Neighborhood Kids Rescue Compost

Since the neighbors refreshed the garden last December, the garden's compost barrel has been diligently maintained and filled with food scraps. One of the new rules for the updated system has been to match food bits with equal parts of leaves (this assists the composting process and masks the smell). Until now, there have been enough surrounding leaves on the ground from last fall ― but suddenly the adjacent leaf supply ran dry.

This was the kind of problem perfectly suited for some of the neighborhood kids. With trash bags in hand, they took to the challenge: five kids (for five dollars), how many leaves can you gather in five minutes?

The countdown began: three, two, one... go! They raced against the clock, filling up their bags with leaves from edges of the Springer St Tunnel (that's where the best caches of leaves could be found). And when the timer ran out, they piled together their individual bags into one extra large trash bag, filling it completely!

The next step was to deliver the collected leaves to the garden. The kids all biked up the hill to the community garden, where they emptied the bag next to the compost barrel. They all agreed this leaf pile should last through the spring (and produce the best compost in Greenville).

Just then, their neighbor Mariel came by to check on their progress. She was quite impressed by the number of leaves they had gathered! The kids curiously asked how these leaves would turn food scraps into compost ― Mariel had just the the answer. She brought out a bag of compost accelerator and explained how it enabled the bacteria to quickly break down the food and leaves into rich compost (perfect for the coming planting season).

Everyone took turns dumping spoonfuls of accelerator into the compost barrel, topping it off with water from a pail. They thanked Mariel for the lesson, took the five dollars from their neighbor Bennett, and then went back to play for the rest of the afternoon.