For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Organic Fertilizer or Toxic Sludge page and our Environment and Climate Resource page.

Guess what today is? You might guess May Day and, well, you’d be right. But it’s also the first day of International Compost Awareness Week! Woohoo! And… you lucky reader of this blog you… yours truly has been hired by the Center for Media and Democracy to blog about it.

To start out our celebration, unfortunately, I have a very sad story to share. You see, yesterday I went to help out in a garden in San Diego. The garden belongs to a man who has undergone a series of surgeries in the past year and while he and his wife love the fresh, homegrown food, he’s limited physically as he recovers. So I go over there every now and again to help him out. Yesterday I brought over a bunch of tomatoes, melons, and squash seedlings to plant and, as I entered the garden, I stopped dead in my tracks.

This garden is mostly organic. It’s an attempt at biointensive gardening, as described by John Jeavons in his book How to Grow More Vegetables… But there, next to the patch where we were planting the peppers, was a half-full open bag of Kellogg’s Amend.