Composting at Hawkswawney

I’ve always loved the up-Island spot where my friend Monina von Opel lives with her husband, Edward Miller. Their house, a graceful blend of post-modern and Japanese style, is perched atop a hill on 22 acres with dramatic 180-degree views of the Elizabeth Islands. On a clear day, you can see the bridge in Newport. Monina and Edward call their house “Hawkswawney,” from the Wampanoag, meaning a time of leisure and storytelling in the fall or Indian Summer, and also a “mood” word that describes dreams of hunting and flying like the lazy flight of birds of prey.

Monina was born in 1942 in New York City, where her parents had come in 1934 after fleeing the rise of Nazism in Europe. Her father died in a plane crash when she was four years old; two years later, her mother met and married Fritz von Opel, a charismatic automobile innovator and aviator who moved the family to Switzerland. “He was quite tough,” she tells me. “He taught water sports by throwing me into the water.” 

She was raised in Switzerland, schooled in England and Germany, and today her accent in English is a marvelous blend of the languages of her upbringing, with a French twist that comes, at least in part, from the years she worked in Paris for French Vogue. 

“It was the heyday of Helmut Newton and all these wonderful photographers,” she tells me. “I became the editor’s right hand for dealing with foreigners, because I spoke several languages. I worked on photo shoots doing styling and had great fun.” 

Later, when Monina and Edward Miller lived in the States, they had a weekend house in Pennsylvania. It was an easy commute to their work in New York City, but they never really got rooted in the community. Monina’s cousin, Diana Barrett, urged her to come to the Vineyard, and suggested that she meet Nancy Aronie, who could explain the Island to her. 

“Nancy introduced me to some people in the summer,” Monina says, “and I had the best time.” 

The Vineyard called her back time and again, and although she assumed she would only be a renter in order to free herself of the upkeep of a house, she was captured by the beauty of the home she and Edward finally bought. The people on the Island, their earthiness, led them, in 1998, to make the Island a full-time home. 

“It sounds ridiculous, but you can wear anything,” she tells me. “There's a kind of freedom — intellectual and physical freedom — a lack of social stratification, what club do you belong to … I love the diversity of the Island.” She added: “I love the stimulation that I get from all my different groups of friends and the political conversations. I was never engaged in politics before moving here. I am making up for lost time! And of course there’s rowing on Menemsha Pond, watching the sun rise, and kayaking with friends on Stonewall Pond and the full moon rise. It does not get any better.”

Love of art and photography has been central to Monina’s life, including on the Vineyard. She and Edward curated a stunning and extensive collection of art and photography for Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, amassing almost 800 donated works by year-round and seasonal Islanders to adorn the walls.

Monina instinctively looks for ways to protect and enrich places she loves, and she’s eager to talk to me about composting. She guides me out the front door to the area 50 feet from the house where the yard becomes woods. 

I think back to a lunch I had last summer with several women who were seriously worried about the Island after the loss of the IGI composting program they relied on. “Surely the towns can solve this,” we all agreed. (See Lucas Thors’ story on where public composting on the Island is heading.) For now, though, the most reliable way to deal with food waste is to compost it yourself. 

Monina expresses it this way: “I feel that for the environment, composting is just one little thing we can do that's relatively easy, and daily you're doing your little good deed. It gives me such pleasure to think of all those little worms having so much fun with all the delicious things I'm putting in there, and then I get back such wonderful earth. I put it everywhere in the garden, and everybody's so happy. … It's a wonderful circle.”

“It worries me seeing all these trucks on the boat filled with [food waste] going off Island,” she adds. We have to do something. It's our problem and we should deal with it.” 

She’s right, and food waste is particularly pernicious. When food rots in landfills, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide, contributing to atmospheric warming.

“My minor claim to fame environmentally,” Monina confides, “is in the composting department. For years in New York I took our food scraps to a German lady who collected compostable stuff at the Union Square Market. Imagine walking through Manhattan with a compost bucket! When the first Korean grocery store opened around the corner in the city, I noticed with horror how much food got thrown out…so I asked them to collect the scraps for me, and on Fridays we would take a bulging bag to our little country house…and compost it.” Later, she got her apartment building to compost, years before the city finally made residential composting mandatory this year. 

“It took a while,” she recalls, “but if New York City can do it, surely we can do it here on-Island. It can be done, it must be done! No excuses. However, it is surprisingly hard to get people to focus on the subject: disgust, lack of knowledge, laziness, fear of rats…who knows? If we could get even 25% of the Island to do this, it would make a difference. We can’t wait for some million dollar machine to arrive on the Island to do this for us…nature and the wigglies do it for free.” 

Monina’s compost bins, built 25 years ago, are still sturdy and working. She recommends two or three, depending on how much food you throw out. I expected them to be exuding a sour or rotten smell, but instead I lean in to inhale a pleasant, earthy aroma. The black soil inside them is rich, toasty, and beautiful. The entire arrangement — the wooden bins, the adjacent pile of leaves and grass cuttings, the worms inside working away and aerating the soil, her pitchfork to the side along with a canvas cover should it rain — is tidy and, well, perfectly lovely. When I ask about animals invading the compost at night, she isn’t concerned. “They come at night, but I never see them,” she says, sounding pleased that she’s helping little critters. 

