Composting Made Easy

Can you believe people have written entire books on making compost? I actually find that very hard to believe, but put enough fill in anything and it can look real.

So, you don't want to compost because - it's dirty, smelly, time consuming, space consuming? Did I miss anything?

Done right, it's none of the above. And there are several ways to make compost, so you can find a way that suits you completely.

Apartment-posting

If you're like my sister and live in an apartment in an area that doesn't recycle anything, your garbage bags start getting big and numerous. You could cut down on the amount of stuff you throw out a couple of ways.

Worms - I'm not big into worm farms. People tire of them, and rather than give them away or destroy them, they get released into 'the wild'. The only problem with this is they eat too much too quickly and are rapidly destroying our forest floors. But, you can make a small bin out of a rubbermade container and feed the little guys all of your vegetable materials and newspaper. Use what's left for your houseplants or give to a neighbor. Either way works.

5 gallon bucket - put an ad on Craig's List or find a local community garden to offer your vegetable material to them for composting. They'll take it with a glad heart! A couple times a week, or once a week - whichever works best for you, and you're finished with it!

Home Composting

If you're lucky enough to live where you can compost outside, GREAT! You're options are far more plentiful. You can do either listed above as well as a few other ways.

Hot Composting
This is where you make a little effort once every week or two. You mix grass clippings, weeds, leaves, veggie scraps from the kitchen all together and literally let it cook. Given the right moisture content, which is about that of a rung out sponge, it'll get up to 140 degrees with little effort. You turn it at least every two weeks to give it oxygen - just stir it up - and it'll get hot all over again. This can be ready in as little as a month, but I usually just keep adding to the pile and let it cook all summer. It depends on how quickly you need the compost.

Cold Composting
This is where you add all of the same stuff as in Hot Composting, but don't bother turning it. It'll take longer for this to be ready, a full year, but is far easier to maintain. Build it and forget it. Take the top of the pile to start the new pile the next spring and use all of the bottom material in your flower beds, vegetable garden, container plants, etc.

Trench Composting
Yes, it's as easy as it sounds. Dig a trench - you decide the length - about 10"-12" deep. Fill the trench with your composting material, and cover it with the soil as you go. You can also do this as holes, if you don't have room for a trench. You do this right in your flower beds - plant right on top of the trench! - your vegetable gardens (put the trench or holes in the paths), or right in your lawn (the holes)

Blender Composting
If you have very little room in your yard for a pile, combine the Trench method with this method and the space saved will be phenomenal. Put your vegetable scraps in the blender, add just enough water to cover, and blend it until it's a slurry mush. Pour into the whole, cover and it's gone.

Tips

Hot compost does best when it's in 1 cubic yard piles. 3'x3'x3'. This is why I keep adding to the pile. As it breaks down, it gets smaller. So, I keep adding to it to maintain the proper size. By fall, you've been able to add all of your material from the summer and it will now become a cold compost pile, working more slowly, but just as well. Keep adding to it all winter and use the top few inches to start your pile in the spring.

Cold compost has no size limits. It can be as big or small as you wish. But, it does take a full year for it to fully break down everything, including seeds. So you must be patient with it.

Do NOT add anything with protein in it - milk, cheese, or meat. This will attract wildlife you'd rather not have and will smell horribly.

The smaller the pieces of material to be composted, the faster it will compost. If you place an entire head of lettuce in a compost pile, you'll still be able to recognize it as that head of lettuce up to a month later. But if you chop it or put it in the blender, you won't recognize it within a week. That is ideal!

Compost should look like dirt, but not feel like dirt. It'll be a rich brown with nothing that looks like grass, leaves, vegetable scraps and whatever else you put in. It'll be slightly damp, but won't cake or clump, and won't have that musty smell dirt so often has. It'll smell slightly sweet, but not like yeast.

Add it to anything you want to have grow well. Considering it's what nature has used from the beginning of time, it can't be bad!

Best of all - it's FREE. And doesn't go in the landfill! It's hard to beat that combination.

