Tea in the Garden

I'm a creature of habit, though I try to add at least one thing new to my activities each day. For more than 40 years, I've started the day with a nice cup of hot tea, preferably Earl Grey. It's usually accompanied by a light breakfast of homemade banana bread, an apple fritter, or a bowl of oatmeal if it's a cold morning. Always frugal, I abandoned tea bags years ago and now make my cup with Indian looseleaf tea that I buy at a local Greek market.

As the water heats, I fill my tea ball half full with the tea leaves. It begins to steep as I head out to fetch the morning paper, always accompanied by my faithful Chocolate Lab, Shaca. When we return, my morning beverage is ready; of course on snowy mornings the brew is a little stronger, in accordance with the time it takes to put on my boots and jacket and trek to the end of the driveway. A few too many scoops of sugar, sans milk, and the brew is complete. The final step in the process is to remove the tea ball from the hot, tea-infused water and dump the saturated leaves.

This is where I tend to veer away from the habits of most people who start their days similarly. I don't dump my tea leaves in the trash, I dump them in my compost bucket sitting next to the sink. It's not one of those fancy, charcoal-impregnated buckets you can pay too much for from a catalog or website. It's an empty plastic bucket that used to hold a margarita concoction to which you just add tequila. It now holds wilting lettuce leaves, the skins of cucumbers, gnawed corn cobs, tea leaves, and any other organic kitchen waste we throw in it.

I believe in compost. I believe compost can make any garden better. In our Rocky Mountain region with terrible natural soil, compost is imperative in improving growing conditions. Gardeners can buy bagged compost at garden centers or home improvement stores and they can buy bulk compost at rock yards or sand companies; I've done both.

But I prefer to make my own compost. It's much cheaper, it's easy, and it gives me the opportunity to recycle my yard and kitchen waste, rather than sending it to some landfill that's already overloaded. When my margarita bucket is full, I dump it on my compost pile. When I have a handful or more of weeds I've plucked from my gardening beds, I throw them on my compost pile. When I clean up the spent plants in the fall, I throw it all on my compost pile. I even go around the neighborhood and collect bags of leaves from my neighbors to throw on my compost pile.

You can compost almost anything organic. Eggshells and egg cartons, overripe peaches and the cardboard box they came in, bird-pecked apples and pruned apple tree branches can all go into a compost pile. The black peels from the bananas in my bread are always visible in my bucket and on my pile.

The concept is quite simple: find a area near your garden and start dumping organic stuff. The science of composting is more complex and I'll cover that in another blog, but the basics make it easy for anyone to do. And I encourage you to do it, if you aren't already a composter. You don't need to buy expensive activators and you don't need to buy expensive plastic systems; you can, but a pile in a corner of your yard will work just fine for starters.

Mix "browns" and "greens" as you do it. The "browns" are organic pieces high in carbon, typically dried leaves or sticks or newspaper or brown grass. The "greens" are fresh organic pieces high in nitrogen, typically freshcut grass or rotting fruit or most kitchen waste. The mix of carbon and nitrogen creates a vacation themepark for microorganisms that naturally live in the soil and on the plants. The microrganisms begin the process of decomposing the organic matter and in time will produce a beautiful dark brown, almost black, product that works wonders for your garden.

Compost doesn't smell bad, in fact it has an earthy smell that reminds me of a meadow deep in a forest. The leaves and needles in a forest are decomposing naturally in the same basic way as a compost pile. You take this natural process and control what decomposes in the shelter of your yard. With a little effort, you're rewarded with a remarkable substance that improves soil quality, water retention, pH, biodiversity, nutrient values, plant growth, and much more.

I'm not completely fanatical in how I process my compost. For the most part I throw things on the pile, add water when it gets a little dry, mix it up every now and then to introduce oxygen to the microbes, and wait for it to turn dark and lovely. It's pretty simple.

By composting, I feel I'm doing my part in reducing neighborhood waste, I'm improving the conditions in my garden, and I'm giving a place for delinquent microorganisms to spent their summer.

Think about it and join me with tea in the garden.

