Waste

I've always been a frugal creature; not one to waste unnecessarily, and a bit of a pack rat when it comes to anything I perceive as potentially having a little life left in it. It's a blessing and a curse, really, in terms of the oddments and "junk" that I stockpile save. It is a relatively small percentage of the time that I end up doing anything with those spare buttons that come with my husband's work shirts, as he usually manages to wear the shirts out well before the buttons can go missing, but, even still, I can't just throw them away. I just... can't.

So I'm the first to admit that there can be too much of a good thing in terms of saving stuff. The HUGE exception to that rule in my book is food. There is always a body - be it human, chicken, ruminant, insect or microbe - that could use up that food's energy to a productive end and, in many cases, also produce a useful by-product (eggs, milk, compost, penicillin) besides. Therefore it pains me when I see any food irretrievably wasted.

To clarify exactly what I mean by irretrievably wasted, I'd define it like this - Useful potential energy that is irresponsibly cast off in such a way that renders it permanently unavailable for use by another living thing. Humans are the only ones who make waste like this.

If your family doesn't finish their dinner, saving the leftovers, composting them or sharing the food with critters would all be viable non-waste alternatives for taking advantage of the potential energy that is the raison d'etre, the very definition of food, and therefore a reasonable use of the food's energetic potential. Really, just about anything besides entombing it in non-biodegradable packaging and burying it 50 feet deep under thousands of tons of other trash, making it totally impossible to ever degrade, would be a reasonable use of the food energy. It's actually pretty easy to do.

Even so, it isn't unheard of to read tales of gross mismanagement of perfectly edible produce, as detailed in this story about an "unauthorized" public garden that was needlessly destroyed days before being harvested. As if that weren't tragedy enough, the ruined crops were then taken to a landfill and disposed of. I mean... why?

Irretrievable waste is hands-down the most complete waste of food, but there are others, though much less egregious, that still get under my skin. 

A major frustration that I'm experiencing a lot lately has to do with unharvested fruit trees. Washington state is known the world over for it's amazing apples. They grow almost effortlessly here, which is no doubt part of the reason that they are nearly as ubiquitous in our neighborhoods, parks and woodlands as the Douglas Fir is. But maybe having affordable, world-class apples available at the supermarket year-round has caused us to overlook the miracle of free food growing in our own front yards?

In Autumn, you can't help but notice all of the beautiful apples, pears, walnuts and hazelnuts hanging heavy in the trees, begging to be picked. And yet a vast majority of the time, the fruit will be left to drop and rot, perfect fodder for squirrels, yellow jackets and hungry deer, but seen as somehow less than their shiny supermarket counterparts, and therefore unfit and unworthy of human consumption. Have we lost our minds?

Yet another article (I've been reading a lot...) discusses just how much food we Americans waste on account of our acquired snobbiness and our reckless there's always more where that came from attitude. To illustrate just how insanely, ridiculously picky we've become as food shoppers, the article offers this bit of advice to producers and retailers for taking better advantage of "imperfect" produce -

Companies should look for alternatives in their supply chain, such as making so-called baby carrots out of carrots too bent to be sold whole at the retail level.

*Shakes Head* This is for real. People are going without and we're splitting hairs over carrot presentability. Phase two of my emotional reaction to this article (after weeping interspersed with multiple face-palms) was anger. I'm pissed, and that makes me loud, especially when it comes to things I feel passionately about. Taking care of people is one of those things.

I am only one person, but I am 100% responsible for choosing the food eaten by 4 people, 2 dogs, 20 chickens, 9 goats, 2 bunnies, 2 parakeets and one sassy turtle, therefore, my resolve to use food responsibly and with thanks has an impact that should not be, and indeed, is not taken lightly. I can participate in the system that keeps these problems going, or I can refuse, and take care of my family and farm on terms that both my head and my heart can live with.

Therefore, I resolve to grow, buy and use food even more responsibly than I have. I will buy less, grow and forage more, preserve more and use the food we do buy, find and grow as fully as can be done, and with all the respect it deserves.

Please join me.

Be Poo to Your School (My 200th Post!)

I'm not a PTA Mom. Does that surprise you? Yeah, it doesn't really surprise anyone. I love my kids' school and volunteer there regularly, but I'm just not leadership material. I fall asleep in meetings, I'm bad at making tough decisions and I don't do politics, on any scale.

And so I look for other ways to contribute. This year I will not only be working at our school's annual plant sale, I'll be contributing goods for the sale. You know, seedlings, flowers, veggie starts, animal poop... did I lose you on that last one?

