Who doesn’t want their compost to get hot?
To really swing, baby?
The combination of leftover food and coffee grounds is merely the foundation, though, like a sturdy rhythm section.
You go and add some rabbit scat and it’s like Coltrane stepping up to solo — your garden is going to take giant steps.
But Halpern doesn’t just want a good garden.
Considering he now grows most of his own food, he needs it.
So here’s hoping that, come summer, this thing once again sprouts all over the place like an Ornette Coleman record.
Halpern and his partner, Gail Keen, went green a few years ago.
Not in an annoying, preachy sorta way, either.
They just did it.
“I generally find that actions speak louder than words,” Halpern, 52, said.
They even convinced a handful of fraternities and sororities at Wittenberg University to start composting as well, pitching their food scraps into buckets that Halpern and Keen then collect three times a week.
That equals about 600 pounds of food.
A week.
Then again, considering they play locally in a tight little jazz combo called The Manic Organics — he on the Hammond organ; she on the more environmentally friendly flute — what they’re doing to save a little patch of planet Earth should really come as no surprise.
And yet, after seeing the changes they’ve made, it’s easier to believe that the polar ice caps will melt and drown us all next week than it is to believe that two people in 2010 could live so, well, simply.
The goal? To live as far off the grid as possible.
“We didn’t have a TV anyway,” Halpern said.
At the end of the day, when you look at their actions, they make Albert Gore Jr. look like a lightweight — smooth jazz to their hard bop.
“Being green is perceived as being a plaything for the rich,” Halpern said. “People looking to celebrities and politicians to solve their problems are going to be disappointed.”
So in 2004, he and Keen settled on a wild concept.
“We maybe can’t change the world,” he said, “so let’s look at how we’re living.”
Slowly but surely, they took it way beyond just ridding their house of incandescent light bulbs.
As vegetarians to begin with, growing their own food was an easy one. They cook with a solar cooker.
And this past winter, they took it a step further, heating entirely with wood for the first time. That wasn’t so easy.
“We didn’t have enough,” Halpern said.
They ran out. In February. So they had to scramble to find more.
But it’s an interesting twist of fate for their 109-year-old house, which sits on an acre and a half — back in the olden days, it was a farmhouse.
Halpern, who also serves as the organist at Knob Prairie United Church of Christ in Enon, didn’t actually buy the place to cultivate tomatoes and kale.
He bought it so he could practice with his old band, the Babalu Afro-Cuban Jazz Ensemble, and not have to worry about bugging the neighbors.
“Most of these changes were made on a low budget,” he said. “We’re musicians.”
But above all, it was done gradually.
“We didn’t change from black to white overnight,” he said. “A lot of people jump right into the deep end and they find it’s too much for them. We’ve seen people fall off the wagon.”
They’re going strong and steady with more changes to come, like rigging up an exercise bike to power the lights.
As a former bicycle commuter in San Francisco, cycling for an hour to get 100 watts of juice isn’t all that big of a deal. “I know what a hill is,” he said.
But there’s still room for improvement.
“We got our gas bill and we were still outraged,” Halpern said. “We somehow managed to use 24 ccf on just hot water.
“But we’ve had electric bills of $5.04. It really can pay off.”
The hardest thing to sacrifice?
Naturally, the electricity-guzzling Leslie speaker for his organ.
“It was easy to give up the refrigerator,” Halpern smiled, “but the rotating organ speaker was tough.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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