Reusefulness

In praise of doing it yourself.

by Brian Howard

For this week’s Summer Book Quarterly, I reviewed Mark Frauenfelder’s excellent Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, and the book’s been rattling around in my head ever since I put it down.

Frauenfelder founded the tech/culture blog Boing Boing and is the editor in chief of Make, the DIY magazine that teaches you how to turn VCRs into cat-feeders and bell jars into beehives. Frauenfelder loves the latest gadgets, but he also holds true to old-school beliefs like fixing old things rather than simply buying new ones.

Made By Hand is all about his own transformation from consumer to maker/fixer/figure-it-outer. Once the proverbial lightbulb went off in his head, Frauenfelder made a list of things he wanted to do himself: killing his lawn (and replacing it with a garden), making a still, carving wooden spoons, etc.
It got me thinking about my own to-do-it-myself list. Not that I had an actual list at the time, but if I’d had the forethought to make one, I’d have knocked a few things off in recent years: plane and install an antique door; brew beer; bake bread; brew sweet tea; grow vegetables from seed. Of course, as a relatively newish homeowner, there are about a thousand things I’d like to get done around my house. Some of which will require the dreaded HAE approach (hire an expert is the antithesis of DIY), but many of which demand the courage to screw it up on the first try. On my list: install a dimmer switch; reroute my downspout; preserve tomatoes; make pickles. But the thing that’s crawling around in my brain, night and day, is composting.

I’ve been toting around The Rodale Book of Composting for about a month now, waiting to find enough undistracted time to burrow into it. I got far enough in the last week to realize just how much of what I throw away — with the trash or down the disposal — could be spared from the landfill or the sewer. Beyond kitchen scraps, leaves and newspapers, there’s hardly anything that can’t be composted: Stuff like slag from iron smelting (not that I do much of that since I quit the Ren Faire), dried blood from slaughterhouses (I’m cutting back), felt waste, fish scraps, granite dust, ash and even hair can all go into the ground.

My composting book is primarily for people with yards, though there is a section for city folk. My challenge: Figure out which of the 5 unused square feet of my concrete South Philly back patio should house a big bin full of worms and trash. Though maybe it’s not even that big a problem. In discussing my green-thumbed late great-grandfather with my mother over the weekend, she revealed one of his gardening secrets: “He’d take his [biodegradable] garbage and just bury it in the garden. Even in a sandy beach town like Keansburg, he had great soil.” I think Frauenfelder would have liked him.