What’s in the ground this week:

“Peaches in the Summer time, apples in the fall, if I can’t have local, organic fruit I won’t have none at all.”

This would have been the famous folk music adage if its creator would have ever had the displeasure of trying conventional, packaged fruit from thousands of miles away. We are in that very important part of the season where the peaches will soon be out of season and apples will replace them. So eat them up now. Just this past weekend, Sean Hoots hosted a peach party for some friends with every dish containing peaches, and I’ll be posting tips for cider pressing as the fall season emerges. And if you’ve begun exploring the world of preserving, then you’ll be able to enjoy peaches all year round. There’s no better way to enjoy the season than a peach or cider party.

What’s going on in sustainability:

The other day in the paper, I read an article about the first ever compost fueled energy initiative in the Bay Area. Basically, compost is collected from over 2,300 groceries and restaurants, undergoes a controlled microbial decomposition, and the methane gas produced generates electricity  to power a water treatment plant which serves 665,000 people in Contra Costa and Alameda counties.

As I’ve been advocating for years, it is not only irresponsible to bury materials in plastic bags far beneath the earth that would otherwise decompose in at most a few months if properly maintained, but it’s unbelievably wasteful and short sighted to not see these materials as one of our most important resources. The “real black gold,” as some farmers call it, organic compost is not only the most sustainable way to fertilize plants, but it is the most intricate part of soil maintenance that agriculture can rely on. As Tom Hilbert from High Fields institute in Vermont told a group of students I took on a tour, “To trace any failed society through out history, their decline was a result of their soil eroding.” Compost completes the cycle of food production by putting back in what was taken out of our soil. To survive as a species, we need to incorporate this advice of always replacing what we take into every aspect of life . As I explain to students, compost today is what recycling was twenty years ago. No one really understood it and it wasn’t available to lower income people. Well, we need to rectify this problem much quicker, and it will be difficult to do it in a city as much as it will be in the suburbs.

For more info on composting in a city, please visit www.chicagorecycling.org/composting. Chicago has one of the best metropolitan composting systems in the country.

Also, please visit www.compostingvermont.org and check out High Fields Institute for composting tips in less denser areas.

As I said, composting will be one of the most important issues that sustainable minded people must incorporate into their cities and their lives. Good luck.

-Nic