I'd been sort of marinating on this idea for a while now, but I hesitated to throw it out there, lest I sound like a complete yokel-dork. I mustered up the courage to ask the garden gals if they would be interested in my poo (words that I never thought I'd hear myself say, I assure you), and was very enthusiastically received by them. It was a nice feeling, knowing that I am not the only granola poo-coveter in town. You've heard me go on about it before, but allow me to remind you that critter poo, bunny poop in particular is magic. It's dry, it doesn't burn your plants, it has very little odor and the bunnies make it like it's going out of style.

Which is why, come Friday night, My friend Melinda and I will be filling and attempting to "jazz up" little bags of bunny, goat and chicken poop for sale on Saturday. I'm trying to think of some snappy wording for the bags. I've heard people refer to rabbit poop as "Bunny Marbles" or "Cocoa Puffs", but I'm looking for something more exciting and original. All Natural Doo Drops? Compost Thunder? Or in the case if goat poop, which looks exactly like a whole coffee bean, Magic Beans? Crappaccino?

I can't wait to see if my critter poo sells like hotcakes or just gets completely ignored. I certainly hope it goes well, lest I have to carry my unsold doodles back home in shame. It'd really be something if my doo revenue was enough to score something cool for the school gardens. You see that peach tree over there? Bought and paid for with goat turds, my friend!

Yes indeed, I may never be PTA Treasurer material, but I betcha a pitchfork that folks will remember the crazy crap peddling lady for years to come. And thus my legacy to the children of Olympia begins.

Composting 102

As eluded to in earlier posts, my compost fanaticism has reached new, annoyingly specific heights this spring with the addition of a second bin to our yard. We added a second after finding that, between kitchen scraps, yard waste and chicken coop cleanings, our bin runneth over. Being so crammed full of stuff, it was not getting adequate air or moisture in it's deepest depths, "retarding", if you will, the breakdown process.

So, we now have two compost bins, side by side. On the left, the "hot" heap, on the right, the "cold".


It's not pretty, but it's very functional.

The hot bin is primarily for critter poo. We also throw in the occasional bowl of kitchen scraps ("green" compost) to balance out all of the "brown". I also add a compost starter now and then to the bin, which is essentially a compost probiotic. It's the "good" bacteria that help eat up and literally heat up the pile. The heat created by all of the microbial activity benefits you in several ways-

1) The bacteria's metabolic process accelerates that rate at which your composting material is broken down.

2) Most compost accelerator formulations include beneficial microorganisms that common topsoil frequently lacks. Again, essentially probiotics.

3) The heat generated in a hot pile, when done right, usually reaches temperatures high enough to "deactivate" weed seeds. So if you have a hot pile and you tend it well, you can throw dandelions, horse poop and other weed seed-filled compostables in there without spreading the weeds all over your garden when you use the finished compost.


The hot bin. With a potato growing in it, no less!

Our cold bin is our worm bin. I don't add compost accelerator or critter poo to it, because I don't want to fry my worms. The majority of my green compostables go into this bin, because those worms are voracious little things.


The cold bin.


My happy little helpers!

The preferred type of worm for a worm bin is the Red Wriggler, sometimes also called a Red Wiggler. They are smaller and more brightly colored than the more common earthworm/night crawler that most people think of when they think of worms and dirt. Earthworms and night crawlers are helpful in their own way, they tunnel through the soil, aerating and adding small amounts of fertilizer in the form of poo as they go. The Red Wriggler is the preferred compost worm, though, because of the quantity of food and plant material that it can break down in a short period of time (they can eat their own weight in food every day!) and because of it's fast reproductive cycle - 5 weeks from hatching to reproductive maturity. You can buy wrigglers online and increasingly more often at garden centers and even farmer's markets. We bought a container of a couple hundred worms a few years back for around ten bucks, and they've gone nuts on their own, ever since.

In addition to making stellar compost, the worms' poo can also be used to make a liquid fertilizer called "worm tea", which many claim, in addition to fertilizing plants, can cure black spot in roses, help veggies root and control unfriendly fungi. I've yet to brew my own tea, but there are a million recipes for it online if you are interested in giving it a try. One trick that I've heard of for making a very effective worm tea is to add a crushed aspirin to your brew, which supposedly boosts plant health and assists root production.

