Sep 20, 2005 4 min read

I think I’m going to try composting. This is the time of year when the leaves begin to fall. In our former home, located on about two acres of mountain turf that was loaded with majestic oaks, this was the time of year I dreaded. During each October for what seemed like a century I spent nearly every free dayight hour raking, dragging, blowing and burning fall’s debris in an attempt (sometimes futile if it was a damp, rainy month) to keep the dead leaves from piling up on the grass and smothering it. If that happened, I’d face a rather large and extremely odious task of reseeding major portions of the yard.

Well, I escaped all that when we moved to our small house in the city with its even smaller yard.

So how did I come up with the desire to compost?

First, it looks like a way to get something useful out of something I have been throwing away for years. Second, in the city, you must bag your leaves and set them out for pickup.

Having lived in the country nearly all of my life where I could either dump yard debris in the woods or set a match to it, that goes against the grain.

I sweat enough just cleaning the stuff up but find it rather insulting that I have to sweat more to package it.

I think you get the idea.

And, third, it just seems it would be more environmentally friendly.

What triggered the desire to compost was while watching TV one recent afternoon, I saw a program on PBS dealing with composting methods where you gather up all your lawn debris (and even some of the vegetable scraps from your kitchen) and throw them into an outdoor container.

Microbes and bacteria break the stuff down into a nice, dark loam that you use to enrich your garden of other soil around your house.

One of the points on the TV show was that many municipalities are offering discounts on recycling containers as a way of encouraging people to compost. The reason? Yard waste is packing the landfills to overflow.

I know a lot of people compost. I never did because there were just too many leaves with which to contend at our former home.

I could have composted for all of Fayette County with the quantity that came down each fall. OK. That might be an exaggeration.

But I’m sure I could have composted for everyone in a 10-mile radius of our home.

Composting at our present home, however, would be a more reasonable effort, kind of like putting three gallons of water into a five-gallon bucket instead of the other way round.

And, each spring, my lovely wife always makes a beeline to the local outdoor store to pick up a few sacks of – that’s right – some kind of soil enriching stuff, either peat moss or manure or she just outright buys one of those special blends of dirt.

What I’m throwing away could supply what she has been buying.

According to the fellow demonstrating composting on the TV show I watched, the trick is to make sure the stuff gets enough air and water and that you turn the pile to mix it all up. The containers displayed on the program weren’t very large and some were even made from recycled materials.

I already have the basic material and I have a couple of garden forks that would be just dandy to use to turn the pile. All I need is something to put it in and I’m composting.

Exciting stuff, isn’t it? Just like watching grass grow.

And then you cut it, rake it up and throw it in the compost pile.

Okay, let’s not get too carried away.

Have a good day.

P.S. In last week’s column I incorrectly referred to the current British Queen Elizabeth’s father as King Edward. Her father was King George VI. Thanks to the readers who pointed that out.

James Pletcher Jr. is business editor at the Herald-Standard. He can be reached at 724-439-7571 or email to begin Jpletcher@heraldstandard.com Jpletcher@heraldstandard.com end

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