a tale of two composts

I had a box of worms in my kitchen once.

They were, like so many other things in my life at the time, an attempt to make my Brooklyn apartment habitable -- at least for anything other than the cockroaches and rats.

This didn't exactly turn out as I had hoped. In terms of life forms, I guess you could say the kitchen became definitively more habitable, as the worms ended up becoming part of a thriving ecosystem of funky humid air, raunchy rotting smells, and millions -- I swear to God -- of tiny little gnats, who covered the surfaces of nearly everything in my kitchen with a few weeks.

This was not as I had planned.

At the time, I was starving for some kind of emotional connection to the natural world, plus I threw out vats of rotting fruit and vegetable detritus on a near-daily basis. Composting, which my mom did with ease in her Nebraska kitchen, seemed a natural solution.

Based on my usual intense research processes (I vaguely remembered being told my a crunchy, eco-friendly activist colleague that home composting was really easy, and by another that there were worms available through the farmer's market in Union Square) I set about laying the groundwork for my very own green revolution.

Basically, this involved calling the number on the website of the East Village environmental activist group to find out how one obtained worms. All you had to do, I was informed by a pleasant woman over the phone, was put in an order, and for $60 you could get your very own composting kit, complete with a batch of worms, a plastic container to house them in, and an instruction card on how to compost. All you had to do was go by the farmer's market on a Saturday afternoon, and they'd have the worms read to pick up.

Ta da! Problem solved. Newly flush with funds from my corporate advertising job, which had just transitioned from temporary to indefinite, I told the woman that yes, I would like to buy some worms.

Some things that I might have overlooked, upon reflection, included the fact that I had an all-day, very important and unmissable activist media planning media (or something like that) to attend on the scheduled day of pick-up. This wouldn't have been a huge deal if say, I were picking up potted plants, or something a little less, well, wiggly. But, worms are actually alive and kind of sensitive, thus, they do things like die when forced to hang out all day in harsh wintery temperatures.

This brings me to the second thing I may have overlooked slightly. It was February -- or January, I forget. It was the dead of ass-cold winter in New York, which can prove to be really, really inconvenient when hauling live temperature-sensitive worms from an outdoor market home to your apartment in the boonies of Brooklyn via public transportation.

I say all this hypothetically, as I didn't actually pick up the worms. This task fell to Keith, who, in his typical gentile understandingness grumbled intensely when I told him of my plan, and in all ways refused to participate, except of course when I made him go pick up the worms.

The worms didn't die though -- and they soon safely had a space under the enormous and precariously over-laden metal shelving unit we had erected to hold nearly all of our/my pots and pans.

Within days of depositing my kitchen scraps, however, the gnats began gathering on every visible surface.

Despite all our best efforts, which included duck-taping the cracks of the plastic box, intense amounts of fly-swatting, spraying surfaces with any chemical spritzer we could find, and a half-dozen homemade gnat-catching traps made out of soda bottles, laundry soap and beer, they kept gathering.

Soon, any movement in the kitchen would elicit a cloud of tiny flies, swarming in all directions before resettling on the cabinets and appliances.

I stopped cooking. The gnats limited even my willingness to brave the kitchen for food. In desperation, we tried to leave the compost on the concrete patio between the building's stairwells, only to find it immediately left in the trash bin. Keith daily threatened to exterminate the worms, only stopping short of dumping the whole thing out of my entreaties that it would be really bad worm karma.

Eventually, however, we decided we had to risk the bad karma, and dump the whole mess of newspapers, worms and rotting fruits and vegetables. When the time came to dump them, however, the worms could still be seen wriggling, alive and happy in their gnat-infested home.

So, instead, we took the bin out front and dug through it, separating out maggot-laden banana peels, rotting potato skins, cabbage heads, etc., from the worms. We had waited until it was warm enough (it was March in New York), so that we could set the worms free into the wild world without incurring the wrath of worm gods everywhere.

So, after sorting out all the garbage from the worms, Keith and I spent one afternoon with the worm bin balanced atop a metal shopping cart, looking for a place to deposit them.

We were going to go to Prospect Park, which was several subway stops away, but only made it as far as the nicely manicured juniper traffic island in between the impeccable Victorians we happened to live near. While Keith stood watch (there was a private security guard making the rounds) I dug a hole with a stick in the dirt, and dumped the worms in piles around the juniper.

May they live long and happy lives making dirt for rich people.

At any rate, this is compost-attempt #2. No worms this time. And I'm keeping the whole apparatus on my balcony, should gnats decide to storm.