My, how my compost pile — and my mind — grow

Suddenly, I was captivated by the darkness below on a steamy August day. I could only stare as tiny gray pill bugs crept up from the recesses of the decaying leaf pile. Then I noticed an earthworm slithering to the surface and looping back to the underworld. This place was alive.

I’m speaking of the compost pile that I keep in a black plastic box in my side yard. My wife and I started it last year with bagfuls of leaves that we collected in the fall. We wanted nutrient-rich dirt for our vegetable garden, which we grow every year with the help of our kids.

I hadn’t tended to the pile properly for the first six months, however. That is, I did nothing to it, thinking that the leaves would become dirt on their own. Wrong.

Then I read up on composting. In the spring, I began regularly turning over the pile with a pitchfork and dousing it with water, which accelerated the complex process of breaking down the leaves into dirt.

As I stood and watched the little decomposers working their magic, I was struck by how long it takes to create the organically rich soil needed to grow food. Eight months had passed and the leaves were not yet soil. It could be another eight months to a year before the dirt fully forms.

My, what a valuable commodity good soil is, but we take it for granted. When the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in 1620, North America had the richest dirt in the world, capable of growing an abundance of food without the need for fertilizers. This super-soil was the product of millions of years of undisturbed chemical processes, nature doing its thing, recycling loose organic materials and transforming them into dirt. Nothing went to waste.

According to the Sierra Club, the U.S. has lost 75 percent of its original topsoil to erosion caused by development, and it continues to lose 4 million acres annually.

Who cares?