Com Post

Make that compost. I was lazy last fall. I raked up a bunch of leaves out front and left them there, in a pile, over the winter. Of course, the pile blew around during the winter months and some of it started to decompose. So on Monday I got out there and re-raked and transported all the leaves to the compost pile as I should have done last fall.

The left side of the compost bin. The right side needs attention.

You can see a thin line of green leaves toward the bottom of the pile. Everything above that line is what went into the pile on Monday. It'll soon sink down and start to rot into compost.

When I first started composting in San Francisco, we got ourselves a small urban composting container for the back yard. The instructions were full of all kinds of "recipes" for compost, including lots of advice for making it work better and faster. Although composting is a natural process, it takes more or less time depending on the size and nature of the stuff that goes in.

But at the end of the little booklet was the key, the natural secret, that negated all the fancy stuff that came before. It read, simply, "Compost happens."

That's been my motto ever since.