A gardener is very much an editor—from planting the seed of an idea to pruning prose that has run amok. Both writing and gardening take shape in the mind and develop through careful and consistent attention. That sensibility has played out over my career, largely spent writing and editing for a mix of magazines, mostly of the how-to variety.
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My vocation as a writer and editor and my avocation as a gardener and composter go hand in hand. I often mull over writing projects while busying myself with the pruning, curating, and transplanting that keep a suburban gardener preoccupied. “I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden,” claims author and composer John Erskine. I also sometimes plot out backyard projects while idling myself at work.
Making compost is a creative, unscripted act, yet its production plays out in a time honored form and fashion. My pile begins as a load of raw if purposeful rubbish, a rough draft that with time and effort is refined into a finished product put to immediate use. A heap of fresh compost is very much a magazine; at its root, the word refers to a collection or storage location, like for gunpowder at a military depot.
But even the minuscule amount of food and other organic material (including paper products and yard trimmings) that is composted or recycled makes a huge difference.
Consider my compost pile the Guns & Ammo of gardening. I’ve kept a backyard compost heap since my days as a staff editor for a food magazine in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s. It was a wonderful job in many respects, chief among them the twice-daily tastings in the test kitchen. Every recipe that ran in the magazine, and then some, was first prepared in-house by our chefs, with assists from other staffers and guest editors.
The tastings were held three days a week, the first at 10 am and the second at 2 pm. I’d hang out in the test kitchen as much as I could, watching and listening and smelling all that went into their work while avoiding the stack of recipe transcripts and manuscripts in my inbox. This was in the early days of modern comfort food. The artery-clogging, cholesterol-laden recipes of old were being replaced by healthy Mediterranean menus, featuring lots of vegetables simply prepared and seasoned. Gone were the rich sauces; fresh herbs and garlic appeared in their place. Lots and lots of garlic. I ate amazingly well from 9 to 5 and couldn’t get a date at night for the better part of five years.
I don’t recall how the subject of my wanting the trimmings the cooks threw out each day came up. But once they knew of the modest compost heap I’d started in the side yard of the duplex I rented at the base of the Hollywood hills, my colleagues happily loaded me up with all the kitchen scraps I could take home at the end of each testing day. It was gourmet stuff—floppy green carrot tops and big bottoms of fennel bulbs. Pounds of flicked potato peels, whole volumes of papery onion skins. Lots of shrimp shells, as I recall. All in all, enough, usually, to fill two grocery bags every test-kitchen day. Each issue of the magazine included about 100 recipes, which, every month, found their way into a million or more kitchens. That’s a lot of food scraps.
My early contributions to composting were barely a drop in the bucket. According to Jonathan Bloom at Wasted Food, a staggering 95 percent of the food waste produced in the United States that could be composted actually ends up going into a landfill or incinerator. In fact, food is the single largest component taking up space inside U.S. landfills, accounting for 22 percent of all municipal solid waste created each year.
“That equates to 325 pounds of waste per person—the equivalent of 130 billion meals,” according to the Food Waste in America in 2023 report from Recycle Track Systems. But even the minuscule amount of food and other organic material (including paper products and yard trimmings) that is composted or recycled makes a huge difference.
Taking one year as an example, diverting these materials from landfills “prevented the release of approximately 186 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the air in 2013—equivalent to taking over 39 million cars off the road for a year,” according to an EPA report Bloom cites. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I suppose my LA compost pile offset a fair share of the smog I created driving back and forth to work each day, helping to produce a monthly magazine made of many acres of wood pulp.
And there, in the bottom corner of the yard, I carved out my first compost pile, digging steps into the terraced hillside to reach it.
What happens after we toss those day-old leftovers into the trash can? Most of us don’t think about it. But as David Owen points out in The Conundrum, rotting food is the main source of the methane—an especially worrisome greenhouse gas—that leaks from landfills.
That’s not all: “When we throw away food we don’t just throw away nutrients. We also throw away the energy we used in keeping it cold as we lost interest in it, as well as the energy that went into growing, harvesting, processing, transporting, and preparing it (assuming we got that far), along with its proportional share of our staggering national consumption of fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation water, packaging, and landfill capacity.”
My Spanish-style duplex sat perched on a knoll just below the Griffith Observatory. On the edge of the back patio a tall Ponderosa pine, its lower branches trimmed, stretched its upper limbs outward to form a wide, sculpted canopy. It was a gorgeous tree, especially in the evening when the sun set over the Pacific. The colors would wash across the Los Angeles basin and light the tree from underneath, making its orange-red bark glow and waxy green needles sparkle. A patch of ivy covered the slope below it. And there, in the bottom corner of the yard, I carved out my first compost pile, digging steps into the terraced hillside to reach it.
The rest of the backyard was taken up by two old olive trees that shed long, slender leaves and a rich rain of black olives that slowly air-dried to dusty pits. In their shadow grew a rosemary bush so big that when I trimmed it, I saved the branches to use as skewers for kabobs. Alongside the house, a sliver of grass bordered the walkway to the street.
This tiny lawn gave way to a small rose garden perched above a huge hedge of brilliant magenta bougainvillea that fronted the sidewalk. Though small and set on a hillside, the yard produced enough throughout the long California growing season to keep my compost heap in business. I especially liked scooping up piles of the Day-Glo bougainvillea petals, as thin as the breath strips you put on your tongue and just as fast to melt away.
