Compost adds to fruitful West Side gardens

By Jeff Pawlak and Brittney Singletary
Bengal News West Reporters

As the weather warms up in Buffalo, so does the composting effort across the West Side. While most of America tosses away its yard waste and kitchen scraps, food markets and farmers on the West Side band together to provide compost to nourish the city’s farms and gardens.

         Composting is a means of fertilization that reuses crops and other organic foods, particularly the scraps. Since farming can be difficult in the middle of the city, the West Side’s movement to provide fertilizer through composting has become an invaluable asset to urban farmers.

         “In the past few years, more and more folks have rallied around community gardens in Buffalo, which is really exciting,” said Nicole Dionne, a prominent community gardener. “Community gardens have the potential to be such a boon to a neighborhood—they can be a gathering space, a source of food, a break from the monotony of concrete and asphalt, a way to create a healthier urban environment, and something that allows folks to practice working together toward a common goal.”

Nicole Dionne, on West Side gardens

         Dionne is one of many urban farmers who receive  compost from Grassroots Gardens of Buffalo, an organization dedicated to agricultural growth in the city. Grassroots collects its compost from a variety of sources, from produce markets to some of the West Side’s largest gardens, before parceling it out to local farmers in need of additional fertilization; particularly during Buffalo’s chilly spring season.

         Grassroots isn’t the only program spearheading the compost movement. The Lexington Cooperative Market on Elmwood Avenue assists groups that manage urban farms, such as Grassroots, as well as the Massachusetts Avenue Project and farmers from the East Side. 

Lexington provides those farmers with organic materials from some of its   own products: the tops of carrots, the outsides of cabbages, even produce or vegetables that are past their due date.

         Lexington expects to increase its  compost supply as winter finally fades from Buffalo.

         “If you were to take a look at our produce section now in comparison to two months from now, it’s going to be way different,” said Tom Vrabel, a bookkeeping clerk for Lexington. “A lot of the stuff we have right now isn’t local, just because farmers can’t do much aside from apples and things like that, so that’s definitely going to be picking up a lot in the next couple months.”

         Lexington currently provides its   urban farm projects with compost between three-to-four days a week, but Vrabel hopes that the market can expand to a seven-day-supply soon enough.

         “I think that what a lot of grocery stores do and what they’ve done traditionally is they’ll just throw it into the garbage,” said Vrabel. “I mean, that’s wasteful when there’s people down the street who want to use it and would benefit from it and know that’s it’s kind of a higher quality because a lot of it is organic.”

         The compost movement also benefits the grocers who provide it. According to Vrabel, Lexington’s dedication to separating compost from its  trash has kept its  garbage containers from filling up quicker, saving  money since it  requires less garbage pickups.

         Much of the United States can’t claim that benefit. According to a report filed by the Environmental ProtectionAgency, the country sent approximately 26 million tons (67 percent) -  of its yard waste to landfills in the year 2012 alone.

         “If you take a look at nationwide organic waste statistics, you start to see why it's great that our city is starting to be proactive about this issue,” said Dionne. “A lot of folks will start out throwing that stuff into a landfill, but as you begin to think about and understand how different resources cycle through our environment, you realize that it makes more sense to figure out a way to re-incorporate all that organic waste back into the soil, where it will help create a healthy garden.”

         According to Dionne, several gardens are working with the city government to start a yard waste composting pilot program.

         “Compost is a valuable resource, while the stuff that gets trucked off to a landfill is a burden,” said Dionne. “I would like to see zero percent of our yard waste going to the landfill.”