DC Urban Gardeners

More on D.C. Compost

In fact, there is a municipal compost pile in the District of Columbia. It's about twice the size of the bulk pile at American Plant Food in Bethesda. But never has there been a compost heap more difficult to find or better hidden from public view.

This pile is located behind (on the north side) of the Public Works vehicle lot and trash collection facility at New Jersey Avenue and K Street SE. This is in close proximity to the new baseball park, surrounded by scruffy commercial and utility operations of one kind or another, just off the Southeast-Southwest Expressway, South Capitol Street and the railroad tracks. In stunning contrast, there are also brand new condominium high-rises opening just across the street.

Coming from Northwest D.C., I took the I-395 tunnel under the mall to the expressway going east and exited on 6th Street SE. I turned left when I should have turned right. I think if you turn right on 6th Street and follow it to K, you can make another right and go four blocks to the Public Works lot.

What you will find there is a fantastic assortment of dump trucks, snow plows, street cleaners and salt spreaders, as well as many dozens of private vehicles. There is hardly a human being to be found. The place to enter is off 2nd Street at K. You will be facing two very imposing ramps, one going up and to the left into the trash dumping area (a smoke stack towers overhead), the other going down into a dark and somewhat scary parking area. Take the down ramp, through the garage to the other side of the building.

When you emerge back into the light, you have to make a 180-degree turn to the right, around a line of parked vehicles and back along the north side of the building. You will see piles of sand, shredded wood and compost in the background. The compost is all the way in the rear.

Unfortunately, a front-end loader was blocking the drive into the compost area. I had to take my 1997 Toyota Corolla somewhat "off road" to get back there. But I did find the compost. It's compost alright, although littered with bits of plastic, bottle caps and other trash. The city apparently does not make much effort to screen the compost.

I found the piles after locating two employees who were testing a street washing machine. They invited me to "take all you want," although the city's website says there's a limit of 3 30-pound bags per customer. Does that apply to the mulch and the sand as well? There are no signs posted.

To get home, I followed K Street back to 3rd Street SE, where there's a ramp onto the expressway west-bound.

Compost, shredded wood mulch and sand are located on the north side of the building

There is lots of plastic debris in the compost

But this is genuine compost. Where it comes from and how often it is replenished is still to be learned.

Perfectly usable mulch of shredded wood

Also sand for your gardening needs.

I filled most of a small trash can with compost.0

D.C. Doesn't Compost

If you are one of the many gardeners in the District of Columbia wondering where you can get hold of municipal compost, you needn't wonder any more. It doesn't exist. The District of Columbia does not compost.

You know all the leaves the city picks up in the fall? Well, it seems to depend what year it is where they end up. In the past, they usually went to a landfill. In recent years, the city has been experimenting with compost options, sending some of the leaves to Oak Hill, MD, site of the District's juvenile detention facility. Some of the leaves apparently have recently been going to Pogo Organics outside Olney, MD, but officials were unable to say whether leaves taxpayers are paying to dispose of are turning up in that compost Pogo is selling in the handy 5-gallon buckets at Whole Foods.

In the works we are told is a possible composting enterprise in conjunction with the University of the District of Columbia at a facility in Belltsville, MD. But as of today, you cannot obtain compost from the District.

All this comes via William Howland, the city's Public Works director, who was invited to speak on the subject of recycling last night at a meeting of the Chevy Chase Citizens Association.  Barbara Baldwin, a founding member of D.C. Urban Gardeners, arranges these Chevy Chase garden events. They are always spot on.

According to Howland, all of the District's trash goes to a landfill outside Fredericksberg, VA.  Recycled items, meanwhile, are sent to a processing center in Columbia, MD. Only recently, Howland said, has it become cheaper for the city to dispose of recycled goods than general trash. The city now pays $60 per ton to dispose of trash, compared to $16 a ton for recyclables. Most of the difference, he said, is due to the rising value of aluminum cans.

Yet there doesn't seem to be any urgency on the city's part to start composting. Most jurisdictions are desperate to compost the organic portion of their trash, such as kitchen scraps, because it can constitute up to 30 percent of the waste stream. Some jurisdictions even give away compost bins to encourage citizens to turn their garbage into soil amendment. Howland was unable to say how much of the city's trash consists of compostable organic matter. Nor is there any plan to compost it.

