YUCK! - Disgusting sickly-red worms, black, filthy smelly dirt, stinking garbage. Who would ever want to get close to the stuff!

I do. Let me tell you why.

In the first place completely composted earth is sweet smelling - clean and fresh. The end products of this natural process are the stuff that plants thrive on - far better than anything any chemical company can come up with. Why? - because the natural processes contain ingredients and chemical complexes industry has yet to discover.

Check it out - how many years has it been since vitamins were discovered? How about enzymes, how about riboflavins, how about any of the hundreds of health additives appearing on store shelves throughout the world.

All these and more existed long before we discovered them. How reasonable is it to now assume that we have discovered all there is? Each time a new one is discovered we assume that’s it - we know all about it. And a few months later another ingredient in our food chain is discovered, and again we think this is it, there are no more. No way, Jose. There will always be something we don’t know about. And this is the wonderful thing about compost. It’s all there, whether we know about it or not.

Consider this: Here in my hand is the rind of a papaya about to go into my pile. Where is it from? Hawaii? Philippines? India? Mexico? What kind of soil was it grown in? What kinds of fertilizers - natural and synthetic  - have been applied? How old is this soil? Is it in a volcanic area? What was grown in it before Papayas? Just think of the history and travel this rind has gone through in all its reincarnations. Whatever that history has been, it’s all here in my hand now. And when I put it in the compost pile, I’ll be garnishing the benefits of that history and pass it on to whatever I grow.

Here are potato skins - from where? Safeway, of course - but where before that? Idaho, Ireland, San Salvador? Canada? Again, what went into producing those potatoes - whatever it is, it will soon be part of the potatoes I grow from these skins once they go through the compost pile.

Got the picture? By using composted earth in my garden I am gleaning the riches of the world. I am collecting all the nutrients, vitamins, minerals, dibasic Calcium Phosphates, Beta Carotenes, Ferrous fumarates (I’m reading off the back of my multivitamin jar) - whatever exists anywhere and everywhere on the globe I have a chance of including in my menu. Here are cuttings from a pineapple, here are egg shells, here apple cores, discarded cabbage leaves, shells of beans and nicely prepared foods which were not eaten. Here are fish parts - from which ocean, near what continent? What a blessing! What a gift! I could never assemble these. nutrients all at the same time - this variety - this diversity - I couldn’t even buy them - and here they are - and all FREE!

I can understand fear arising from this recital of sequences, such as deadly viruses, pathogens, heavy metals, all the bad things might be in there, too. And not knowing all there is to know about such things, I can only say I feel a lot better having it all processed through nature’s natural composting cycle - those purifying processes that remove or transform such stuff. Also, the fact that I include in my garbage, ingredients from all over the world compared to only one single source, leads me to feel more confident that I have not included a concentration of anything harmful from any single source. But if you’re still worried, call the City of Redding’s Recycling center and ask for a typical chemical report of the ingredients in their compost. It’s going to be a lot more complex than anything you have in your own backyard, and even this complexity will reveal a clean product. But what’s going on inside these compost piles?

Take the worms themselves. Would you believe their waste products are the purest thing you can find as far as plant food is concerned? Can you separate the thought of your own waste products from those of this worm? There’s a huge difference. Look at it this way. In water treatment, aerobic bacteria are used to purify waters because their waste products are pure water (H20) and carbon dioxide (C02). What could be cleaner than that? I don’t know the chemical analysis of worm castings, but I do know you pay a lot of money to buy the stuff. It is pure gold when it comes to raising vegetables. When I think of the purifying power of a compost pile (including high pathogen-­killing heat) I have no fear of being poisoned by the foods I raise from this nourishment.

But if you insist on getting more technical, let’s talk a little Latin. There are the mesophilic decomposers, bacteria which thrive at between 50 and 113 degrees Farenheight, then the thermophilics which love to chew on what’s left from the mesophilics and raise the temperature to 113 to 170 degrees F. Then there are the fungi, yeasts and molds and actinomycetes - these latter create the humus, release nitrogen, carbon, and antibiotics. Then there are the macro organisms like mites, millipedes, worms, rotifers, nematodes, enchytraeids. This is like a battleground, with the first battalions coming in waves upon the enemy, weakening their defenses, then the second waves come in, with different weapons and further reduces them, then succeeding waves each with their unique weapons, techniques, strategies - until voila! you have pure sweet-smelling humus soil loaded with goodies for your plants and vegetables to pass on to you.

What a marvel of nature - what complexes and transformations go on inside this mini-universe! I am humbled by the power I release when with the vast help of nature I tend my compost pile. Just the thought of being able to transform something that is a smelly, useless, undesirable waste, into something that is sweet-smelling nourishment for my table is a marvel, and a reason to be thankful that such exists.

Robert Rock is north state writer.