Earth Day with Compost Cab

In honor of Earth Day, Compost Cab and The Farm at Walker Jones Elementary School teamed up to provide an opportunity for volunteers to get their hands dirty.    I heard about the opportunity through the D.C. Farm to School Network and thought it would be a fun way to enjoy the day while exploring my new-found interest in urban agriculture.  I was joined by a dozen or so folks who pitched in despite the inclement weather.


The farm and the school are located about ten blocks North of the U.S. Capitol, close to where New York and New Jersey Avenues intersect.  When I received the invitation to volunteer, the address was most of what I knew about the project.  A quick trip to their blog and I was immediately impressed by their vision.

Imagine dining at a restaurant and loving the fresh figs served with your prosciutto.  You inquire about their origin and your server says, "Oh, the kids over at Walker Jones grew them."  Or maybe you live in the neighborhood and visit weekly what will be the school's "farmers market" where sixth graders learn math skills while selling you Swiss chard.  Biology lessons will come alive.  Cafeteria waste will become compost.  And child-cultivated veggies will wonder across the street into school lunches.  From what I understand, the project is still young and their vision will take a few years to unfold.  It's exciting, though, and I can't wait to watch it grow!

On Friday our job was to help convert old, plant-waste-only composting bins into a new system that would integrate local food waste picked up and delivered by Compost Cab.  Some of the volunteers knew each other - a sizable contingent had come (bearing doughnuts, I might add - yum!) from a local law firm - but most did not.  Our common bond was compost, so that's what we chatted about:  Do you compost meat?  What about bones?  Cooked veg?  Have you tried worms?  My worms died.  So did mine.

Worms, I have come to realize, are compost's best friend.  And so they come up at every event I attend.  You can't talk about urban agriculture without talking about compost.  And you can't talk about compost without talking about worms.  The resulting vermicompost (or worm compost) is great for gardens and the best way to speed up the time it takes for food scraps to morph into fertilizer.  If you're curious, here's some helpful information.

The city is full of folks who could compost.  But without back yards, where's it going to happen?  Think about all the dorm rooms of all the colleges, all the apartment complexes, all the office kitchenettes.  Then think about all the coffee grounds at all the coffee shops and all the food scraps produced by restaurants, markets, and hotels.  Now think about all the produce tossed by grocery stores because it didn't sell before it went bad.  That's a ton of compost!

Enter Compost Cab.  As Jeremy Brosowsky pointed out on Friday, recycling programs didn't spread widely because the masses demanded it (although grass-roots organizing, I would add, did help sound the alarm); their spread was catalyzed by their profitability.  Entrepreneurs figured out that there was money to be made in recycling and this resulted in the wide-spread infrastructure needed to make recycling available across America.  The entrepreneurs benefited and so did the planet. 

He added that this same trend is possible with compost.  If we wait for the government to decree it (now I'm editorializing), we may be waiting a very long time.  But perhaps right now, some forward-thinking entrepreneurs can help galvanize this effort.  Compost Cab is a good example.  From what I understand, it has quickly found a receptive green niche here in D.C.

As I mentioned in my last post, Dina and I are experimenting with our own compost.  We own an anaerobic indoor composter that uses a substance called bokashi to speed up the break down while absorbing the resulting odor.  There's a spout on the bottom for retrieving compost "tea" which you mix with water and give to your plants.  I have to confess, we should have done a little more research before going this route.  Yes, the tea is great and the bucket is odorless.  But in order to convert the half-broken-down food waste into usable compost, you have to bury the contents under soil and wait two or so weeks for it's final conversion.

Soil...hmm...that's the stuff we had to buy for our balcony garden because we have no yard and therefore no soil.  So what are we supposed to do with a bucket of half-digested waste every week?  I called the County of Fairfax's Composting Department (well, that's what Google Places called it), but they don't actually compost, just recycle and mulch.  I called the City of Vienna, but they don't compost either.  The City suggested I try looking for local community gardens.  The County worker was blunt: "I have no idea; that never really comes up."

Undaunted, we now plan to give worms a shot.  We're going to invest in a little Worm Factory and several hundred Red Wrigglers and see if we can't fertilize our garden while minimizing our waste.  As we struggle to find our way, I'm glad that the Compost Cabs of the world exist and I'll try to check in on Walker Jones now and again to see how The Farm is shaping up.