The Gardener — What the garden keeps, Page 5
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Several days later, Kai empties vegetable peelings and coffee grounds into the compost box. He covers the moist scraps with dry leaves. Wet material and dry material begin to alternate in simple layers. He is not following a perfect formula; he is learning to notice what the pile needs.
Image description
Kai adds vegetable peelings and coffee grounds to the compost box and covers them with a layer of dry leaves.
About this chapter
Kai begins collecting fallen leaves, spent stems, and kitchen scraps in a simple compost box. At first the pile looks like a container for things that are finished. Over time, he sees heat, fungi, insects, and decomposition turn the discarded material into dark compost. When he feeds that compost back into the same flower beds, Kai realizes the garden does not divide the world neatly into useful and useless, living and dead. It keeps changing one into the other. The lesson is simple: an ending does not erase value, and worth is not the same thing as productivity.