Howland looked genuinely stricken when it was pointed out that you can order compost delivered to your garden in the District from the City of College Park, MD, where they do take composting seriously.

Really, isn't it time the nation's capitol gets with the program?

--Posted by Ed Bruske

Trash Can Composting

Here's our friend Matt shredding grass and leaves in a trash can to make compost. For you suburbanites out there this may be totally unnecessary: You have a big back yard in which to construct your composting system.

But for us city folk, ingenious steps must be devised to compost in small spaces, especially to keep our kitchen scraps away from the local rats.

Garbage cans are a bit smaller than what the composting experts describe as the minimum size for an "optimum" compost pile. That would be three feet wide, three feet deep and three feet tall. But in fact compost will happen anywhere, even in a crack in the sidewalk. You can bag leaves in the fall and come back in a couple of years and even those bagged leaves will be turning into compost, the ideal amendment for our organic vegetable beds.

When a neighborhood learning center near my home--the Emergence Community Arts Collective--asked me to teach a course in composting that would result in actual compost, I proposed the trash can method. Teachers at one of the local schools employ several trash cans to turn their garden debris into compost. There's plenty written about it on the internet.

I had the arts collective procure a metal trash can (tougher for the rats to get into--I hear they are often available on Craig's List). I came by and drilled a series of drainage holes in the bottom, then more holes around the sides of the can for aeration. After watching my Power Point presentation on the hows and whys of composting, a small group of eager composters went to work in the yard, filling bags with last year's leaves and pulling as much green grass as we could find.

A good compost requires a proper balance of "green" materials, such as grass clippings, and "brown" materials, such as fallen leaves. They aren't always available exactly when you want them. Sometimes it pays to store leaves over the winter for a time when enough grass clippings become available to create the right mix. But if you poke around the neighborhood, you often will find old leaves waiting to be collected in an alley or blown into a pile against a fence. Kitchen scraps and coffee grounds from the local barista also make for good compost. Composting is a good way to recycle your newspaper or shredded personal documents as well.

The students were amazed to see how the bags of leaves they collected reduced to very little when we shredded them with our electric weed whacker in the trash can. We used the line trimmer just like a hand-held blender, plunging it into the leaves and moving it this way and that. We collected more leaves. And more leaves. And more leaves. And since we didn't have a mower, we collected the grass by hand and shredded that as well.

When it was all done, our trash can was a little more than half full, about equal parts chopped leaves and grass for a quick-acting compost. One of the students had brought some shredded paper, another had a bag of kitchen scraps. We mixed that in as well, then added a couple of large pitchers of water until our mix was just damp, about the wetness of a wrung-out sponge.

"By tomorrow, this compost will be hot," I assured the class. I knew that bacteria quickly would begin to feast on the nitrogen in the grass clippings, multiplying like crazy and raising the temperature of the heap. My students looked dubious. But this morning I visited the site. The ambient temperature is 40 degrees--just eight degrees above freezing--but inside the trash can, things are already toasty.

Another man's Trash...

Neighbors might have thought it strange, a man wheeling bags of leaves and grass clippings up the sidewalk. But in my travels recently, I noticed a landscaping crew cleaning the area around a huge apartment complex down the street.

There were at least six workers busy mowing grass and blowing leaves and the sight of it I stopped me in my tracks: compost.

I suppose the workers thought I was crazy, pointing, waving my arms, jabbering away in fractured Spanish--indicating however I could that I wanted their big bags of lawn refuse. They looked at me like I was daft, then looked at each other as if to say, What is this guy talking about? But we soon had an arrangement: they would continue bagging the grass and leaves while I ran up the street and fetched my hand truck. In fact, the captain of the crew spoke enough English that we could compare notes on composting. He agreed that I had a good mix of materials and that by next year (or maybe the year after, he seemed to think) I'd have some great soil amendment. "All organic," he said, nodding.

The trees here still haven't shed all their leaves and we have great colors despite months of drought. Normally I would be driving around the neighborhood in the coming weeks, snatching the leaves people gather and bag from their lawns and place at the curb for pickup by city crews. Brown leaves, a great supply of carbon for the compost pile, are difficult to come by in the spring and summer if you haven't saved a stash. The grass clippings, or green material, contain the nitrogen that stokes the composting process.

