humor, compost and worms

Since things are quiet on perennials, here is a longish piece on reading 
(catalogs), composting, worms and final experience of a neophyte.  New York 
Times article, freely available on internet.
Claire Peplowski
NYS z4

Into The Garden, Holding Your Nose

By PENELOPE GREEN

 Sarah Kovner was a special assistant to Donna Shalala, the secretary of 
health and human services in the Clinton administration, Friday evenings went 
something like this: sweep desk debris into backpack and fumble for bag full 
of kitchen scraps from Washington apartment; head to kitchen of executive 
dining room to receive vegetable scraps from the chef, who had saved them for 
her after preparing lunch for 60. Then she would grab a cab and head to the 
airport for the shuttle, where said packages were duly X-rayed, prompting, in 
those laxer times, some pretty rich gazes from airport security.

"My bags had a lot of attention," Ms. Kovner said recently. "There was the 
Friday a friend was being sworn in for an ambassadorship in the Old Executive 
Office Building. So of course there was security and my bags were scanned yet 
again. God knows what would happen today." Ms. Kovner's destination was a 
weekend house in New York, on Fire Island, where the Washington scraps met 
others like them, all happily decaying in a three-compartment composting bin 
in her backyard. These days, Ms. Kovner crosses three county lines and rides 
a ferry to take garbage from her Upper West Side apartment to her house in 
the Fire Island village of Saltaire.

My own tiny household has become a transfer station of increasing complexity. 
Spurred by the recent reduction in New York City's recycling program, which 
now only collects metal and paper, I haul wet kitchen scraps 180 miles to a 
compost pile at my weekend house in Rhode Island, as well as milk cartons, 
plastic containers and wine bottles. (Rhode Island's own fiscal horrors have 
not yet impacted its recycling program.)

My Friday departures have been somewhat less orderly than Ms. Kovner's. 
Because I don't go away every weekend, there has been build-up. Small bags 
must be exchanged for larger ones. There have been olfactory issues and the 
attendant family rifts. And so, a few months ago, I decided to refine my 
methods, to use what the gardening catalogs and Web sites call composting 
aids. I figured I would try a few of them, from the stylish, galvanized steel 
"English Keeper" b "still used in England to transport coal ashes to the 
dustbin" b $36 from Smith & Hawken, to the smaller ScrapCarrier ($17.50, 
and with a charcoal filter in its lid) from Composters.com.

Since the goal was to turn Manhattan kitchen scraps into food for Rhode 
Island soil, I also decided to test what's known in composting circles as the 
vermiculture method. Vermiculture is a fancy name for worm farming. Yup. The 
idea is that worms will eat their weight each day in scraps, creating instant 
compost in the process b like living garbage disposals. Following this 
formula, you can feed one pound of worms one pound of kitchen scraps b about 
average for a family of two, like mine. And then, instead of hauling fetid 
garbage, you will be hauling sweet-smelling almost-dirt, and your car will 
smell like a potting shed instead of a garbage barge.

A note on the social history of composting: dyed-in-the-wool gardeners, as 
well as hippie-boomer b "Diet for a Small Planet" b gardeners, have always 
composted. For the former, it is just sound practice, and for the latter, a 
political statement. For Smith & Hawken gardeners, or late bloomers like 
myself, composting is an awkward and recent add-on to a seat-of-the-pants 
activity, and knowledge comes slowly.
Products b the right accessories b point the way. Smith & Hawken has 
been selling its English Keeper since 1995; a smaller, cuter copper compost 
crock has been selling since 2000. These tidy and attractive containers 
arrived first. I instantly rejected the Keeper. At roughly one foot by a foot 
and a half, I found it too large for carrying around. Almost as good-looking, 
however, was the 10-by-5-inch ceramic Kitchen Compost Crock ($34.95) from 
Gardener's Supply Company (www.gardeners.com), heeding the company's 
sympathetic prose: "Collecting kitchen scraps for composting shouldn't 
detract from your kitchen decor." My thought was to pair the crock with the 
plastic ScrapCarrier from Composters.com and embark on a two-step process. 
Daily scraps would be tipped into the ceramic crock, and finally emptied into 
the plastic carrier, which I would take in the car to Rhode Island. Which is 
what I did.

