Compost

There is quite a bit of compost/stuff in front of the garden! It looks and smells good, but I don't know anything about it! I'll assuming its Second Start's to use, so we should get it off the street and into our plots as fast as possible. Everyone take a wheelbarrow load or two. And we have some compost, thanks to Katie Martin. She and her children have been building and turning the compost piles diligently. Please do your part and add vegetable matter from your gardens, leftovers from the kitchen (no meat or fat), no bindweed or other seedy weeds but young innocent weeds like sunflowers and dandelions and tops of comfrey are OK. And Adam, Joy, and Paul have collaborated to bring us some manure. They are set to bring more this weekend (I think) and will need some strong bodies to transport it into the compost bins East and West.

Compost

Not hot anymore!

Our big pile of stuff has cooked down into some nice compost! Thank you so much to Brett and to Michelle and her friend, for turning this compost with me. It sure was a lot of work, but compost is the heart and soul of the organic garden. It provides organic matter and beneficial microbes. I don't think we will be doing this very often, so get this compost while you can. We need some volunteers to top up and to turn the compost on the East side.

This compost was a hot compost, done California-style. We turned it every three to seven days, three times. I layered brown and green matter, then finished it off with our leftover sheep manure. I should have used quite a bit more chopped leaves to balance all the fresh green garden clippings and manure. It was a very hot compost - we could feel the heat radiating off of it as we turned it. (Thank you, Mike Monell for all those leaves as well as the manure!) Every layer of green matter should have a bit of manure or finished compost and a covering of dry brown matter like leaves. The manure or compost adds a little ecosystem of live microbes and the leaves balance the carbon/nitrogen ratios. (Also they make the compost less attractive to mice and flies.)

So please use leaves to cover your additions to the compost pile and chop everything up. Do you see all the sticks and things in the compost? Even a hot compost like this cannot digest big items.

Yellowstone is amazing

I'm back from my trip to Yellowstone and finally catching up on the blog. We got caught in a buffalo-jam while they crossed right in front of our car. They were close enough to touch. Boy, are they big and fast. I was so glad no one did something dumb to get them upset like honking or touch the babies.

I have a couple of Workshare days to catch-up on. The first weekend Michelle Crandell and her boyfriend flipped the compost for the first time - yeah! - This is really tough work - thank you! On July 8th Brett Sloan and I flipped it again. It had cooked down a little, but it really had a terrible ammonia smell - the smell of valuable nitrogen escaping. Next time I will put in far more dry brown matter. Brett, you are a trooper! Lynn Siverts, Enid Van de Walker, and Anne Knoll weeded. Paulina Mundkowski worked in the orchard. The next week Lynn and Brett came again and Brett turned the compost with me again! It had definitely cooked down, and the smell was far more bearable, but still bad. It was hot to the touch. David Pinter tended the current compost by adding brown leaves on top of the green vegetable matter. Tim Towns tended the bees.

Compost

Liz Slokar has volunteered to take our weedy waste to Western Disposal for commercial composting. Thank you very much! It is important to divert our waste away from the landfill, so we are committed to making compost instead of methane (vegetable matter decomposing without oxygen produces methane a potent green-house gas, according to Eco-cycle.) I may need to ask other people with trucks to also take our weeds. I've asked the city and Eco-cycle if we can get some kind of official compost pick-up, as well as recycling pick-up. The city has committed to starting a pilot compost project in 2010, maybe they will start with us.

Right now I have a little bin by the front gate of the West Side that is just for weeds we can't compost, like thistle and bindweed. Please, no plastic, dirt, or rocks! We pay by the ton.

Things we can compost include hair, vegetable plant parts, chopped up corn or sunflower stalks, kitchen vegetable waste, leaves, flower garden trimmings, and cut grass. Please bury food scraps in the compost.

I have topped-up the compost in bin 5 on the West Side. We (you can contribute here) will be using pitch-forks to flip it into bin 7, then back into bin 5, no more once than every third day. It should be as moist as a wrung-out sponge. See the shed door for details.

Workshare

We had another good workday at the gardens. This time we pulled weeds in the East side -- around the compost bins, the herb garden, the squash patch, etc. Veronica and her children, Ingrid, Judy and I were there, and Anne and Kristen brought some veggie scraps from Terroir. We were interrupted by a big storm and had to take shelter in a hurry. Sometimes we wish the sheds were bigger!

Next week is another one, same time, starting at 6pm. If you can only be there for one hour, that's enough, we can get a lot done in an hour. I would like to build a new compost pile on the West side with manure and leaves, then turn it every three days. I need your help! Call or email me if you would like to be a part of making new compost. We can get compost in two to three weeks if we put the work in. Also, we should do the same thing on the East side soon.

In addition (and this work can be done any time) we need to finish pulling the weeds on the East Side around the compost and in the herb garden. We also need to add thin layer of compost and manure around the trees in the orchard, from a few inches away from the trunk, to the drip line. The grape vines and the raspberries also need some amendments. The paths also need mulching -- we have new mulch now! Several inches is very helpful in keeping down the weeds. Of course, the shade garden and the sidewalk garden on the West Side could also use some mulching. The trees overhanging the garden by the children's play around need trimming.

Please take some compost from the west side's bin. It's done, and looks pretty good aside from the big pieces (and, for some reason, rocks.) The sifter can be used to sift that stuff out. That's why we chop up big stuff with the machette or the clippers or trimmers! The newsletter has some good info about the compost.