All of this is essential to the food we eat. Trees draw nutrients from the ground, which find their way into the leaves, which then fall back to the earth. Nitrogen is essential food for vegetable plants. Compost feeds the soil with organic matter, supporting an entire ecosystem of small creatures who transport nutrients to my carrots and beets and lettuces and tomatoes and make the soil a living, hospitable environment for things to grow. In the end, those very same nutrients find their way into our bellies as well.

I made several trips back and forth with my bags of loot. The landscaping crew, once they understood what I was doing, pitched in to help. Normally they use a big vacuum to blow the leaves into the back of their truck. But this time they gathered the leaves and stuffed them into more bags so I could wheel them home.

Every bit of compost I make myself means compost I don't have to buy, compost that doesn't have to be trucked into the city from somewhere else. It also means leaves and grass clippings that don't have to be trucked out of the city in the back of a landscaper's truck and dumped who-knows-where. We love the idea of nature recycling itself right here in the neighborhood and feeding us in the process.

--Posted by Ed Bruske

Everything you ever wanted to know about Compost

Compost is THE most asked about topic on local gardening listservs, so we've compiled what we think is the very best thinking on the subject.  We're also putting it on our website for reference any time, so help us keep it accurate and up to date.  Just leave a comment below.

. . . . . . .

Organic gardening experts are constantly telling us to improve our soils with organic matter, but what kind?  Fully decayed organic matter - compost - is, in the words of *one of my favorite gardening books, "the creme de la creme, the piece de resistance, the best in show, the big rock candy mountain of organic matter." Not convinced yet?

Why it's SO Great  

• Compost improves soil structure, no matter what kind of soil it is.  Got clay? It'll loosen it, letting water drawn from it and oxygen get down to the roots.  And in sandy soils, the ability to hold moisture is increased by compost.   
• Compost contains nutrients.
• Compost also feeds micro-organisms, thus increasing  plants' abiltiy to   USE the nutrients.
• Compost attracts earthworms, which further enrich the soil and improve its   structure.      
• Using homemade compost reduces the need for products you have to buy, especially the synthetic stuff. 
• Unlike those fast-acting synthetics that end up polluting our waters, compost releases its nutrients slowly.

Urban Composting

After months of preparation, I finally gave my composting presentation to the Capitol Hill Garden Club this week. I only had an hour, so this was not the kind of venue where you get into a hands-on demonstration of how to contruct a compost heap. I decided to assemble a Powerpoint slide show about what fascinates me most about compost, which is the backstory: How in the world did we arrive at a place where people think fertility is something you buy in a bag at Home Depot, while feeding the soil naturally with compost falls to hippies and tree-huggers?

To recap: humans for thousands of years were fertilizing their fields with compost and manure. (Even the Greeks talk about how to build a compost pile). Darwin was convinced that earthworms ruled the world (or at least the underworld). But the 19th Century saw a parade of German chemists who were convinced that the only thing plants really need to grow is nitrogen. It was only a matter of finding an industrial method of turning gaseous nitrogen into something you could spread on your fields and there'd soon be enough food to feed an exploding world population. Voila, the age of chemistry was born. Now we use around 2 percent of our natural gas to manufacture nitrogen, which does nothing for the health of our soils--in fact, is a factor in the destruction of our soils--and is helping to create huge dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf of Mexico.

I could turn this into a polemic. The point is, I received a warm reception at the Capitol HIll Garden Club, one of the most venerable in our area. People really want to know how they can compost in their back yards. Especially their urban back yards, where they may not have so much space. They have tons of questions. They are worried about space. They are worried about pests. They are worried about costs. They are worried about what their neighbors will think. And there are no easy answers. There are so many different ways to compost, every gardener has to fashion a solution that fits best.

But we should be working on solutions. We should be identifying backyard composting bins that really work in an urban setting. We should be identifying systems for storing all your compost materials when your bin is full. We should be doing more to help spread this information across the city so that everyone can do more to recyle wastes that can easily be turned into a valuable amendment for our soil.

And where is the city in all this? I am on the hunt for our city's leaf czar. I feel like Michael Moore, tracking down the head of GM. Somewhere, there's a city employee who's in charge of collecting all the leaves the District generates each fall and deciding what should be done with them. I've been told there is a place where you can go and collect city-generated compost (they give it away in Takoma Park), but that this compost may not be the greatest because of all the bits of trash that get caught in the leaf stream. Where is this place? I am determined to find out.