Links to More Information
From the EPA
From Cornell
From Farm Aid
Composting 101

Community Sustainability Workshops

From Jerome Pigot

There is still time left to sign up for the January 2009

"From the Ground Up" Growing Power Training

"Growing Your Community Food System" is an intensive, hands on, training workshop offering diverse groups the opportunity to learn, plan, develop, operate, and sustain community food projects. Project participants leave the workshop with improved skills that they can take back into their communities and pass on to others. These workshops are for both rural and urban projects. This training is at the Growing Power facility in Milwaukee, WI.

Workshops Topics:

Aquaculture/Aquaponics: Build an indoor system for raising fish. Recycle the wastewater from the fish and grow plants. This is known as aquaponics. See us grow Tilapia at a very low cost. Learn how to build indoor fish and plant systems for food production. Participants will set up a small scale Aquaponics system and learn how to maintain and monitor tilapia fish production in a closed loop/natural system.

Bee Keeping: Learn the ABC's of urban or rural beekeeping without the use of chemicals. Participants will leave with a solid understanding of the materials, suppliers and environment to keep these amazing animals content and productive.

Community Project Design: Develop effective action plans for your food system project. Meet people who have actually done community projects requiring technical expertise in soil remediation, urban agriculture & food distribution, aquaculture, vermiculture, community gardening, large or small-scale composting, bee-keeping, etc.

Living Biological Growing Systems: An Innovative Approach to Sustainable Production. Learn how to develop a comprehensive and sustainable growing system that can grow food year-round without heat.

Composting: Learn how to build indoor/small scale compost systems, and design and maintain outdoor/small and large-scale systems. Discuss collection of waste streams in the city or on the farm.

Vermiculture: Construct and maintain a worm bin. Use vermicompost as a fertilizer or use it for generating cash from those who want an excellent, organic fertilizer

Hoop House Construction: Hoop houses are a great season extender whether used for early tomatoes or year round greens. They are extremely adaptable and can be inpensive to maintain. This workshop will demonstrate how to bend pipe to make hoops, how to erect and secure the hoops, how to finish the ends as well as pull the plastic. We will also discuss strategies for utilizing the structure.

Year Round Production and Marketing Workshop: Participate in a group discussion focused on year-round greenhouse production and marketing strategies to effectively sell your product. Get hands-on training to learn how to mix soil, seed, harvest, wash and package sprouts. Take home some finished product to share!

Animal Health- Learn the proper breeding, nutrition, and environment for your animals. Develop your custom strategic plan to select which species most ideally fit together in your individual set of circumstances.

Please call to find out when other specialty workshops will be offered on Fridays. (April and May)

Other workshops may include: Dismantling Racism and multicultural alliance building, Record keeping/accounting/human resources and legal risk management, Mushroom growing, Youth programs and soap making, and cheese making.

To attend these workshops
Please call or email to request a registration form to:
katie @ growingpower.org
414-527-1546
Or download a registration form from the website www.growingpower.org

COST: $325 (cost includes 5 meals)
Full 2009 Workshop Schedule:
* January 10th and 11th
* February 21st and 22nd
* March 7th and 8th
* April 18th and 19th *17th special training date
* May 16th and 17th *15th special training date

Food Waste Collection For Communities

Dear Umbra,

Are any communities collecting food waste -- potato peels, meat scraps, corn husks, etc. -- for recycling? Is there a market for such material?
Wendy S.Far Hills, N.J.

Dearest Wendy,

Yes and yes. Multiple communities collect food waste, in a variety of ways. Which is great, considering that food makes up about 12 percent of our garbage discards and is perfectly recyclable.

The proper end to food scraps is rebirth as compost, wherein the nutrients stored in the foods will be returned to the soil and made available to the next generation of plants. You know, in one of those magical cycles of life. There are all sorts of similarities to be drawn between financial banks and the soil bank, mainly that if we keep withdrawing nutrients from the soil bank in the form of food, and then do not return those nutrients to the soil in the form of compost, we will have no nutrients left in our soil bank account. Then we have to buy nutrients on credit, via petroleum-based fertilizers, but the interest rate, so to speak, is punitive. I'll stop my little metaphor there.

