Can I Compost That? Organic Gardening Composting Tales from the 1950s

Organic gardeners in the 1950s took their organic wastes very seriously (Organic Gardening and Farming, July 1954).

“Compost-minded crusaders.” That’s what Sir Albert Howard called organic gardeners in March 1947, and it was an accurate depiction. Organic gardeners in the 1940s and 1950s thought about compost all the time. They couldn’t drive or walk down the road without keeping their eyes open for possible sources of organic wastes to add to their backyard compost heaps.

“Organic gardening has made us a family of scavengers,” Mrs. George R. Connor of Norristown, Pennsylvania admitted to Organic Gardening in November 1953. “We go miles to collect corncobs, sawdust, leaves, straw and manure!” The neighbors raised an eyebrow when a circus came to town and the Connor family collected “baskets of elephant manure to add to our compost pile.” But by the end of the summer, she said, “Neighbors no longer laugh, but are glad to accept our extra large vegetables while we thank our friends, the elephants!”

When the South Jersey Organic Gardening and Farming Club decided to hold a composting demonstration in 1951, they scoured their neighborhoods for every possible type of organic waste they could find. Club members “called on hairdressers for human hair; breweries for spent grain and yeast; supermarkets for vegetable trimmings; householders for vacuum emptyings and lawn rakings; nearby farmers for straw and manure.” People were happy to donate their organic wastes, and they were curious, too. What were these crazy gardeners going to do with them?

When the day came for the composting demonstration, the president of the garden club stood atop a straw bale, explaining what was happening as club members layered all these organic wastes into compost piles. “Believe it or not, local people who had never heard of organic gardening before, and who came politely in their Sunday best, left the gathering early and returned in their garden clothes and with pitchforks,” Mrs. C. L. Sweeny wrote in a letter to Organic Gardening. “The garden gate has been swinging steadily ever since…and the local paper really did the thing up brown for us, three columns wide!”

Generally, outsiders watched this craze for collecting organic wastes with quiet bemusement, humoring these strange folks who were willing to take trash off their hands for free. That’s how most people viewed a Washington, DC organic gardener by the name of Tom, who kept two bushel baskets in the trunk of his car to collect leaves for his compost pile. Then one day in November 1951, while Tom was filling his baskets with leaves like usual, two policemen suddenly came up and told him what he was doing. Fixated only on the promising piles of leaves, Tom hadn’t realized that he was right outside the White House! “Look, bud, if you like to go around filling baskets with leaves, okay—fill ’em. We don’t mind,” one of the policemen finally said. “But don’t fill ’em around the White House.”

Despite such occasional altercations, the organic gardeners kept at their strange hobby of collecting organic wastes and turning them into compost. That’s because compost worked so well. A. E. Fortner from Chesterfield, Missouri, reported in the July 1952 issue of Organic Gardening that his compost-grown tomatoes weighed two to three pounds each. “I must say that we are sold completely on compost for quantity, quality, taste and flavor with all the produce we grow,” he said. Thousands of other Organic Gardening subscribers wholeheartedly agreed—and kept an eye out for any promising organic wastes to add to their compost piles.