Queer Prepper: Can I Talk About How Much I Love My Compost Pile

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Maybe it’s a cliché but when I moved to the country a few years ago and became an amateur vegetable gardener (aka a queer prepper, to borrow a phrase from my neighbor, a fellow queer prepper), I promptly became obsessed with my compost pile.

Why do I love my compost pile? Let me count the ways. A compost pile is somewhere I can dump my literal trash — apple cores and carrot peels and eggshells and coffee grounds and autumn leaves and the corpses of last year’s tomato plants — and, having thrown it all on there, I can walk away and totally forget it exists. For months, I pay the compost pile no mind whatsoever. During which time, the compost pile is out there working steadfastly. Maybe that’s a small consolation right now, all things considered, but I am really grateful to the pile for its devotion. For the fact that while I was watching Star Trek: The Next Generation all winter it was out there decomposing on my behalf.

This week, I decided to pay the pile a visit. Because I needed to take a break from mainlining news and having brief flashes of panic about everything horrible that might happen next. Maybe because I’m still a novice gardener, every time I go out to the compost pile to dig down into it, I feel compost skepticism. I never quite believe I’ll find actual compost. Like surely, somehow, I screwed this thing up.

My pile is actually two piles, or places for piles. It’s five palettes in the shape of a capital E that we’ve lined up and tied together with zip ties because we aren’t the types who use nails or screws if we can avoid it. The zip ties have already snapped apart for the most part, following a few upstate New York winters, so the palettes are just balancing there. Not that this affects the pile. It doesn’t care where it is.



I started digging through the pile, hauling material from the side I’d piled high to the other, which was empty. Some of the matter was still pretty whole — shells of gourds, spruce branches. I got down a few feet down when, well well well what have we here: Sweet, beautiful unctuous crumbly black compost. The stuff they’d charge you a fuckton for at a garden store, for even a tiny little bag. I heaped it into a wheelbarrow. I walked it out to the garden beds and dug it in. Our soil here is crap, everybody says, rocky and terrible. Compost, on the other hand, compost supports the heck out of life.

Like let me tell you about the most amazing shit I’ve ever found in my compost pile (this was last September): One day I was out there, digging around, when I came upon what I realized was a very large young plant, sprouting from a chicken egg-sized seed. It was an avocado tree! I realized. I am Californian so in my culture there is no higher blessing than stumbling into an avocado tree when you do not expect it. I freaked the fuck out.

I sprinted the giant tree seedling back to the deck and I planted it in a pot with a bit of potting soil. A few minutes later, digging around in the compost pile, I found a second avocado tree. I again freaked the fuck out and I planted it and I moved both to my greenhouse where, as the chill of fall set in, they slowly died. I am Californian and still unaccustomed to cold and the way it kills. Anyway I learned my lesson with the avocado trees but let me reiterate: these were avocados that had sprouted in upstate New York, thanks to no work on my part and 100% owed to the magic of the compost pile.

My shoulders and neck are all fucked from the last two days I’ve spent outside relentlessly hauling around soil and also mulch and rocks. I regret nothing!