So, if I haven't bored you to tears by now with all of this jabbering on about poop and happy bacteria, I'll say just one last little thing about home composting: Do it! It is absolutely worth the effort! Though you'll be putting 10 times more "stuff" into your compost than you'll be getting out of it, the stuff that you do get out of it is incomparable to anything that you can buy in a store. It is perfect for your plants, critters and land because it was made by your plants, critters and land! Not to mention how much completely usable plant material that it keeps out of disgusting, airless landfills, where it would sit forever, never breaking down, it's usefulness wasted forever. Composting - dig it, baby!!! ;)

Composting 101

Quite a few folks have asked me for additional information about composting, and as weird as it is for me to think that I might actually know a little something about something, when it comes to composting, apparently I actually kind of do. Crazy! ;)

So I guess that I'll begin at the beginning. Compost, by definition, according to Merriam-Webster is "a mixture that consists largely of decayed organic matter and is used for fertilizing and conditioning land." Basically, do-it-yourself dirt.

Compost can be made from TONS of different things - plant-based kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, fallen leaves, straw, food-soiled paper, most animal manure, twigs, newsprint, wood chips, wood ash, etc. The ideal formulation for a compost heap consists of 1/3 "green" ingredients, and 2/3 "brown".

Green ingredients-
Vegetables & Fruits
Grass clippings
Coffee Grounds
Fresh Manure (horse, poultry, sheep, goat, cow, rabbit and -believe it or not- bat are the most common)
Seaweed
Aquarium water & plants
Plant cuttings/trimmings
Wine making/Homebrew leavings - yeast dregs, must, etc.
(It isn't on most lists, but I also throw my fish carcasses - especially salmon - in my compost heap because of their outrageously high nitrogen content. They can be very attractive to rodents and other critters though, so use sparingly.)

Brown Ingredients-
Straw
Hay
Leaves
Egg Shells
Tea Bags
Twigs
Newsprint
Hair
Paper
Wood Chips
Wood Ash
Corn Cobs
Cardboard

The compost heap or bin itself can be as simple or as fancy as you make it. Some folks use tumbling or stackable bins to help aerate and mix their compost, while others have nothing more than a literal heap of clippings and scraps in a corner of their yard. Most people opt for something in the middle, such as a refrigerator box with the bottom cut out or four wooden pallets knocked together to form a bottomless box.

When starting a bin or heap, take time to consider it's placement. Though your heap, if assembled with the proper proportions of ingredients and reasonably well tended, shouldn't smell much if at all, the possibility of smell issues is still a consideration. You won't want to put it right under your kitchen window, for instance. ;)

Another consideration when initially assembling your bin/heap is animal activity. If you live in an area with raccoons, opossums, etc., you'll probably want to make a closeable/contained bin. Otherwise your kitchen scraps will be eaten or strewn about regularly by marauding wildlife.

Once you've made or chosen a bin, and begin throwing you scraps and yard waste in there, all that you really have to do after that is to make sure that your compost stays moist, and that you turn/aerate the pile every few weeks to a month to ensure adequate airflow. That's it! You're composting!

Coming up, er... eventually; Composting 102 - the finer points of turning stuff into dirt. ;)

Queen of the Compost Heap

When it comes to garbage and recycling, I can be a little neurotic. I hesitate to label myself OCD, and yet I definitely have my neuroses about most things "trash" related.

With our diaper days long behind us, our family of four now generates a modest 35-gallons of garbage (as in, that destined for a landfill) every two weeks. Try as I might to whittle that number further down, with holidays, spring cleaning, purging closets and what-not, I almost always manage to nearly fill our 35-gallon can by trash day. Though I'd love to be producing even less trash, I already drive myself - not to mention my family members - quite crazy with my militant recycling and composting rules.

In spite of my kids having been raised from day one of their lives knowing about the rules and importance of recycling, I am still forever fishing perfectly recyclable items out of our trash cans that they have wantonly tossed. I know it's a little nutty to dig an empty paper towel roll out of the garbage, but my conscience honestly can't stomach throwing away forever something that has at least one more incarnation left in it. And don't even get me started on throwing away food - that has spawned a madness all its own.

An example of this would be what I call my compost hierarchy.

When it comes to kitchen scraps, the order is this -

If the food item can be eaten by a chicken, rabbit or turtle, the critters get first dibs. I figure that I'll be getting this back for the compost heap eventually anyway, at least in the case of the hens and the bunnies, in an enhanced form, no less.

If it can't be eaten by the critters, and isn't meat, dairy or bread product, then it goes into the Worm bin (our "cool" compost pile*). We end up putting a lot of egg shells, onion peels (that chickens shouldn't eat), coffee grounds and spoiled fruits & veggies in this bin. (*We also have a "hot" compost pile, which I'll delve into on another day.)