And if you have any tips on what style of composting works best for you, please pass them along. This is a continuing journey, a journey of mutual discovery and assistance. Compost should be at the top of our priority list. Every gardener should be involved with compost. We certainly are.

Meanwhile, check out these websites for an eyefull about compost. One of them links to the urban agriculture program in Vancouver, Canada. Sorry to report, folks, the Canadians are light years ahead of us. We could be taking a few cues from them.

My favorite part of the presentation at the Capitol Hill Garden Club came at the end, as I was packing up to leave. An elderly woman on crutches approached me.

"You know, I've been gardening for more than 35 years," she said. "And when I started, my soil was awful. But every year I'd take the leaves that fell in my yard and spread them around the garden. I just kept doing that. And you know what? I now have the best soil you've ever seen."

You go on with your bad mulching self, girl!

Sometimes the simplest solutions are indeed the best.

http://www.cityfarmer.org/

http://www.compostguide.com/

posted by Ed Bruske

After months of preparation, I finally gave my composting presentation to the Capitol Hill Garden Club this week. I only had an hour, so this was not the kind of venue where you get into a hands-on demonstration of how to contruct a compost heap. I decided to assemble a Powerpoint slide show about what fascinates me most about compost, which is the backstory: How in the world did we arrive at a place where people think fertility is something you buy in a bag at Home Depot, while feeding the soil naturally with compost falls to hippies and tree-huggers?

To recap: humans for thousands of years were fertilizing their fields with compost and manure. (Even the Greeks talk about how to build a compost pile). Darwin was convinced that earthworms ruled the world (or at least the underworld). But the 19th Century saw a parade of German chemists who were convinced that the only thing plants really need to grow is nitrogen. It was only a matter of finding an industrial method of turning gaseous nitrogen into something you could spread on your fields and there'd soon be enough food to feed an exploding world population. Voila, the age of chemistry was born. Now we use around 2 percent of our natural gas to manufacture nitrogen, which does nothing for the health of our soils--in fact, is a factor in the destruction of our soils--and is helping to create huge dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf of Mexico.

I could turn this into a polemic. The point is, I received a warm reception at the Capitol HIll Garden Club, one of the most venerable in our area. People really want to know how they can compost in their back yards. Especially their urban back yards, where they may not have so much space. They have tons of questions. They are worried about space. They are worried about pests. They are worried about costs. They are worried about what their neighbors will think. And there are no easy answers. There are so many different ways to compost, every gardener has to fashion a solution that fits best.

But we should be working on solutions. We should be identifying backyard composting bins that really work in an urban setting. We should be identifying systems for storing all your compost materials when your bin is full. We should be doing more to help spread this information across the city so that everyone can do more to recyle wastes that can easily be turned into a valuable amendment for our soil.

And where is the city in all this? I am on the hunt for our city's leaf czar. I feel like Michael Moore, tracking down the head of GM. Somewhere, there's a city employee who's in charge of collecting all the leaves the District generates each fall and deciding what should be done with them. I've been told there is a place where you can go and collect city-generated compost (they give it away in Takoma Park), but that this compost may not be the greatest because of all the bits of trash that get caught in the leaf stream. Where is this place? I am determined to find out.

And if you have any tips on what style of composting works best for you, please pass them along. This is a continuing journey, a journey of mutual discovery and assistance. Compost should be at the top of our priority list. Every gardener should be involved with compost. We certainly are.

Meanwhile, check out these websites for an eyefull about compost. One of them links to the urban agriculture program in Vancouver, Canada. Sorry to report, folks, the Canadians are light years ahead of us. We could be taking a few cues from them.

My favorite part of the presentation at the Capitol Hill Garden Club came at the end, as I was packing up to leave. An elderly woman on crutches approached me.

"You know, I've been gardening for more than 35 years," she said. "And when I started, my soil was awful. But every year I'd take the leaves that fell in my yard and spread them around the garden. I just kept doing that. And you know what? I now have the best soil you've ever seen."

You go on with your bad mulching self, girl!

Sometimes the simplest solutions are indeed the best.

http://www.cityfarmer.org/

http://www.compostguide.com/

posted by Ed Bruske