Growing soil
Compost is vital to our
gardens, our national security
and even our celebrities!
BY JOHN HERSHEY

Tonight a cold winter night, I took a big bowl of kitchen scraps out to the backyard compost bin. When I plunged the pitchfork into the pile, a blast of steam, heat and pungent aroma hit me in the face. It was overwhelming and exciting. What a feeling of power! I generated heat in the winter. I’m creating healthy soil for my garden. I provide a cozy home for several local mice. For a gardener, composting is the most fun you can have in the wintertime.

Outdoors, anyway. And the experts teach us that if you want to produce your own local food, what you really need to do is grow your own soil. Making compost is the best way to do that.  A great thing about gardening is the direct connection between our efforts and the beneficial results. This is especially rewarding for people who work in large organizations, where our contribution to the end product is often less tangible. Can you honestly say you get the same sense of personal satisfaction from that latte you served or that deal you negotiated as you do from growing your own tomatoes?  But we miss this feeling in the winter, when the garden is dormant.  A compost pile can fill this deep emotional void. The temperature is in the mid-30s tonight, but the center of my compost heap is a furnace purring along at 120°. Not only do I have a sense of accomplishment, but I am also secure in the knowledge that if I accidentally locked myself out of the house, I could survive by immersing myself in the compost. I might not smell too good, and my wife might not unlock the door for me in the morning, but I would be alive.

Composting keeps us connected to our gardens through the cold months. But compost does so much more than that. I know this because the other way I pass the time before the last frost date is by scouring the internet for unusual news stories about gardening. As a result of performing this public service for you, the reader, I now know that compost plays a crucial role in every important aspect of our lives, from technology to national security and even our obsession with celebrities.

Indisputably, the way to tell if something is truly significant is whether celebrities do it. We all want to emulate the celebrity lifestyle, whether by writing children’s books or by staying married to the same person for at least several weeks. Well, it turns out that some celebrities emulate my lifestyle too. For example, British music heartthrob Alex James is a dedicated composter. “I’ve come to love [compost] heaps!” he gushed in an interview. Wow, you know composting is becoming really trendy if a superstar like Alex James is into it. OK, I’ve never heard of him either. But apparently he’s rather well known in parts of England.

Composting may not have achieved Kaballah-level interest among the showbiz glitterati yet, but it’s a catching on. More recently, Julia Roberts and Pierce Brosnan have encouraged their fans to compost. I predict Snooki will have a worm bin under the boardwalk soon.  Composting is not only making inroads into popular culture. Did you know that compost is also vital to our national security?

At Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, the U.S. Army composts the organic waste generated at the base. This eliminates the toxic fumes released by burning trash, and it also improves the soil in the area. If our troops did this everywhere, imagine the benefits their compost would spread around the world, especially to places with sandy soil like Iraq and Afghanistan. Our leaders talk about planting the seeds of democracy. Well, what better way to help them take root than to put down a nice layer of compost first?

In addition to helping in the war on terror, compost also plays an important role in law enforcement. Near London one evening, police were searching a neighborhood for two fugitives. Thermalimaging equipment on a police helicopter detected two heat sources apparently hiding in a garden behind a house where Mr. Piers Smith was reading a bedtime story to his children. Officers stormed through the house and into the garden. After a brief struggle, they discovered that the source of the heat was Mr. Smith’s two compost heaps.

Because I hold the elite title of certified master composter, people often ask me how to tell if their compost system is working properly.  “Well,” I reply helpfully, “if the police barge into your garden and try to arrest your compost pile, you can be pretty sure you’re doing it right.”

Yes, from the garden to the battlefield and even the world of high technology, compost is truly the wave of the future. Combining biotech and nanotech, the billions of microscopic organisms in your bin are working tirelessly to improve our way of life.

Scientists have developed plastics to use in automobiles that can be composted when the car is scrapped. And researchers recently created a cell phone cover made of biodegradable plastic containing a sunflower seed that grows when the plastic turns into compost.  What a great idea! Surely our world becomes a better place every time we have one less cell phone and one more sunflower.

Ultimately, compost reminds us that we are part of nature’s cycle of life and death, decay and renewal. Now we can take that literally.  According to news reports, scientists in Jönköping, Sweden, have pioneered a process of composting human bodies as an eco-friendly alternative to burial or cremation. That’s the way I want to go.  Continuing to help my garden grow would be enough of an afterlife for me. Just don’t use me to grow eggplant for all eternity. I hate eggplant. That would be hell.

To read more garden-variety humor, visit John’s website: www.rakishwit.com .