Humans don't tend to value the soil bank as much as they do the money bank, but fortunately diverting food and yard waste from the waste stream also makes financial sense (and reduces landfill methane emissions, as previously discussed).

All that to say, there are food waste recycling programs across the country, from Stockton, Calif., to Wayzata, Minn., to Bowdoinham, Maine, and many other places. As far as I can tell, there is no curbside program in your state of New Jersey, but I did just find a Rutgers-based group that is hoping to instigate food waste recycling statewide, and -- they hold forums! Do you like a nice forum?

These systems differ. Some are curbside pick-up programs, others are central drop sites. Some accept every food scrap including meat, others ban meat. Some separate food from other organic wastes, others accept food mixed with yard waste and soiled paper. The waste is then composted or, in some cases, used as an Alternative Daily Cover at a landfill.

I can personally testify that yes, there is a market for the end product. In Seattle, curbside yard/food waste is sold back to gardening citizens in the form of a high quality compost product.
An organization called Compostable Organics Out of Landfills by 2012 maintains a website with information and resources about this very topic, so if your query motivation was to begin your own program, COOL 2012 may be the place to start. Biocycle also maintains an interesting online database if you wish to search for composters in your area who process food waste.
Rindly,Umbra

Every School Needs A Garden

Second in a series from old Organic Gardening Magazines.

My father was cleaning out his night stand and found a stack of 1973 OG magazines. Knowing I was into that sort of thing, gave them to me to read. Now, it takes me quite some time to get through them, but I'll get there!

Here are links associated with similar programs - from around the world. Very few such programs exist in the US. How sad is that?

Ireland
Canada

Here In The US
Rhode Island
Also a good resource for starting a school gardening program
California
Arizona
Oregon

Since this article is so long, I’ve edited some of the examples. But no content was changed, just omitted for space.

Every School Needs A Garden
Join the 1973 effort to put a garden into every schoolyard - starting with the one in your own neighborhood
By Jerome Goldstein

Last spring, students at the Helen Keller Junior High in Royal Oak, Michigan, planned and planted a 20x25 foot garden in the school courtyard after a series of organic gardening sessions. With the help of teacher Ronald Canton, they planted radishes, lettuce, peas, gourds and pumpkins.

Environmental education specialists Bud Souders and Tom Fegely of East Penn School District in Emmaus PA, used the nearby Organic Gardening Experimental Farm as an outdoor classroom to get youngsters personally involved in compost-making and gardening.

"Contact the school district in your hometown... Explain how important it is, and how educational 0 for children to work with nature to produce something useful, and how a lifetime habit of gardening can begin now." The last count showed almost 500,000 leaflets were sent out to schools, teachers and individuals around the country. The schools mentioned above illustrate some ways the material was put to use.

And yet, the School Garden Campaign is just getting underway! In 1973 we know that there are going to be more gardens on school property and more students gardening both in school and at home than ever before!

Teaching students to garden is by no means a new idea. Back in 1914, the Children's Vegetable Garden of Brooklyn, NY, Botanic Garden was laid out. Frances M. Miner writes in Plants and Gardens that "over the years, children seem instinctively to prefer vegetables."

School Science Projects
10 years ago, my oldest daughter did a school science project showing how food scraps change to compost. Today, several Emmaus High School students have taken on the task of composting some of the school's cafeteria garbage. Right now, my youngest daughter is planning a project with earthworms and recycling.

Earthworm projects, composting as well as many soil experiments are fully described in 2 separate manuals authored by Albert and Vivian Schatz - Teaching Science with Garbage and Teaching Science with Soil.

The science projects with garbage and leaves and other organic wastes are great, but only a garden ties everything together - food becomes alive and meaningful when cared for from seed. The land ethic and environmental awareness are just so many words in a book or on a blackboard. But they have real meaning in a garden. "In our work, we encourage schools to develop on-lot gardens by the students similar to the program which is carried out in Cleveland," says Bruce N. Singer of Blue Bell, PA. "I am sure that your materials will be helpful to a number of schools."

