Yesterday, my little half-dozen carton of dried eggshells that I'd been accumulating over the past week was finally too full to hold even one more shell. I dumped them into my hand blender, ground them into tiny bits, added the rich calcium dust to the 'sweet' compost that I save, and brought it upstairs for my worms. I had a thousand things to do and didn't really have the five minutes it took me but it made me happy to stop to do it anyway. I remember when I was little and bringing smelly rotten food to our compost pile was the worst job you could get. You had to go out to the back yard, pull back the brambles, brave the bees and the terrible smell, and for what? I was never quite sure. But here, my hardworking worms will turn that compost into rich mulch and fertilizer for my plants and help me complete an important circle. Without them, I would have to bring down old, depleted dirt (and my kitchen scraps) the five flights of stairs, and carry new dirt and fertilizer back up again.

Sometimes gardening, especially in the city, seems like such a luxury, and talking about it feels like boasting and even preaching. Lucky me who has a rooftop where I can play in the dirt, using too much water and energy to produce a handful of grapes. But the other day I saw a sign that said "Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city, plus you get strawberries.” And it made me think about how gardening is a political act. Growing your own food, recycling your own waste, rejecting dependence, insisting on autonomy. No matter how small the scale.

And given a tiny urban garden, and the even smaller yield of food that it produces or refuse it consumes, it might seem quixotic or even naive to think that it has the slightest impact in this increasingly crazy world. It's easy to listen to those people who say that bringing a plastic bottle to the recycling bin is a waste of time as long as the huge polluting multinationals keep churning out plastic items by the billions.

But helping worms make compost so that your plants can grow better is more than just a literal revolution of death to life, it also helps me avoid lugging stuff up and down the stairs. And not only that, there is the effect that recycling (or a garden) can have in each of us, by forcing us to come down to earth, on a human scale, and witness the fascinating sequence of birth and growth and sex and disease and community and death and rebirth again in a tiny patch of earth in a pot on a roof in the middle of an urban jungle. That's why gardening is defiant, because it makes us stop still and question the convulsing cacophony of actions whirling around us, continuously pushing us to buy and mortgage and run around ever faster and instead pay attention to a bright orange pumpkin and the mold that threatens its survival. It allows us to be the change we want to see.

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Let me tell you the nuts and bolts of my worm composting. It's way easier than anyone would have you think. In contrast with hot composting, where you need enough mass to create the heat necessary to break down your food scraps (I composted an entire sheep in one of those once), you can do worm composting in a very small space. You can start with a bag of dirt, or coconut fibers, and some composting (not earth) worms from a friend (I'm happy to share). You don't need a special worm composter, any bucket will do. But the worms need air and there has to be drainage so they don't drown in the liquid that can accumulate. I bought a hard resin plastic modular compost bin from Aquilea Jardin in Tàrrega. Make sure you get the platform because you don't want the compost directly touching your roof or terrace. You also need mild temperatures. You have to keep your worms from freezing or cooking. Mine are right on the roof in corner that gets the least sun (although there is still a fair bit in July and August). The shadier the better.

I collect food scraps (wilted greens, coffee grounds, crushed eggshells, and melon rinds, how my worms love melon rinds! and lots of other stuff but not meat or bread or citrus or onions or garlic) in a glass lidded bowl in my kitchen and when it's full, I bring it upstairs, dig a small hole in the compost, dump the scraps in and cover them up to keep the flies at a minimum. I also put old dirt from used pots into the bin (though I have a separate bin for dead plants, leaves and branches that take longer to break down). And then the worms do their thing. When I first got them, I would go check on them a lot, but now I mostly leave them be. It's another part of my lazy-gardening strategy. I do one tiny thing at the beginning, and the garden then does its own thing. I confess I still go visit them once in a while, watching the slimy, slithering worms work happily making my compost. If you look closely you can see worms of all sizes, and even small translucent orange eggs. I'm happy to share a couple with you if you want to grow your own colony (and I link to my subscriptions, but I'll give them to you even if you don't).

To use the compost, many people sift their worms away from the dirt with special screens or have complicated five tier worm composters that supposedly the worms climb up through leaving clean castings at the bottom. I don't work that hard. I just dig up some of the compost from the bin and mix it with some dirt, and if some of the worms go into the new pot, I don't worry too much about it. 

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Don't worry about the pumpkin, I don't really think the mold is threatening its survival, though I am keeping an eye on it. I have a lot of fungus problems in the garden (oh, my beautiful shrunken raspberries) so it worries me, but the pumpkin is holding on.

Oh! And I had a wonderful visit from a common waxbill the other day, the same one that I told you about. I had been trying to photograph it on the roof a few days earlier with no luck, but had left my camera on my desk, so that when it came back, right outside my living room window, on some bamboo and morning glories I used to hide from the tourists across the street, I was able to get some much better pictures. Build it, and they will come!