Spoiled by the chefs in the test kitchen, at times my pile was more kitchen scraps than yard refuse. It was a turbocharged stew of vegetable matter, with just a few rakefuls of pine needles, prickly live-oak leaves, grass clippings, and homegrown rotting olives mixed in. My landlord was pleased that I took ownership of the yard. My downstairs neighbor, Alix, a British émigré who worked as a paralegal, was also happy to have me puttering about, producing a steady supply of fresh-cut flowers for her apartment.
Tending to a backyard compost heap calls for care and feeding to keep it active and in good health. It’s like having a pet, and I’m devoted to it.
Being a monthly magazine, we worked off an editorial calendar set several months ahead of real time. In September we tested our Thanksgiving menus, which meant that our fattest issues hit at the tail end of California’s dry season—just before winter rains began. The test kitchen worked overtime in those months, producing turkey after turkey to taste, providing me with all the trimmings to take home. Pound for pound, there wasn’t a more fortuitous compost pile in all of Los Angeles. My gourmet compost pile helped turn a rented patch of compacted, hardpan dirt into a lush backyard oasis. When the fall rains came, the garden soaked up every drop, and the roses and bougainvillea and rosemary thrived in the California sunshine.
And I became a composter.
Composting is a pastime, a passion, a pursuit. Tending to a backyard compost heap calls for care and feeding to keep it active and in good health. It’s like having a pet, and I’m devoted to it. Like any pet owner, I am sensitive to comments about it. One being, “Ew, a compost pile? With all your garbage in it? Won’t that just attract rodents, like rats?” Well, yes—but it’s not my pile’s fault; it’s just doing what compost does. It’s its nature. It is nature.
We share our suburban landscapes with all kinds of critters, welcome or not. My Los Feliz neighborhood was near rugged Griffith Park. All kinds of urban animals would wander over, chiefly because Alix set out bowls of kibble and water on the front stoop for her big black tomcat. Coming home late from work one evening, I bent over to pet what I thought was her cat crouched beside the dishes, only to realize the backside belonged to a skunk.
My hillside compost pile was also a wildlife draw. One cool morning I dug into the heap and surprised a possum that had carved a nesting spot in its warm flanks. The cat gave these wild visitors a wide berth, especially the raccoons. All feared the coyotes that roamed the Hollywood hills at night.
Then Wilbur arrived. A Christmas present for Alix from a benighted suitor, Wilbur was an adorable little Vietnamese pot-bellied piglet with a red bow tied around his bristly neck. Micro pigs were the trendy pet back then, supposedly as smart as a dog, easily housetrained, and with a sense of humor—almost. Plus, this breed was promised to stay cute and cuddly.
The pig pranced around Alix’s ground-floor apartment like a toy poodle on high heels, hooves clicking along the wood floors. Wilbur used his snout like the mini-trunk of an elephant, always nosing around, sticking his frizzy pink nozzle into your side for stroking, sniffing out anything and everything. And that was the problem. The piglet had one button—the on switch—and he was indefatigable in his search for one thing and one thing only: food. He was a snout attached to a stomach set on cloven feet.
I was prepared to share my bounty, as there’d always been enough to go around. Besides, the pig rooting through my pile did help turn it over a bit.
On occasion, I’d come home from work before Alix, and I would hear the little piggy downstairs, rooting around. He’d learned how to nose open Alix’s kitchen cabinets and delighted in licking and kicking her pots and pans across the apartment. If a molecule of a food particle, even a memory of a meal, remained on the pot, the pig would lick it until the Teflon wore off. Alix put childproof locks on all the kitchen cabinets and secured the cat food bowls.
She took the piglet for walks on a leash around the neighborhood. In time, she let Wilbur walk about the yard, as it was mostly fenced and fairly private from the street. He quickly sniffed out my compost pile. At first, I didn’t really mind. Wasn’t it entirely natural that a pig and a compost heap were made for each other? I was prepared to share my bounty, as there’d always been enough to go around. Besides, the pig rooting through my pile did help turn it over a bit. But soon, Wilbur’s relentless pursuit of all things edible overwhelmed my little heap. It wasn’t a fair fight. Any bag of fruit and vegetable scraps I added to the mix was gone by the next day. My pile became his pigpen, his feeding trough.
And he got bigger and bigger, rather than staying cute and cuddly. Wilbur put on pounds each week, and before long had grown to over 100. His personality, over-hyped to begin with, grew more single-minded. All he wanted was food. I grew resentful and stopped bringing home leftovers from the office. I allowed my pile to devolve into, well, a pigsty, more dust than loamy dirt in the making.
Then one day I got home to find Alix in a proper tizzy. She’d left the pig outside rooting around the yard while she was inside her apartment, then found him gone. She printed up “Missing Pig” posters and stapled them onto telephone poles around the neighborhood. The ABC-TV affiliate station was just a couple blocks away, and a news producer saw the flyers and sent a TV crew over to interview her. “Pignapped! Live at 5!” led the evening newscast.
Alix, the beautiful, big-eyed British ex-pat, was tearfully persuasive in pleading to be reunited with her pet pig. Sure enough, some hours later, the station got a call from a viewer in East Hollywood, who had seen the pig in a nearby backyard, the unwitting guest for a weekend barbecue in the works. Wilbur was safely returned home.
I moved a while after, taking a new job on the other side of the country. Alix and I stayed in touch, and a few months later she called to say that her cute little Christmas gift had grown to 150 pounds of pure surliness. She was sending Wilbur to an animal rescue shelter on the outskirts of the San Fernando Valley, where she hoped he would have a long, happy life. I didn’t miss that pig, but I sure did miss that compost pile.
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Adapted from On Compost: A Year in the Life of a Suburban Garden, Christmas Lake Press, 2024, by Scott Russell Smith.