If it can't be eaten by critters or put into the worm bin, it goes into what our city calls the "organics bin". The organics bin is largely responsible for our household's reduction in garbage. We're allowed to put otherwise uncompostable items like meat, dairy & bread products, as well as "food soiled paper"/aka drive-thru packaging, Starbucks cups, pizza boxes, paper towels, etc., into the bin. We also put undesirable yard waste like dandelions gone to seed and blackberry brambles into the organics bin, as the city processes the lot through a massive, high heat digester that can break down and combine all of these materials, rendering a "soil-like" product (their words, not mine).

The result of all these rules and sorting is that -

A) We have cut our landfill garbage contribution more than half in the past year.

B) Between free-ranging and supplementing with kitchen scraps, our animals eat better food and cost us less to feed.

C) We save a bundle by making our own compost.

D) We have begun a symbiotic relationship between our soil, plants and animals, along the lines of permaculture gardening, wherein we feed our animals and ourselves, as much as possible, what we grow on our own land. We use collected rainwater to irrigate, fallen leaves and needles to mulch, and chicken & bunny poo to fertilize the very same plants that will feed us all. The same is basically true for the chickens, we feed them, and they feed us, and on it goes.

So in the end, I really do feel like all of the nagging and uptight compost sorting is worth the trouble. My garden and critters are happy and well fed, and I shave a few bucks off of the garbage bill every month, but most of all, I have an easier time living with myself when I know that I'm doing what's healthiest and just plain right for the land and for the lives in my charge.

Container Taters

Since I was a kiddo, I've grown potatoes. I'd find a gnarly, leggy, wrinkly one in the cupboard and I'd sneak it out back and plant it in my mom's flower bed, which she did not exactly love. She also did not love it when, once, in a digging frenzy, I accidentally cut the phone line to our house. Sorry 'bout that, Mom...

My sneaky potato past not withstanding, I feel like I've grown and learned a thing or two over the years about growing the mighty spud. Just today I put my latest, greatest idea for growing container potatoes into action, using a spankin' new compost bin, of all things.

It might seem a little weird to grow potatoes in a compost bin, but if you have a compost bin and have ever thrown a potato into it, I'll bet that you've noticed that the discarded 'tater sprouted like mad. They love the dark, wet recesses of the compost heap, and they produce the best when new soil or straw are regularly added to cover their growing vines, which is pretty much exactly how the ol' compost pile works. And so, I embraced my potatoes' love of the damp and dark of the compost bin and bought a new one expressly for the purpose of growing potatoes in it.

Here she is, the wonder bin-


This bin is actually meant to be 3 tiers high, but I'm going to wait for the vines to come up a bit before adding the 3rd layer, all the while covering them with soil/compost/straw as they pop through and keep on going until I have all 3 layers chock-full of taters. Note the netting on top. This is to deter my bottomless-pit chickens from climbing in and scratching and pecking my tater bin to death. My fingers are crossed that this will work, because we're using the same "bird netting" on all of our raised beds this year. I love my hennies dearly, but when it comes the the garden, they are like a plague of locusts and must be stopped from devouring the whole kit & caboodle.

I planted just 6 potatoes in the bin - 3 Yukon Golds (my fav), 2 Yellow Finn and 1 nubbly-old Russet that we had in the cupboard. I'll be interested to see how much my 2 lbs of seed potatoes yield. As I do with pretty much everything I grow, I'll do my darndest to keep track of the pounds harvested to give myself (and you) an idea of what kind of return on investment can be expected for the relatively little time and trouble required to grow potatoes. Check back in August for a progress report.

Attack of the Fruit Flies

One of the few downsides to having a nearly nonstop stream of fresh fruits and vegetables in your kitchen is the appearance of the very persistent fruit fly. Try as I might to take the compost out daily, the fruit flies always seem to find a way to hang on. Our recently adopted hobby of winemaking has not helped. I see fruit flies buzzing around the airlocks on our jugs of wine, presumably drowning their sorrow over their inability to reach the sweet, sweet wine itself, and instead huffing up the powerful fermentation gasses that are regularly belched out via the airlock.

In essence, our kitchen is now an extremely popular fruit fly singles bar.

I have tried good old fashioned fly paper, with some success, and gave one of these traps a whirl, with decent results, but the surest way to catch them still seems to be leaving my cup of coffee unattended for 5 minutes. I tip my cup up to take a drink, and if I'm lucky, notice that I have a passenger in my coffee just in time to abort the sip. If I didn't already have it in for these guys, that'd do it. Not cool, flies, not cool.