For a time, I kept a newspaper column that necessitated being photographed often. The column was weekly, was about gardening, and ran through the seasons. But the magazine commissioning it tried to save money by shooting several weeks’ worth of accompanying photos in one, usually frenzied, afternoon. Together the photographer and I would try and conjure summer from a patch of tulips that were only just in leaf, or autumn from a blisteringly hot mid-July day. It hung in the convivial air between us, I think, the daftness of it all. We were both doing a job and we wanted it to be done well. Years on and we’re still fond of one another.

One of the columns was about mulching and we discussed how to make dead and decaying matter appealing for the back pages of a glossy magazine. The photographer explained that she loved compost heaps as subject matter for the things they contained; the half-grown things, the half-gone ones. She spoke about clearing the garden of her late parents’ home and the compost heap there and the plants she had rescued before the garden was bought by somebody else. I think of that conversation every time I put something in the compost: what we make, what we keep, what we throw away.

If I open the WhatsApp chat with the person who photographed my wedding, I see a stream of images. Curls of onion skin; pallid garlic sprouts, never destined to grow; the porcelain inner of an eggshell; tight core of a pak choi; tired rhubarb stem and folded paperwhite petal; firm courgette top; the anemones somebody brought to my booklaunch, folded into a margerine tub; bald lime haves, radish top, nettle; bit of bread, curl of ribbon, the colour of a mouse’s ear.

WhatsApp attests that India and I started to send photos of compostings to one another last summer, but I know it started long before that on Instagram when I announced I had upgraded my compost container to a large glass jar, so that I could see what was going on inside - something she appreciated. India likes the beauty of the small nothings in life, the things other people overlook, and she likes when colours work together in accidental ways. She has sent me impeccably crisp and composed snapshots from worktops during cookbook shoots and Sunday afternoon cooking. “Now unable to see scraps without thinking of you,” she wrote, on one of the last days of January.

My photographs are rough: an oblique slide inside the compost bin, a chunk of my worktop, slippered feet just in shot. A red chopping board resting on a wheelbarrow.

We wouldn’t that talk much otherwise; we are busy and our lives are far away from one another’s. This is a conversation led by a mutual appreciation of something we don’t think anybody else might care for. Sometimes there is gentle analysis of the photo, sometimes not. Just an interruption of a day with a something before the scraps go in the compost and we all return to what we were doing.

Inside its bin, the compost is bunkering down for winter. It was feverish in the summer, a busy mass of fruit flies and heat and sweat and sex. I’d have to squeeze things in there, play a risky little balancing game every time I took the scraps down. We went away and when I came back the creatures had done their work. The contents were flat and blackened, squalidly sitting eight inches beneath the edge of the bin. I cut back bits of the garden and fed them there instead.

I worry about the compost more than I’d like to admit. One should tend to a bin, really, but I don’t. Don’t have the time, don’t really have the inclination. I know I should feed it the cardboard that lands on the doorstep; I feel guilt every time I put a banana skin in the bin, rather than offer it up. But life is complicated and busy and I’ve only just recovered from the last fruit fly kitchen invasion. I have been a keen composter before, I may become one again. Until then there are the photos and the offerings, the peelings and the paper. We throw these things away, but before we do we give them one last look. Next time we see them, they’ll be entirely different.