Letter from Lee Robbins, MD

Composting Takes Patience, Creativity

I enjoyed reading Maureen Murrray’s crisis of recycling and congratulate her on her son’s wedding and environmental consciousness. However, rather than the metaphysical crisis portrayed—which was fun to read—it represents the green-industrial-complex clashing with woke, and I feel it reflects corporate fashions toward nature.

I recently left a great cup of coffee from Freight Wheel Café in Hartwick in my cup holder and in a week it all liquefied, a mess. It’s not all that tough! I have nothing to say about clear corn plastic cups, but corn packing peanuts melt on the tongue! Silicon in the structure of bamboo adds toughness and slows breakdown.

I moved to Hartwick in the 1980s from Manhattan with 300 snakes, but no lab rodent delivery. At the time, I went before the Bassett Research Institute but, fearing the publicity of supporting snakes, I was refused the surplus as I had received at the New York City Health Department for years, and the young rodents ended up in the Bassett incinerator, more socially acceptable than feeding my snakes. Protein is precious! Like the U.S. during the war of 1812, I was forced to become self-sufficient in food production, calling myself “Mouse-EYE Ranch,” a breeding colony of 70 cages of mice and rats to support my artistic color breeding of harmless snakes.

I went through weekly bales of pine shavings from Niles at Agway, Cooperstown. The mouse bedding, soaked in urine plus droppings, gave nitrogen to the carbon of the pine shavings. Major mounds of compost built up behind the barn and started my permaculture garden. As Chief Justice John Roberts said this week, “it’s still the same Constitution,” and it’s still the same carbon and nitrogen regardless of accompanying package information suitable for lawyers, corporations, and political correctness.

Now, without rodents or snakes, my tortoises recycle green waste from Price Chopper and I compost soiled bedding of newspaper and hay, adding nitrate-rich fish water from koi and goldfish color breeding. This supports 500-square-feet of a raised bed experimental garden. My kitchen waste through a redworm colony feeds the fish as well.

The worms also feed Felix, the spotted salamander who showed up covered in the tungsten dust on my blacksmith shop floor during a snowy November night, when I was making art for the Cooperstown Art Association Christmas show. He detoxed for three days in his water dish and he now eats worms from my fingers three and a half years later. The finished worm castings nourish my artichokes and lemon and lime trees.

Not quite the crisis! A pile of 140 settings of bamboo dinnerware—run over by a lawn mower and given a sheltered location to keep it moist and accepting of kitchen scraps—might take two to three years to become black gold. Fence it off if you fear a bear invasion versus a quick NIMBY! Patience is a virtue!

Lee Robbins, MD
Town of Hartwick Medical Officer, ER physician
and former EMS Medical Director Otsego County