Organic Living Courses

About 4 years ago, Charles Kuntzleman and John Haberern of Rodale's Fitness For Living magazine and Clay Myers, National YNCA Physical Fitness Director, developed the YMCA-Fitness Finders program.

Out of the original program has come an even more ambitious effort to teach and motivate people of all ages "into patterns of living which would help delay the onset of degenerative diseases." Editor Haberern calls it an Organic Living curriculum. This month, a special pilot program with these objectives goes into effect for the fifth and sixth grades of five San Diego City schools. In the "back to nature" unit, for example, students will get a thorough knowledge of organic gardening methods - from taking a soil profile to making a compost pile. They will learn how to find their way in the woods, attract birds to the backyard, tell a good bug from a pest, sprout seeds, read a food label - learning activities never offered in the traditional health and physical education program.

With the aid of a garden plan drawn up by OG editors and volunteer help from local organic gardeners, 14 Appalachia youth aged 12 to 16 began preparing and planting their gardens. Within a matter of weeks after the decision to go ahead with the project, over 100 tomato plants went into the ground, followed closely by the planting of squash, cucumbers, corn, beans, potatoes, peas, onions, flowers, herbs and even popcorn. "The kids sometimes took some of the vegetables home with them, or if the had enough to sell, they sold them at the stand in front of the Y." Davis pointed out.

Nutritious School lunches Naturally Follow School Gardens

Out in Bloomington IN, high school students have formed a Brown Baggers for Health to publicize the low nutritional value of standard school lunches. Students hope to have a fresh-food line set up that would feature fruits, some organically grown foods and home made breads.

Actually, a teacher has been introducing good nutritional concepts to her 9 and 10 year old students since her term began last September (1972), and she’s noticed a difference in the kind of lunches her students now bring.

This community effort by organic gardeners will be most constructive. From your own organic gardens, you have already gotten many municipal officials to learn about composting leaves, for example, instead of burning them. And now, from your own organic gardens, you can extend your impact to local educational quality just as you have to local environmental quality.

Good Spring

A picture of our back yard May 5.

So far it is a great spring. Yes, the weather has been incredibly odd, but generally speaking, it's been good.

My vitamin D production is beyond last year's already (read, "sun tan"), and it isn't June. That's a good thing.

I'm both ahead and behind in my outdoor projects, but that's ok. It evens out in the end.

I've started my composting with the assistance of a lawn care service. As soon as I know which one, I'll put the info on here. LOL - I truly don't know the name of the business, but he does the lawn of the church next door. He's thrilled to be getting rid of his grass clippings, and I'm thrilled to be getting them.

Oh - I checked - half-life of herbicide ON the plants is a max of 2 weeks. In the soil, up to 2 months. Pesticide, 1 month and 6 months respectively. With grass, and how rapidly it grows, neither will be on for more than 1 week. So - I'd say 75% of the clippings I get are fine. And with my using them mostly in the compost, there will be absolutely new worries. So, while truly organic would be nice, this is a great second place in my book.

This is a compilation photo. Each bin is about 3' cube. 1 is 4', but that's no big deal. The far left is compost from 2 years ago that has been used. The days are marked to give an idea of how quickly compost can be made. They all started out the size of Day 1 - at far right. Second from the left is 7 days old - like peas porridge. LOL

I'm doing my compost differently than most recommend. I'm adding half green, half brown (leaves from the property). When it compacts to half of original volume, I'm turning it and adding half grass clippings again (or weeds/deadheading/ thinning, etc.). When compacts to half volume, will add it to another pile to make into full volume. If and when that compacts to half volume, I'll turn it and add more grass. That should get me to the right ratio of green:brown. Then, in fall, combine all piles into 1 large and let it sit to cold-compost over the winter. Seeds shouldn't stand a chance that way.

I've added grass clippings to last years compost in 1 large pile, and will sift that out in a couple of weeks to use in flower beds.

