Composting on a small island farm, the denial that is "away," and decomposition-in-place

Hello there,

Last edition, I mentioned that I would offer subscriptions to The Rot for $2/month. It turns out that Substack doesn’t actually allow this—they require a minimum charge of $5/month. My mistake and my apologies. To get around this, I’ve made a permanent discount code - please enjoy: https://therot.substack.com/cheapie

Onward:

I’m writing to you from an island in the Pacific Ocean, not far from Canada—but still not really close to anything. It’s a small island, with no stores or restaurants or paved roads. Everybody grows their own food. There are several farms, dozens of chickens, and some goats. There is a post office served each Thursday by boat. (“Mail day!”) Not much else. Annie Dillard wrote a book here, once, in a small cabin by the water. “I lived on the beach with one foot in fatal salt water and one foot on a billion grains of sand,” is what she said about it. She seemed vaguely afraid of things and referred to the islanders as “half mad” and with “their necks stuck out.” I’m amused by this because I’ve spent so much time here and have hardly ever seen one other person, let alone formed an opinion about the whole group. But that’s what makes Annie a famous writer and me a composter.

Speaking of that, though—everybody here composts.

And I do mean everybody.

There is no trash service, no dump, and septic is expensive to install—so people compost. They have compiles piles, compost bins, worm compost, biochar kilns, and composting toilets. Anything that isn’t actively composted is at least passively aided in decay, and there are big shaggy piles of plant detritus everywhere to prove it. I love to walk around and photograph them. They look, to me, like happy little sculptures.

What I like about this island is that there is nowhere for anything to go that isn’t right in your face. There is no “away,” as in “throw it away.” (That popular American past time.) Trees are felled, chopped, and the pieces not for kindling are mounded and left to rot. Crops are weeded and the weeds used as mulch. Some goats that passed away were piled into a big pit layered with biochar and then covered with earth. Everything that is built must eventually breakdown, a fact of life, and one that the island is intimately concerned with, if not actively shepherding.

For me, it’s heaven.

I often think, and have spoken about, how learning to compost can change how people consume things. There is no magic, it turns out, in plastic. What makes a material interesting is its ability to be transformed, and the particular feeling that arrives when you understand how you can help make it happen. Not with any intervening technology, but just your hands and your mind and a little bit of your attention. Add cardboard (carbon), gently torn, to some dried leaves (carbon), and the leftover zucchini bits and broccoli floret (nitrogen) from dinner, and you’ll end up with a singularly useful and generative substance (“soil”), from which all other life now stems. Is that not amazing? And it’s available to you. The earth’s deepest and most primal incantation.

Here are just a smattering of the conversations I’ve had since my arrival on the island:

• The couple from Phoenix who own an “urban citrus farm.” They used to pile their grass clippings in a big heap on their cement patio. Now, they told me, they know to spread them haphazardly around the trees, as fertilizer.

• “Have you read ‘The Humanure Handbook?’”

• The farmer who’s been there 50 years and, in the last three or four, has figured out “no till” agriculture. Now he makes biochar, keeps vermicompost and, when he weeds, spreads the clippings around between the rows, in order that they decompose there slowly. “Never seen the crop as good as this before,” he told me. “The effect was immediate.”

• “Have you read ‘The Humanure Handbook?’”

• The woman who approached me on the beach. “Are you the compost girl?” She was in her 70s, maybe older. She said she had a composting toilet, but she couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Turns out she was only mixing it with sawdust, which isn’t a sturdy enough source of carbon for all the liquid nitrogen. I told her to get straw and try again.

• That woman’s brother, also in his 70s, who was “too lazy,” he said, to ever turn his compost. “Well, you’ve come to the right girl,” I reassured him.

• “Have you read ‘The Humanure Handbook?’”

Again, heaven.

There was one more thing Annie Dillard wrote while she was here, and it was this: “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.” “Spend it all,” she implored. “Shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.” I’m perverting a famous quote, and I know it. She meant this about writing, but while walking the island and considering things, I recognized that it applies to everything: love, trust, generosity.

Forgiveness.

Today it’s raining. I find some old graham crackers in the cupboard of a cabin and eat them for breakfast. Make coffee. Use a single slice of paper towel as a delicate bookmark. I feel that a thing in me is building up, the thing that I need to be doing. I am giving it all the time in the world.

Love, Cass

From the archives

1. If you’re new to The Rot, I’ve collected all my “how to” missives for the very beginner in one place.

2. It’s October, so here’s a reminder on what do with your pumpkins:

3. Can you actually compost dog poop bags? This one comes up a lot whenever I get a glut of new readers. (Hi, welcome!) If you have any questions or thoughts, just reply to this email and let me know. I love to talk to you.