Compost

Cleaning up from brunch this morning, I stepped outside to toss the compost over the fence into the chickens in the orchard. As I crushed up the eggshells in my bare hand, I thought about whether all farmers compost.

While it is hard to imagine any person who relies on the soil and the strength of tiny plants for their livelihood tossing their potato peels in the trash, people farm for many different reasons. In reality ¬there is probably no safe assumption about organic versus conventional or small versus large-scale farmers and their composting values. But to me, composting is one of my favorite parts of growing things.

One of the first lessons I learned when we began volunteering on farms was that crops that never made it out of the field – for lack of labor or time to harvest them or unfavorable weather getting to them first – are not waste to be lamented over. It is just part of the nature of farming. Part of the annual cycle.

There are many choices we can make on a farm to keep the cycle close to home. Yesterday Janet drove down the road to a horse farm to get a truck-load of aged horse manure. After burning the prunings from the raspberries, we put the ash into the compost pile. The pigs we get in June will dine on apple pulp all fall while we press cider. The chickens are an important part of tilling and fertilizing the soil as they are rotated around the farm.



Finnriver produces a lovely list of food that keeps our meals delicious and close to home:











Eggs
Chicken
Pork (soon!)
Potatoes
Beets
Rutabegas
Parsnips
Carrots
Leeks
Onions
Garlic
Blueberries
Raspberries
Strawberries
Marion Berries
Blackberries
Currants
Logan Berries
Apples
Tomatoes
Tomatillos
Peppers
Eggplant
Melons
Zucchini
Beans – fresh and dry
Cucumbers
Cabbage
Kale
Chard
Radish
Lettuce
Spinach
Squash
Wheat
Oats
Hard Cider
Hops
Honey






















And it all comes from and goes back to this



Compost.