I'm a creature of habit, though I try to add at least one thing new to my activities each day. For more than 40 years, I've started the day with a nice cup of hot tea, preferably Earl Grey. It's usually accompanied by a light breakfast of homemade banana bread, an apple fritter, or a bowl of oatmeal if it's a cold morning. Always frugal, I abandoned tea bags years ago and now make my cup with Indian looseleaf tea that I buy at a local Greek market.

As the water heats, I fill my tea ball half full with the tea leaves. It begins to steep as I head out to fetch the morning paper, always accompanied by my faithful Chocolate Lab, Shaca. When we return, my morning beverage is ready; of course on snowy mornings the brew is a little stronger, in accordance with the time it takes to put on my boots and jacket and trek to the end of the driveway. A few too many scoops of sugar, sans milk, and the brew is complete. The final step in the process is to remove the tea ball from the hot, tea-infused water and dump the saturated leaves.

This is where I tend to veer away from the habits of most people who start their days similarly. I don't dump my tea leaves in the trash, I dump them in my compost bucket sitting next to the sink. It's not one of those fancy, charcoal-impregnated buckets you can pay too much for from a catalog or website. It's an empty plastic bucket that used to hold a margarita concoction to which you just add tequila. It now holds wilting lettuce leaves, the skins of cucumbers, gnawed corn cobs, tea leaves, and any other organic kitchen waste we throw in it.

I believe in compost. I believe compost can make any garden better. In our Rocky Mountain region with terrible natural soil, compost is imperative in improving growing conditions. Gardeners can buy bagged compost at garden centers or home improvement stores and they can buy bulk compost at rock yards or sand companies; I've done both.

But I prefer to make my own compost. It's much cheaper, it's easy, and it gives me the opportunity to recycle my yard and kitchen waste, rather than sending it to some landfill that's already overloaded. When my margarita bucket is full, I dump it on my compost pile. When I have a handful or more of weeds I've plucked from my gardening beds, I throw them on my compost pile. When I clean up the spent plants in the fall, I throw it all on my compost pile. I even go around the neighborhood and collect bags of leaves from my neighbors to throw on my compost pile.

You can compost almost anything organic. Eggshells and egg cartons, overripe peaches and the cardboard box they came in, bird-pecked apples and pruned apple tree branches can all go into a compost pile. The black peels from the bananas in my bread are always visible in my bucket and on my pile.

The concept is quite simple: find a area near your garden and start dumping organic stuff. The science of composting is more complex and I'll cover that in another blog, but the basics make it easy for anyone to do. And I encourage you to do it, if you aren't already a composter. You don't need to buy expensive activators and you don't need to buy expensive plastic systems; you can, but a pile in a corner of your yard will work just fine for starters.

Mix "browns" and "greens" as you do it. The "browns" are organic pieces high in carbon, typically dried leaves or sticks or newspaper or brown grass. The "greens" are fresh organic pieces high in nitrogen, typically freshcut grass or rotting fruit or most kitchen waste. The mix of carbon and nitrogen creates a vacation themepark for microorganisms that naturally live in the soil and on the plants. The microrganisms begin the process of decomposing the organic matter and in time will produce a beautiful dark brown, almost black, product that works wonders for your garden.

Compost doesn't smell bad, in fact it has an earthy smell that reminds me of a meadow deep in a forest. The leaves and needles in a forest are decomposing naturally in the same basic way as a compost pile. You take this natural process and control what decomposes in the shelter of your yard. With a little effort, you're rewarded with a remarkable substance that improves soil quality, water retention, pH, biodiversity, nutrient values, plant growth, and much more.

I'm not completely fanatical in how I process my compost. For the most part I throw things on the pile, add water when it gets a little dry, mix it up every now and then to introduce oxygen to the microbes, and wait for it to turn dark and lovely. It's pretty simple.

By composting, I feel I'm doing my part in reducing neighborhood waste, I'm improving the conditions in my garden, and I'm giving a place for delinquent microorganisms to spent their summer.

Think about it and join me with tea in the garden.