Have just planted some of my veggie garden. 4 rows of beets and chard. I'm late with the chard, but had to wait until someone else cultivated the garden. It drives my vertigo wild. Tomatoes are in. Fence is up. String beans are tomorrow. Will be done with that very very soon. Woohoo!

1 flower bed is complete and ready to mulch. Hoping to have another one ready tomorrow. I may be exhausted until October, but I'm not arguing it. It's what keeps me sane.

Using Supermarket Waste To Compost

5/7/08 Well, I'm back with an update. I went to my local grocery - the one I am confident I could get to daily, if necessary. I spoke with the produce manager and others before me have ruined it for the rest of us. They used to give to a pig farmer, who tried to steal good produce by hiding it under the stock loss as he hauled it away.

I was amazed, stunned, taken aback. It remains amazing what people are willing to do when given some well meant assistance.

So, I moved on to plan B. I went online to my local freecycle and barter groups. Asked if anyone knew of or were a lawn service business who paid dumping fees at the county dump to get rid of the yard waste. If they were, they are more than welcome to dump the clippings and such here for me to compost. I have a 5 bin system set up now, and can expand, if needed. Thus far, 2 have contacted me. Here's hoping!

3/14/08
A Study on average back yard composting of both waste produce and wax coated cardboard successfully
http://www.cwc.org/organics/org935fs.pdf

PA farmer working with Wegmans
http://www.newfarm.org/depts/talking_shop/0304/pasa.shtml

Wasted Food.com
http://www.wastedfood.com/2007/03/

What is bringing this little ditty about is a project I am hoping to take on this year. Ha! We'll see.

I have a small grocery store not a half-mile from my home. I am hoping to convince the manager to give me the compostable waste from the store. I'm planning on taking it home, chopping it up (designing a chopper) and having multiple series of bins to do hold the compost.

It'll be a full year process from start to finished product. It'll be hot compost piles during the summer, and then all will be collected into a single large pile for cold composting over the winter.

Hopefully my brother is working on the design for the chopper as we had agreed, resulting in his wife getting half of all compost I make for her greenhouse/flower biz.

I'm thinking sort of a nut chopper deal that could basically be inserted in a 5-gallon pail. Fully manual - I want this to be as green as I can make it.

I know I can't label this as organic compost. But since I'm not selling it, I'm not nearly as concerned about that as I am having stuff needlessly end up in the landfill.

If I'm successful, I'll work on helping others set up similar composting bins to use in conjunction with their local grocery.

L

Friday Night Musings

My brother and I are having a very abbreviated discussion (due to my inability to read long articles) regarding The Future.

We tend to be fatalists - he says realists. Whatever. Half-empty kind of folk anyhow.

But the issues with subsidies to every millionaire in America - did you know that something like 90% of all monies from farm subsidies end up in Manhatten NY? Big Farma. Meanwhile, his neighbor got rained out of his dairy herd that was about 3 generations in the family, and got a whopping 2400 bucks in subsidies. He ended up selling the herd for meat. Tragic at the very least.

Anyway, subsidies led to energy discussions (along with Medicare costing us 10x what SS does and will due to inability to negotiate prices with Big Pharma).

Corn as ethanol (etoh for those in the know) and the cost upon cost upon cost of using corn - the article he sent outlining this issue very clearly:
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/cooke/2007/0202.html

That always leads to weather issues, other energy issues.

Energy - China is taking the entire earth's coal. The nation can't get enough of it (meanwhile, they're trying to clean the air in Beijing for the summer Olympics - the sun never shines in that city, air is too foul).

This means coal prices go up in North America, making both oil and natural gas more equitable as energy sources for our electric companies. Oil is expected to hit and maintain 100/ba this summer - due to China, global demand increase and the drop of value in the US dollar (which could be dropped as the currency of favor by OPEC, making price even higher). And that makes Natural Gas even more equitable.

If I remember right, NG was around $2/unit wholesale back in 2000. It's sitting right around 8 as of 2/14/08. It hit record highs right after Katrina, which was 13ish, but then dropped back to between 6 and 8 bucks per unit wholesale.

