THE Com POST

Your weekly update on all things compost!

Another beautiful Sunday at the garden! We filled one bin this week, lighter than last week, but something is better than nothing. I saw two visitors come by though admittedly I was only there for an hour of drop off hours. Not to say that I was only at the garden for an hour… on Sundays I average four hours at Galvez Garden. During the week when my husband works from home it is closer to three hours, every day, at the garden. On days he goes to the office, Dylan and I may spend 45 minutes to an hour total, but she’s two, so not much gets done on those days.

Today I was telling my husband how Compost Sunday is possibly the greatest way the garden give back to the community and how in the grand scheme of things, it really requires very little work.

To set up, we make bins available. I’m not obligated to be on site the whole time (though I do enjoy greeting people as they drop off perishables to thank them), and all I need to do is drop the compost in the pile, fill with an equal amount of browns, and lock up the bins. Easy, right?

He agreed with the simplicity of my role in this process, but was quick to correct my original statement. While it’s an awesome service we’re providing, he had a difference of opinion in regard to it being the best way we contribute to the neighborhood. Bless his heart, my husband believes that the space we’ve created is the biggest way the garden contributes to the community. It got me thinking…

Compost is a very tangible factor that one can monitor and keep track of. On a weekly basis I can write a post that keeps a log of how much food waste we collect. I can give updates on the work involved with turning the compost (that task was completed today) or some of the funny stuff that happens when managing a compost drop off site (for example, the little field mouse was back today…). It is a visible process that has a physical presence and while it is a process, it is a calculable one. Trying to calculate the impact of the hours spent working on the property is much more intangible.

Not to say what we have done is subtle, it’s far from it. It is just that it’s more difficult to define the impact of the garden as a whole than it is to add up the outcome of collecting compost.

After doing the math, it turns out that I spend twenty hours a week working on site at the Galvez Garden. Suffice to say, I’m getting tons of things done on the lot and it shows. I can measure our success by the explosions of growth in waking trees and seedlings sprouting in response to spring. I can weigh the fruits of our labor not yet in fruit, but in harvests from the plants we planted and the seeds we grew. I don’t know how to approximate or evaluate how these hours are impactful on the community; I haven’t a clue of how to gauge that. So I’ll return to compost and simply say, thank you.