Living in the desert on the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, I was desperate to have a flower garden. I'm a flower junky. After four years with not much more than some cactus and ocotillo, the ugliest stick tree around, I decided I was going to create my oasis in the desert.

In my little village there was a severe shortage of compost materials available to work with, exactly none. No leafy trees, no grass clipping, nada. To top it off we had environmental regulations as to what we could plant or not plant due to protected cactus in my area. So I designed some planters as my front wall, filled them with sand and smuggled in gobs of topsoil from outside of Mexico.

I took a corner of my yard and started an underground compost pile by digging a hole and throwing in my kitchen scraps. Being the desert, it doesn't really compost as much as it dries up and hangs around. So I started watering it. When I built my house I had the kitchen, showers and washing machine collect in a grey water holding tank. It was with this water that I fed my compost pile.

The grey water also proved to be the best fertilizer I could ever have gotten. I actually didn't need the compost because the grey water made my plants go nutso. Eventually I gave up on the corner compost and stayed with my grey water because it provided the nutrients my plants needed. I had a massive morning glory vine that had thousands of blooms on it even in the intense summer heat.

So if you live in the desert, maybe you should consider grey water for compost.

Learn more about this author, Baja Raquel.
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