Guess what? If coal is so marketable to China, oil going up to 100 and now NG being the 'final' fuel, ETOH is going to be the 'next big thing'.

Which brings us to the weather. The mid South is in moderate to extreme drought. Corn is a very high water needing plant. They can't consider growing it with how severe their water restrictions are.

The Great Plains are in a moderate drought right now. Water run-off from this winter's extreme snowfall will help, but most of those farmers irrigate from the Great Plains Auqifer - completely unaffected by surface water. And the GPA is running out of water. So, if they don't have the perfect rainy season for corn, they aren't going to do so well growing it. Plus, if the deep south and Gulf Coast has anything to say about it, they won't be able to fertilize they way they are used to and most likely won't be able to grow corn well.

So, corn will go up that much more, making NG prices go up as well. It's that supply and demand thing. Plus, other energy companies are catching on to what Big Petrol has long known - push the market until the consumer backs off buying, and then pull the price back about 10%. Pull back in 10% increments until you find what the market will actually support directly.

What people don't understand is, this affects ALL aspects of life. The graphics in that article are pretty explicit in that. And when the ecomonists discuss "adjusted" inflation - they take out all aspects of the cost of energy. So yeah! Inflation is only 3% or so. But, adjust it back to include energy prices and it's double digit. Last I heard was about 11%. And they wonder about consumer confidence.

I have a saying that most people don't quite get - but hopefully they will very soon:
Wise is the man who recognizes our landfills as our greatest natural resource. (Leslie Holly, 2002)

If we "mined" our landfills - the composting would allow for the return of inches of topsoil. Convert the heavy metal laden compostables into methane. Chip the wood materials for either ETOH or pellet fuel. Reclaim steel to eliminate the need for Japanese steel. ReMine copper so we don't have to go deeper and deeper into protected lands for an ever increasingly expensive metal (25% increase in the last 18 months - being stolen everywhere). Recycle plastics to reduce needs for petrol imports (did you know fleece fabric started out as recycled bottles?).

It can ALL be reused.

We just have to find a way to mine it all. And for the first time - strip mining wouldn't be a bad thing - it would actually RETURN land to the landscape.

Here's a quote:
This is due not only to the machines' increased efficiency but also to plain old supply and demand: Countries such as China are desperate for raw materials and are finding recycled U.S. trash to be a good source.

http://www.wildcatmfg.com/images/E0094901/626good.JPG
This is a picture - and I don't remember my html right now to just post the pic.

But it's of a trommel. A drum sifter basically. You can get different screens for them - and thus, sort by size of object. Place magnets underneath and get all of the smaller steel out. Do you have any idea how much flatware gets thrown out on a daily basis?

Add a sifter that shakes the fill, and the lightest stuff comes to the top - plastic - literally skim it off like those new fancy but stupid litter boxes for cats. Flip it and skim what was the bottom - most likely glass and other metals - and you have the majority of non-compostible stuff out.

Basic sorting can and is automated. Chop the rest and composte it for methane to fuel the sorting machinery or sort it further to compost into topsoil and methane production. Either way will work.

Have you asked what your county is doing about the trash issue? And are we going to let our last 'natural' resource be exported as well?

Gardening and Community Gardening

I researched and wrote up a series of pages for my hurricane relief efforts. They're great for here as well.

Starting A Community Garden
A church in my community started a garden
One of my goals was to have churches in the Gulf Coast communities hardest hit to begin community gardens. They are still the center of their members' lives, are gernally easily travelled to, have the space and would create a wonderful outlet for stress AND give fresh veggies center stage - something that has been missing for almost 2 years. Unfortunately, there is just no one onsite who has the time to dedicate to such a special mission. If you know of anyone, please contact me at KatrinaCoalition @ aol.com (spaced to avoid spam)

Container Gardening

Simpler Pest Control

Looking Like A Pro

I am hoping to go into greater detail in the near future regarding composting. I will be adding links to go along with my suggestions, but if you know of any true quality sites that delve into this subject, let me know.