Crisis in the compost heap

Sunday, 16 November 2025

Mike White is a senior writer and columnist.

OPINION: It’s a strange and ironic time of year in our garden.

On one hand, we are maternity nurses: driven by the urges of spring, we enthusiastically coddle and plant an array of seedlings that will flourish over the long and hot days of summer.

On the other hand, we are frenzied killers, ruthlessly rooting out villainous weeds, which seem to have an energy unpossessed by anything worthwhile or fruitful.

Weeds obviously contain a steroid that, if harnessed and distilled into a tincture, could transform us all into super-athletes, while still consecrated as “plant-based”.

I grab, I tug, I dig, I uproot.

But still they come, unkillable, unstoppable, like a swarm of Russian drones.

The battle ebbs and flows, but is never won.

However, the biggest problem we have lies at the bottom of the garden.

We have a crisis in our compost.

Not the quality or quantity of it, but, well, the socio-economic state of it.

Last weekend, my partner returned from our large compost heap, a bucket of decomposed goodness in her hand, and stabbed a garden fork through my everyman pretensions.

“Our compost is so bourgeois,” she declared.

Having assessed the recent contributions from our kitchen, she reeled off the signs that we were not, in fact, socialist soldiers in the war of egalitarianism, but sad-arsed snobs.

“Avocado stones, free-range eggshells, tamarillo skins,” she began.

Coffee grounds from the temperamental Italian espresso machine. Fair trade banana skins. The bottom bits of asparagus spears.

I listened to the litany of luxury. She was right.

The compost heap was a scandalous class crime scene. If the the equality police ever swooped, they would quickly erect a tent over it, surround it with plastic “EMERGENCY” tape, and officials in white coveralls and masks would intermittently emerge carrying bags of evidence.

What I had previously proudly seen as an admirable contribution to sustainability, now became a shameful indication of indulgence, a measure of how far we had strayed from the proletariat.

I’ve already abased myself over my bourgeois love of skiing.

But now, shrill from the corner of the quarter acre, comes the mocking cry of the compost: “You have become a wanker.”

Oh dear.

Is it worth trying to mount a defence and explain myself?

Well, probably as pointless as jabbering desperately in front of a panel of party elites during a Chinese political purge, in an effort to avoid a re-education camp, or worse.

But for the record, for my own conscience-salving, for the hope of a reduced sentence from the self-appointed critics of comfort, these things should be noted.

Avocados are a weakness of mine. I’m sure it’s actually a medical condition. And whoa, they’re amazing for you.

Likewise tamarillos, which are seasonal gems, and their wincing tartness tells you they’ve got to be flush with vitamins.

Bananas are for potassium. Or was it magnesium? I dunno - I read something somewhere about them being vital for middle-age. It sounded really believable.

The asparagus comes from Graeme and Heather’s place down the road. None of the withered disgraces from New World, theirs is picked each morning, tied into an irregular bundle with string, and left in a chilly bin at the end of their drive.

Free-range eggs? Well, given the battery egg industry is a barely-concealed cruelty in a supposedly compassionate society, it’s the least anyone can do.

And that leaves us with the rounds of coffee grounds, ejected from the temperamental Italian espresso machine.

The machine is a wonder. Simple, shiny, a design classic.

In its stainless steel body, however, each morning I see a reflection of inadequacy and failure, when I make my partner a coffee.

You see, the machine was a present from her previous partner. It was brought back to New Zealand by hand, it was handed to her with love. It was, and remains, the most stupendous of gifts.

If the house caught fire, my partner would flee leading the old dog to safety, with photos under one arm, and the espresso machine under the other.

Each morning, as I press down on the machine’s arm to allow black oily goodness to drip from it, and froth the milk from the attached wand, the machine burbles and steams.

What I hear, however, is it hissing: “He was better than you…”

It’s a useful daily reminder to up my game, to try to match my predecessor. And to be an incomparable barista at the same time.

Hence the coffee grounds that populate the compost, circular tablets of attempted adequacy, now jettisoned into a mix of fruit skins and vegetable offcuts.

In the coming months, they will all combine and be transformed into the dark goodness we mine to fertilise the vegetable garden.

But in the meantime, they are just new voices in the chorus condemning me from beneath the cypress tree.

“Middle class backslider.”

“Capitalist puppet.”

“Wanker.”