I Love Trash (Oscar the Grouch)

I well recall celebrating the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970) in my sophomore year of high school, when they educated us, along with setting up a recycling center... and I have been an advocate of the environment ever since.  I've been using canvas bags for grocery shopping and reusable containers for leftovers for decades, and my family can attest to my fanaticism about recycling.  About five years ago, I asked them for a composter for Mother's Day, but that never happened and now, with our move to a smaller space, we wouldn't have space for it anyway... :-(

My friend NW has had one for a few years, and I asked her the other day if I could collect compostable material at my house, and donate it to her... and she lovingly said Yes!  I bought a small tabletop bin, in which I've been collecting the obligatory banana peels, eggshells (my husband's), coffee grounds and filters, apple cores, vegetable scraps, etc. and my first delivery is today (hoping to do it weekly).  It's not a lot, but it's something, and it makes me feel better that this stuff will not end up in a landfill, but instead in a "compost stew" that will eventually nourish Nancy's garden.  Win/win!

SONG:  I Love Trash by Oscar the Grouch

BOOK:  Organic Book of Compost, 2nd Revised Edition: Easy and Natural Techniques to Feed Your Garden (IMM Lifestyle Books) Handbook to Sustainable, Low-Cost Methods, Community Composting, & More, with FAQs by Pauline Pears

Compost Stew: An A to Z Recipe for the Earth by Mary McKenna Siddals, Ashley Wolff (Illustrator)

POEM:  The Good, the Bad and the Inconvenient by Marge Piercy

Gardening is often a measured cruelty:
what is to live and what is to be torn
up by its roots and flung on the compost
to rot and give its essence to new soil.

It is not only the weeds I seize.
go down the row of new spinach—
their little bright Vs crowding—
and snatch every other, flinging

their little bodies just as healthy,
just as sound as their neighbors
but judged, by me, superfluous.
We all commit crimes too small

for us to measure, the ant soldiers
we stomp, whose only aim was to
protect, to feed their vast family.
It is I who decide which beetles

are "good" and which are "bad"
as if each is not whole in its kind.
We eat to live and so do they,
the locusts, the grasshoppers,

the flea beetles and aphids and slugs.
By bad I mean inconvenient. Nothing
we do is simple, without consequence
and each act is shadowed with death.

QUOTE:  "A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet." ~ Michael Pollan