The Gardener — What the garden keeps, Page 8
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Kai sits on his heels and watches an earthworm disappear into the darkening compost. Nearby, a dry leaf is already losing its old shape. The contrast is simple: dead material is becoming food for living organisms, and their work is turning it into something the garden can use again.
Image description
Kai watches an earthworm disappear into dark compost beside a partly broken-down leaf.
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.