Sometime in early spring there comes that first scent of fresh earth, an essence that drives farmers to their tractors and gardeners to their hoes.
There is a day in March when winter loses its grip on the soil and allows a shovel some purchase.
As if someone flipped a switch, a great energy begins to stir. Stand stock-still and you'll feel it quaking beneath your feet.
This is a time of great eagerness, when the urge to dig and plow must be tempered by the threat of compaction. Seeding must wait for a soil that is dry and warm, like a cake fresh from the oven. But for those who stack leaves and save table scraps and turn piles of waste all winter, this is also a time of harvest.
Last year's withered vines and bolted lettuce and spoiled spuds have meshed for months with grass trimmings and apple peelings and coffee grounds in an organic stew riddled with worms, bugs and tiny microbes.
At the bottom of this mass, if all has gone well, there will be shovelfuls of rich compost for spreading across fields or gardens, for mulching trees and roses, or for digging into the soil as a fertilizer. Dark and crumbly and odor-free, this soft soil is the same compost that goes for $8 a bag at the garden center or $100 a load from farm suppliers.
There is nothing really new about compost, even though it's discovered each year in the gardening magazines or by farmers looking for organic alternatives to chemical inputs. You can buy jars of compost starter, long-necked compost thermometers and special bins that make turning compost as easy as turning a crank. The end result will be the same rich material that helped grow trees that shaded dinosaurs.
The steps to making compost are spelled out in academic texts and best-selling hardbacks and slender how-to booklets. Mix together the right amount of "brown" materials like autumn leaves with nitrogen-rich "greens" like the leavings from last night's dinner and you'll engender a heat-producing, pathogen-killing, sweet-smelling mass that will convert this week's waste to a wonderful compost in just a few months. Turn it regularly and keep it moist and you'll get the same job done in half the time.
Take the same material, or anything organic for that matter, and stick it in a shallow trench or hole and you'll get the same results. The process may take longer – a lot longer, in some cases – and could produce
foul-smelling odors and evil-looking slime. Wild animals may dig into it and insects may swarm around the pile, but the composting process will continue nonetheless.
Some of the best compost, in fact, can be found in the abandoned pig sties and chicken coops and horse corrals of old farmsteads. Piles of manure, left to weather and microbes, will turn to compost in good time.
However it is derived, compost is a welcome supplement to early spring. It brings the remains of seasons past to bear on new growth. And it gives the grower eager for spring planting a place to bury a shovel.