If you give a Gastro-Junkie a garden...

Then she's going to need some compost.

I've recently started a container garden on my patio. It's a clumsy thing, sloppy seedlings in broken rows, sprouting out of old fruit crates, black plastic buckets, mason jars, rubbermade containers. This is my first year gardening in earnest, and so I know I've already made mistakes. My tomatoes were planted hopelessly late in the season. I know I'm in trouble every time I see more skillfully grown seedlings for sale in the farmers market. They are monstrous, towering over my seedlings at home, making them look downright embryonic. My baby tomato plants will never bear fruit before frost, and yet I nurture them anyway. Mostly because I'm amazed I ever got them to germinate in the first place. Perhaps there is still hope for my summer squash.

Having this strange mixed up garden growing on my porch has done something unexpected for my cooking style of late, but not for the reason you'd think. Not because I've reaped any produce from my strange little vegetable patch. I will need at least another week or two before my lettuce and spinach will be ready for harvest, and who knows how long after that for the rest of it. But when I started my garden, I couldn't help but cringe inwardly every time I threw away a batch of coffee grounds or a broken eggshell. These things would end up in a landfill, I knew, when they could have just as easily been feeding my stunted tomatoes. So I did something I had been wanting to do for years, and started composting.

I want to state right now, for the record, that this could all go terribly wrong. I have what is essentially a rubbermade bin of food garbage and newspaper on my patio. I call it compost, and so I am, by association, a gardener, an environmentally conscious individual. But what if my compost doesn't...well...compost? What will I be then? A lady who saves her food garbage in a storage bin on her porch, stirring it, taking its inventory. Saving it for later. A crazy.

So obviously, it is extremely important that this little experiment yield something other than a plastic bin full of rotting food, and soon. I have found myself keeping track of what I have been tossing into my compost bin with a surprising level of intensity, and discovered that my contribution of leafy green vegetables paled in comparison to, well...coffee grounds. Conclusion? I consume a lot of coffee. And apparently, not nearly enough vegetables. I mean seriously, if my compost is undernourished, what does that say about my own diet? Nothing good.

It is a sad fact that my own nutritional well being, not to mention my love of cooking, is not enough to inspire me to eat more fruits and vegetables. Nope. in order to really do anything about my daily allowance of beta carotene, I've got to be saving my food scraps in a box on my porch. Sad but true. Since I noticed the sad lack of green in my compost bin, I have been concocting ways to produce as much vegetable garbage as possible with my dinner choices. Which, in turn, has lead me to craft much healthier dinners. Thinking the bin might be a little low on nitrogen? get some corn husks in there, tomato tops, basil stems, pepper ribs, jicama peels. Cream sauce? No thanks. I'd never be able to compost the leftovers.

I'm not proud. As a thinking adult, and as a food person, I should really be able to make responsible decisions about my green leafy vegetable to coffee ratio all by myself. But twenty six years of history and my own recent observations have proven otherwise, and so I will take a little inspiration where I can get it. And if a bin of rotting food garbage on my porch is what it takes to inspire me to cook healthy and eat more vegetables, well then so be it. So my advice for all of you self taught foodies who love to cook, but maybe don't love your veggies quite enough?

Start a garden.