27 Reasons To Compost

Composting is just fantastic. Sure you have the conscience-easing benefit of removing biodegradable waste bound for the landfill, not to mention getting free goodies for your soil out of the deal; you can even get food for yourself out of it!

Here is how: be lazy. Be lazy enough to let some potatoes get wrinkly, moldy and send up half a dozen shoots. Aw shucks, so much for mashed potatoes for dinner. Toss it in the compost instead. Waste a few bucks, why not? Now ignore your compost. Don't remember to cover it when its raining for months. Don't remember to water it when its hot and dry, and definitely don't bother turning it. By spring you may just find that your favorite disgusting spud is thriving and well. Out of guilt for letting it rot in your cupboard in the first place, you stick it in an unused corner of the veggie garden to give it a pitiful chance at life.

I know we weren't even planning on growing potatoes. Just look what happens when we buy them! It got watered by the sprinkler on a timer along with the rest of the garden; our exalted lettuces, high-demand herbs and medicinal calendulas. It got ignored. We have made it to August now and enough is enough. No more goodwill; the tomatoes need light and air and that potato is using up space, out with it! Wait a minute....1....2....3..4.5.6789...10...no. more?! 27 potatoes were in there. From one plant. A major portion of four to six meals for our family. I have got to be lazy more often!

Well I hope you weren't expecting a how-to list or a motivator with altruistic reasoning to 'be part of the solution.' Don't get me wrong, I am a big supporter of all that. Life just gets busy and full and composting properly isn't one of my highest priorities. Let's just say I have my own reasons for composting, even if I am a bit cheeky for 27 of them being potatoes.

Impromptu Gourmet

You know it is a good thing when you have a farm market a 5 minute walk from your house. It becomes an even better thing when you have a disappointingly wet spring which just happens to be good for mushrooms. It becomes an excellent thing when that market spontaneously carries fresh morel mushrooms, you buy some and just cannot wait to get home and devour them. One of the best things about food that is in season is the greediness that accompanies it. You know you will have to wait a whole year before you get to eat it again, so you just have to get your fill while you can. So it was with me and my morels. When the greediness combines with needing to get dinner on the table 5 minutes ago, there is an opportunity for creativity.

Spaghetti With Creamy Morel Sauce Accompanied by a Flower Salad

We put the pasta (I think it was spaghetti) on and then sauteed the morels for a few minutes until they reduced significantly and gave off their musky juice. Meanwhile, I started a roux with some salt and pepper, some fresh thyme from the garden, olive oil, butter, and white flour. When it was just ready for some liquid I gradually poured in the morel juices (reserving the mushrooms for later) and stirred until it thickened. When it was ready for more liquid I added some cream or whole milk until we had sufficient quantity of sauce. We then poured the sauce over the pasta after it was dished up and arranged a handful of the morels on top.

To go with this main we had a flowery garden-combing salad. We picked miscellaneous fresh lettuces (mild), rose petals (only organic roses are for eating.....ever!) from our roses, calendula petals, sage flowers, arugula and giant red mustard flowers.

Voila! A beautiful feast.

Eat Your Weeds, Dear

As a Permaculture Designer, I find it quite ironic that upon becoming a much awaited homeowner with an attractive, though MASSIVELY overgrown property, I promptly make war on dandelions. My environmental leanings outright prohibit any herbicide stronger than boiling water; yet with small children running around and actually USING our lawn and with a very new veggie garden in the vicinity it seemed inappropriate (not to mention not very neighborly) to continue to allow these plants to take over. I once heard market gardener and farmer Eliot Coleman recite the wisdom to "never let a weed go to seed." So for the last month or so I have been doing just that: pulling up, prying out, plucking and harvesting every dandelion that I possibly can in our yard.

Now along comes a bit of a personal paradox. My environmental leanings also prohibit rampant waste. Well yes, I compost, but every sensible gardener will tell you that dumping a load of dandelion flowers or seeds in your compost bin is a dumb idea if you ever plan on using it. So, instead, I have been taking the seedy portion of my efforts to our municipal yard for them to compost (along with the invasive, thorny, poisonous plant part of our overgrown property), and composting the leafy portion myself. I am always looking for a way to take things one step further, and I have been kind of preoccupied with local food and food security lately as well. So I thought; along with my current efforts transforming our suburban yard into an organic food-bearing permaculture paradise, why not eat what is already there, why not eat what I am already harvesting? Ralph Waldo Emerson said it perfectly, "A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
So to make a long story shorter, my personal paradox combined with seeing dandelion greens for sale at the local health food store and with a need for experimental dinner recipes for our weekly php Tuesdays thing. Voila! Dandelion Panir Curry (or Saag Panir) was born. I do have to say that it wasn't a particularly successful experiment due to the bitterness of the plant (a factor which I may just be able to work out with boiling), but hey - we all ate it!

Four handy tips on dandelion consumption:

1. Pick the big leafy ones in the shade for eating, especially for salads. The small shriveled up ones growing in the compacted soil between you driveway and sidewalk had better be dealt with some other way.
2. Cut the midrib of the leaf off, at least near the bottom where it is thick. Its even more bitter than the rest of the leaf.
3. Mind where you get it from; animals frequently mark clumps of weeds and grass, and by the road or driveway can be quite polluted. Wherever you get them from, wash them well.
4. Visit Wikipedia for other dandelion uses and information and read this article (especially the part about managing away the bitterness) on "Making Dandelions More Palatable" by Dr. John Kallas.