Monina’s passion for composting extends even to “terramation,” or human composting. “That is what I shall do,” she says, “or rather, have my sons do. They can spread me around a young linden, and my energy will become part of a beautiful tree.” (Monina is working on a story for Bluedot exploring the notion of composting oneself after death.)

We wander down the mossy pathways on their land toward a large rock covered with lichen that evokes images of prehistoric animals and glacier movements. From there, we can see the two solar arrays in the field beyond. “This was a team effort, with Edward leading,” she tells me. “We were the first on the Island with this sort: the panels move, following the sun, so the output is always optimal.” 

Edward later provides the backstory.

“Our electric bill skyrocketed,” he says, “so I called Nstar, and asked why. They basically said, ‘That’s just the way it is.’ That irritated me. So I looked into solar. I was thinking of solar on the roof, but we have a hipped roof, and the long part wasn’t facing south. So I called Bob Fuller at Fullers Energy.” 

Fuller told him that they could do a system in the field, but it would take 72 panels to provide the electricity they needed. Alternatively, they could install a system (requiring only 48 panels) whose panels would follow the sun, changing angle sunrise to sunset and season to season. “The panels go flat at night and if the wind is high,” Edward says. “If it snows, they spin vertically.” Such a system, Fuller said, would be the first of its kind on the Island.

“I thought about it,” Edward says, “and figured: that would save me a lot of weed whacking.”

In the 12 years since installation, the system has more than paid for itself in energy cost savings. “It’s been a fantastic success,” Edward says. “We have two electric cars, and [they’re entirely] powered by this. And it doesn’t make any noise, like a windmill does. Just a tiny bit when it moves. We are very happy. We feel very green.”

Monina’s Simple Guide to Composting

Step 1:

Go to Gardener’s Supply and order two wooden bins. They are reasonably priced and easy to assemble. I have both going in the winter. Come spring, I put all the composted earth in one bin for garden use as I plant stuff, and use the other for my kitchen scraps. I eventually run out of ready compost, and then both bins “cook” for the summer. 

Step 2:

Order red wiggler worms. There are many sites that sell them, and they will arrive promptly on your doorstep, ready, willing, and hungry to go to work. 

Step 3:

Buy six bags of organic soil from your garden store (no styrofoam beads in it!), three for each bin, plus a pitchfork! You only need to buy this soil once to set up your system. 

Step 4:

Dump soil into your bins, making sure that there’s at least a foot of soil in the bottoms. Add your new red wiggly friends, who will enthusiastically do what they were born to do: digest your scraps. Dampen the soil if it has not rained in a while.

Step 5:

Have a bucket in your kitchen into which you throw all your scraps — no meat. Cut the scraps into small pieces. Keep a lid on it and empty it every day or so, and there will be minimal smell. I also hose it out every few days. If you have a fireplace, add a thin layer of ashes to the bottom of the scrap bucket. Ash absorbs odors and is good for the soil. If you don’t have ashes handy, you can sprinkle a little baking soda into the empty bin. Some people freeze their food scraps instead of keeping them in a bucket, and this works, too. 

Step 6:

Dump the contents into one side of your double bin. With your pitchfork, turn it over so the scraps are covered with soil. Neither flies nor rats will have the slightest interest in what lies under the soil cover. [Matthew Dix of North Tabor Farm says the ideal ratio is 70% “brown”— newsprint, leaves, grass clippings — to 30% vegetable scraps, which is why Monina keeps a pile of clippings next to her bins.] When one side is full,  start on the other side, using some of the perfect compost you just created to stimulate the new side. Decomposition happens faster in the summer than winter. Your compost  — a rich, black soil additive known as “black gold” — might be ready in as few as 10 days, depending on the temperature. Then you can enjoy knowing that you are no longer clogging up the ferry with truckloads of food that will end up in landfill, where it is useless, toxic and wasted. Perhaps you will find it easier to make a ferry reservation when there are fewer trucks! One can hope. 

If you don’t have a garden, any friend who does would be more than happy to have this precious soil; otherwise they’re paying for it at the garden center. Take it as a dinner gift instead of flowers! Or find a tree you love and scatter it around. (You can also check with any of our farms to see if they’ll take it). 

Important miscellanea: 

• Your worms will multiply on their own. But: remember that you have to “feed” them with your scraps.
• Don’t worry that your compost will be “icky.” A few years ago, for a treasure hunt, we buried a bag of coins at the bottom of one of our compost bins. Nobody hesitated to dig down looking for it. That is how light, fluffy and delicious smelling the soil becomes. And, the children especially liked the wriggly worms. 
• Rats: People immediately think that a compost heap will attract rats. But we’re already surrounded by rats, whether you compost or not — you just don’t see them here in the country. Rats are good citizens; they clean things up. We should be grateful. I keep my bins at a distance from my house, and though I assume that rats explore them at night, I have never seen one near or — God forbid!— inside our house. You can discourage them by tossing a little perfect soil from your “ready” bin into the one where you’re putting your scraps, and stir it up a bit with your pitchfork. Rats like clean leftovers, not leftovers covered with soil. So, let’s relax about rats. I live in harmony with mine. Don’t let rats discourage you from composting!

Recommended Reading:

Let it Rot: The Gardener's Guide to Composting (Third Edition) (Storey's Down-To-Earth Guides) by Stu Campbell, available on Amazon and on Bookshop.