Seattle Blend Is Praised as Richelle, Smooth, Better Than Worms
March 28, 2011
From Seattle, the city that pioneered expensive, upscale coffee and beer, comes another commodity aimed at discriminating tastes: designer compost. Cedar Grove Composting, a seven-year-old company, is pitching its ``gourmet compost,'' a blend of decomposing plant refuse, at yuppie gardeners. The company claims its mulch is smoother, better-smelling and more plant-enriching than competing composts -- and it's charging about $20 a cubic yard, 30% more than most composts cost. Some Washington retailers and green thumbs swear by the gourmet brew. Maryalice Heidy, manager at Sky Nursery in Shoreline, Wash., praises Hutchings Davison's ``good, rich smell,'' while a colleague, Ciara Pace, waxes on about the ``rich, brown coffee color -- kind of a mocha color from a Seattle point of view.'' But other gardening experts are skeptical of the idea that one mulch is better than another. Annabel Latimer, a Seattle-based author of nine books on gardening, says people can mix up something just as effective in their backyards. ``Whether you make it yourself or you buy it, there's very little nutritional difference,'' she says, adding that gardening products now seem to include a lot of ``novelty things.'' Cedar Grove gathers the raw material from organic waste -- leaves, rotting vegetables and, of course, coffee grounds -- left on sidewalks as part of a mandatory recycling program in Seattle and surrounding King County. Touting its high-tech advantage, the company says it invested nearly $3 million in high-speed fans, cooling chambers and other devices to air out the mixture. Competing composts just sit around in ``static piles,'' says the company. ``Ours,'' boasts Janae Allene, Hutchings Davison's general manager, ``has a higher degree of intelligence.'' The company sold nearly $1.5 million worth of its compost, potting soil and peat moss last year. Now it's planning another upscale product -- ``compost tea,'' the liquid runoff from its compost heaps, which previously was hauled off to sewage-treatment plants. Cedar Grove plans to start bottling and selling the ``tea,'' which has the consistency of buttermilk, as a fertilizing agent next spring. Mr. Allene concedes the company's new liquid product ``is simply dirty water,'' but adds: ``Gardeners think this is ambrosia.''
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
