his poetry is available at the click of a mouse - not that I've clicked yet. I may find it in a real bookshop. I'm not particularly attached to my university copy anyway.

 I do like compost. I hate it when I'm somewhere without a compost heap and I have to throw out good vegetable matter into a bin when it could be going into the soil.

 I love our composting toilet, too. When we first got it, I considered making a copy of this Whitman poem to put on the wall.

 To explain my loo: it's called a Clivis Multrum, designed in Sweden, I think, in about the 1930s. When you go to the toilet, you put a handful of wood shavings in afterwards to balance the carbon and nitrogen, in order for good composting to take place. There's a composting chamber where it all takes place, a small electric fan and a vent to extract the smells, and the pedestal looks pretty much like a normal toilet without the U bend or a water holder at the back.

 Simple and efficient! And easy to clean. I just use a squirt of white vinegar over everything about once a week (harsh chemicals will kill the microbes), wipe it down with paper kitchen towels and throw the towels down afterwards. I use a toilet brush if it needs it. It's a waterless system, but you can throw a bucket of water down once in a while to help clean the chute. In fact, sometimes you need to add water if it looks too dry down below - or more shavings if it looks too wet. You shouldn't use it for other compost - don't throw down vegetable scraps. Rake down the poo pile once in a while. Dig it out once a year, put it around trees (not on vegetables).

The resulting compost is rich and odour-free. Good, pure, beautiful organic matter from something we find corrupt and offensive.

 I think Walt would have enjoyed my toilet.

* (added later): Happiness! I have located my Whitman in the Blue Room.