COMPOST, NYC CITY STYLE

No, not like this luscious pile curtained by morning glory vines at the home of Nova & Kenneth Minnick in Oklahoma City, or this one in the Stonewall Public School garden in East Dallas TX.

It's always a struggle to compost in Manhattan with our limited space.
We can buy packs of real NYC composted garbage at the Union Square Greenmarket every Sat., produced by the lower East Side Ecology Project...

 or make our own, as I struggle to do in one of three ways:

Devoting precious closet space to a plastic bin housing red wiggler worms that eat my vegetarian kitchen waste and produce a lovely product euphemistically called 'worm castings'.

Co-opting 2 precious  EarthBoxes to produce compost outdoors,

or the overkill method, a huge composting bin which when loaded is always too heavy for me to turn by myself. This is my crop for the season, about 15 big trowels full, which I add to select containers, especially my roses. Yesterday was my first compost distribution day of the year.

Above, Rosa 'Harison's Yellow' on my roof garden, grown from a cutting, a gift from Stephen Scanniello. My roses obviously like my haphazard  system of nourishment; a little organic Rose-Tone when I think of it, a little compost when I have it, lots of water from the drip irrigation system which doesn't depend on me at all.