The story below is an excerpt from our May/June 2017 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, log in to read our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app. Thank you!
To rot is to live…
—Thorpe Moeckel
I didn’t grow up with a vegetable garden or extensive flower garden in my backyard. My mother is an artist and, while she grows a beautiful herb garden, her interest in flowers has been centered more on the painting of them. If I could grow flowers as beautiful as those she splashes skillfully on her watercolor pad, I’d be happy.
My Nana and Papa were the gardeners. I spent summers with them, snapping beans, thumping melons, plucking strawberries and snipping zinnias. My Papa grew up on and inherited a farm called Rosebower, and my grandmother embraced it when she married him. Their vegetable and flower gardens remain vividly productive in my memory.
When I married My Own Farmer, I knew what a beautiful garden should look like, but I had years to go and lots of failures to learn from before mine came close to resembling the ones at Rosebower. One of the tricks I am working on mastering is the art of composting.
When I stayed with them, Nana always sent me out in the evenings to dig a small trench in the garden where I deposited the peelings, rinds and cores of the day’s meals. The trench didn’t have to be too deep, so I would scrape it out with a trowel, lay the scraps to rest and bury them, stomping on them for good measure.
I can’t make trench compost at my house because my dog is an epicure. He digs the trenches up. Luke loves corn and melons and green beans, so a trench full of scraps is like a vegetarian cafeteria line for him. In deference to this, I built two bins out of discarded pallets and started composting in them.