All went swimmingly until I slammed on the brakes somewhere around 23rd 
Street. I had failed to wedge the Scrap Carrier between trunk items (duh, as 
my daughter might say), resulting in tippage, and seepage, because the 
charcoal-filtered lid is porous.I called Ted Porter, an architect, and Steven 
Godeke, a financial consultant with Businesses Enterprises for Sustainable 
Travel. Their "relocation plan for our food scraps," as Mr. Porter put it, is 
implemented each weekend from their New York apartment to a cottage garden in 
Sag Harbor. "There was one bad spill," Mr. Porter said sympathetically, "and 
now we always wedge. Friends who travel with us have complained, but we 
ignore them."

My new system was organized but still malodorous. Family life grew 
increasingly tense. Eagerly, I awaited the arrival of my Can-O-Worms worm 
farm, $109.95; my pound of red worms, $26.50; and my vermiculture Bible, 
"Worms Eat My Garbage" by Mary Appelhof (Flower Press, 1997) b "100,000 
copies sold!" b $12.95, all from Planet Natural  
http://www.planetnatural.com/. The book arrived first. I thumbed through the 
chapters: "What is the sex life of a worm? What are some other critters in my 
worm bin?" A day later, I was the proud owner of a Can-O-Worms, which is a 
series of circular plastic trays set atop one another. The top tray has a 
lid, the bottom tray is entirely enclosed, the middle trays have holes 
punched in them, like sandbox sieves. The architectural point of all this is 
for the worms to eat on one level, and drop their castings b what you'll be 
using for plant food b to the level below. When assembled, the whole thing is 
about 20 inches wide by 29 inches tall. A day later, the worms came. I will 
tell you that 1,000 worms are no more and no less disgusting than you might 
imagine. "I have pets!" crowed my daughter, 6."Bully for you," said I, 
averting my eyes and shuddering. I'd been hoarding garbage in anticipation of 
the worms' arrival, and this hoarding would be my undoing. The smell was 
indeed wretched when I tipped the ripe contents of my plastic crock into the 
worm farm, but it was Friday, after all, and the worms were on the job. I 
left for my weekend commute feeling lighter than ever: I was traveling 
garbage-free for the first time in months, and I imagined our new pets at 
home, manfully chewing away. Alas, when we returned Sunday night, the 
apartment was beyond whiffy. "Mom!" howled my daughter, running to her room 
and slamming the door. I called Eric Vinje, whose company, Planet Natural, 
sells "about two" Can-O-Worms a week."It sounds like you've got some 
decomposing food," said Mr. Vinje, clearly a master of the understatement. 
"It can't be doing the worms any good." Had I read the manual? Mr. Vinje 
wondered. Indeed, I said, especially the part where it describes the worm 
farm as having "a pleasant rain forest odor." "Throw everything out," Mr. 
Vinje said, "and start over. Don't feel guilty." What I now know is that 
worms are fussy, picky and slow eaters. They have tiny mouths; you have to 
chop their food up for them. They simply can't stomach things like onions, 
orange rinds or dried-out lemons. Or banana peels. And when the onions, 
rinds, and banana peels rot, the smell in your kitchen will in no way mimic a 
"pleasant rain forest aroma." Also, worms like their food fresh, fresh, 
fresh; otherwise they get cranky. Worms, in fact, are a real pain to take 
care of. After two months, I was on strike. I began ignoring the worms. 
Indeed, I haven't fed them in weeks. Nor have I fed my crock-carrier. My 
stomach aches with guilt. My car, however, smells delicious.Recently, I 
decided to tackle the drip-smell problem one more time and asked the advice 
of Katherine Whiteside, the national garden adviser to Smith & Hawken and 
the Garden Goddess columnist at House Beautiful magazine. Ms. Whiteside 
understood immediately. "I hauled for years," she said, "from our apartment 
in Hoboken to our house in Cold Spring, N.Y." And the smell solution? "You 
freeze it, of course." Big light bulb. "I used an enamel stockpot with a lid, 
which I kept in the freezer," Ms. Whiteside said. "I used a bungee cord to 
keep the lid tight. I don't care how long you're stuck in traffic, it doesn't 
smell." She's right.Now my only problem is how to offload 1,000 sulky red 
worms. 

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