Time For A Garden

The first full year we were in Waitsburg, we started a compost pile. We placed a countertop container by the kitchen sink and put everything we might normally put down the garbage disposal or in the trash can into this container: vegetable peels, coffee grounds, fruit cores, burnt toast, you name it.

Using pallets gifted by a generous neighbor, we set up three bays in the backyard: one for new compost, one for aging compost and one for straw (from a kind, local farmer), leaves and grass clippings to mix with every batch of new kitchen waste.

When the Whetstone was still open, we would even get vegetable waste from their pizza kitchen and add it to the pile. Combined with regular recycling of paper, plastic, cardboard, glass and cans at the big dumpster across from Preston Park and in Walla Walla, we found we only had a small kitchen bag of non-recyclable trash each week for the city garbage can.

Only when we do a home-improvement project or unwrap holiday presents that still come with excessive packaging do we come close to filling the city can.

If Waitsburg had a landfill space-reduction incentive program, we'd be due for some credit, say, against our utility bill. An idea, perhaps?

We're not trying to boast here. Many conscientious Touchet Valley residents recycle and compost much of their household waste. But we found it remarkable and satisfying to learn how effective it is in cutting back our contribution to the waste stream.

And a year after we started this routine, we have something else that's very welcome: rich, dark compost that we're going to use for our first vegetable garden here.

This is an exciting prospect. With the price of gas and produce going up, we now have a financial incentive to set aside a portion of our yard for a food-producing garden, using the compost from our first year of recycling kitchen waste and adding to it the manure from local friends who have natural compost at their farm.

It's also exciting because we're not the only ones doing this. An increasing number of friends and acquaintances are dedicating time and energy to what many farmers in the Touchet Valley have been doing for generations: growing their own food or food for local restaurants.

In a couple of weeks, we'll witness the groundbreaking for the Blue Mountain Station designed to process local, natural and organic crops right here in Dayton and promote food tourism.

Rural Green Youth Enterprises is expanding its gardening program this year and hoping to sell its produce on Main Street (see page 6), while the Waitsburg Ministerial Association's new food bank wants to pay more attention to gleaning unpicked fruit and other foods.

Some area residents who don't have the time or the land to start gardens are participating in CSAs (consumer-supported agriculture, see page 1) like the one started last year at the Monteillet Fromagerie.

We strongly encourage this move toward local food sourcing to help bring down the cost of living, reduce the burden on the environment from food trucking and bring us back to the self-sustaining agricultural roots of this area's pioneers.

According to one source in the sustainable-living movement, the average carrot travels 1,838 miles to reach our table. Locally grown foods can provide the freshness, nutrients and vitamins that processed, frozen or canned foods can't.

The proposed Fridays At The Park/Wait's Market can be a great outlet for local food producers and gardeners.

With unique initiatives like the Blue Mountain Station along Highway 12 and Rural Green Youth Enterprises with its proposed store front on Main Street, this valley could easily become a showcase for rural, sustainable living in an age when it's politically, environmentally and financially smart to grow and consume as much of our own food as possible.