Last year, we got 25 kilos of butternut squash out of our compost pile. Never mind that the whole back 9 of the property was consumed by squash vines (Less grass to tend! The compost pile is now a compost field because we can’t see the pile any more!) we got a lot of unexpected food from several well-fed and very happy volunteer plants.
My 7 year old empties the compost bucket outside into the pile every morning after breakfast. But the bits and pieces of coffee grounds and vegetable goo that make up a sort of mud layer at the bottom never quite broke free from the bucket. So over the course of about 10 days (approximate time between washings of said compost bucket), a lone sprout pushed itself through the muck and was reaching up out of its stainless steel incubator.
There is something beautiful about rich, dark dirt. I remember asking my high school chemistry teacher, Mr. B., “is dirt actually, you know, dirty?” (Because he was the kind of teacher who was happy to consider the musings of nerdy 16 year olds or make up experiments on the fly.) And he answered, “well, by definition, yes, it is DIRTy.” And ever since I was a child mucking around in my grandfather’s garden, I’ve always thought about the dirt. While my husband’s mom doesn’t like to dig around without gloves on, for fear of running into a worm or two, I’ve always loved digging around in the dirt bare-handed. I relish the varied particles, the way it holds water, and how alive it smells and feels, even if my brain knows that is it full of dead things too. I think frequently about how beautiful and fragile earth really is, and how thin the layer of soil is over the surface of the dry part of the planet and how this somehow sustains all of the land-dwelling animal life that has ever existed.
What an apt pointer to the things we cannot see with our eyes. Sometimes our provision of life and food comes unexpectedly, from a source we didn’t tend but rather ignored, and truth be told, it was the very refuse of brokenness and death that brought it forth.