Rotting organic matter inspires this collection of personal anecdotes, garden science, and historical digressions.

We meet the author behind a coffee shop in tony Westport, Connecticut, as he's gleefully putting a garbage bag full of coffee grounds-still warm!-in his car. This brown gold is on its way to Smith's compost pile, where its nitrogen will transform fall leaves into rich soil. His dumpster diving isn't just a way to get free nutrients for his garden. By liberating these spent beans and reusing them, he's keeping them out of an already overflowing landfill. He may also be keeping leaves out of a landfill; yard waste makes up a rather shocking amount of all that we throw away in this country. Smith's investment in his own patch of land extends to a concern for the environment generally, and his sense of alarm is woven throughout the text. But this diary of a gardener's year is more than a call to action. Smith's composting career began when he was an editor at a food magazine, and his cooking colleagues started giving him their kitchen scraps. The prose here is stylish but never showy. Smith's sentences have the patient pacing of someone attuned to the seasons. Any observant and curious writer is likely to go off on tangents, and this writer certainly does. There are quotations from Wendell Berry and Henry David Thoreau, but Smith also shares Natalie Goldberg's meditation on mental composting from Writing Down the Bones. Anyone claiming to be any kind of authority on compost would reveal themselves as a fraud without a chapter on worms, but not every author will mention that Cleopatra declared earthworms sacred or that the landmass that we call North America was denuded of earthworms during the last ice age, only returning with European settlers. Even when he offers glimpses of his personal life beyond the garden, Smith's sense of time is connected to the state of his compost.

Part memoir, part backyard gardening guide, and altogether charming.

- Kirkus Reviews

Smith's wonderful writing skills and equally sharp powers of observation make this book a must for a 'winter day by the roaring fire' read. You will be completely entertained and end up fully educated. - Jeff Lowenfels, co-author, Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web

Scott Smith captures the wonder of what happens below our feet, and at a faster pace in a compost pile, without straying into the fanciful or magical thinking that infuses too much of the compost literature. - Keith Reid, author of Improving Your Soil: A Practical Guide to Soil Management for the Serious Home Gardener

There can never be enough books about the vital subjects of compost and soil. We need everyone to think about the vital role soils play, and composting in all its forms is so important to build good soil health. - Nicky Scott, author of How to Make and Use Compost