How to compost

Which Composting Method is Best for You? Infographic Helps You Decide

Great graphic in this article. check it out.

Everyone should be composting.

Garden Worm Bins

Vermicompost Right in Your Garden - Make a Worm Bucket

I am a big fan of vermicomposting. It can be done indoors or out, and it's still fun, even after all the time I've been composting with worms, to watch my apple cores and coffee grounds turn into amazing, nutrient-rich vermicompost. If you're looking for an even easier way to compost with worms, consider installing a worm bucket right in your garden bed. 

-  Get a plastic 5 gallon bucket with a lid. These are cheap at most home centers. If you have a bucket from cat litter or laundry detergent, these will work well too.
-  Cut the bottom out of your bucket, and, if you have a large drill bit, drill several 3/4" to 1" holes all around the bottom quarter of your bucket. Doing these two things allows your worms to come and go as they please -- which is exactly what you want. If you aren't able to drill holes, it will still work, so don't let that stop you.
- Place your bucket in your garden bed, sinking the bottom quarter of it down into the soil. Now you can start filling the bucket with kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, tea bags, crumble egg shells -- anything you'd add to a traditional worm bin. Put the lid on, and you're done.

The whole point of this particular composter is to take work off of you, the gardener. You add your food scraps to the bucket, keep it covered, and end up with better, more fertile soil, thanks to the worms. They make their way into your bucket to eat, then head back out into your garden bed where they deposit castings, adding nutrients to your garden and improving the soil. Anything that improves my soil and turns waste into something useful, with no work on my behalf, is a win in my book (lazivores, unite!)

Effective and simple - that's for me. Now if someone will drill the holes and bury the buckets...

Paper and gardens

Fending Off the Weeds With Newsprint

I also picked up some cottonseed meal, a good fertilizer if you’re starting a new garden the no-till way — which basically means using newspapers to smother the grass and weeds without resorting to herbicides, and then adding a few inches of compost and planting right through it.
The advantages of not tilling are many. Weed seeds are not brought to the surface of the soil, where they readily sprout and grow. You don’t churn up earthworms and countless other organisms that will aerate and enrich the soil just fine, thank you, if you feed them compost and leave them alone. And since gas-powered tillers not only pour hydrocarbons into the air, but also release CO2 when they churn up the soil, leaving them in the garage is a good way to cut down on your carbon footprint.

Newspapers and cardboard were used to start new garden plots last year - with great success. Used for my new berry patch and even for my potato patch.
The only problem is that we canceled our newspaper subscription. May have to visit my neighbor's recycle bin for a few weeks.

On my wish list

'Comploo' Design Heated Entirely by Organic Waste

Architects from the Japanese design firm Bakoko have developed a circular structure, called the Comploo, that could be the perfect sustainable compliment to Japanese Tea Gardens during chilly winters--heated by a unique composting system built in the walls. Designers say that the heat captured from the organic waste breaking-down could heat the space to temperatures nearly 120º F, all while producing compost for the garden.
The key to the design is in the special decomposing compartments that line the walls. When food or garden waste is put inside, the heat generated by the microbial processes is circulated throughout the room. A glass ceiling acts like a greenhouse to capture heat from the sun as well.


And, after the heat has been captured from the material, what's left is useful as well. According to the designers:
A steady supply of rich organic compost is extracted from a door at the bottom of each bin. It fertilizes new vegetation that will eventually become fuel for the next cold season. The concept is suited to large urban parks, community gardens, or even serving as an outdoor café - anywhere that generates a continuous supply of organic waste for fuel.
There are a number of kinks that need to be worked out before the Comploo can be considered a viable alternative to outdoor garden structures--namely the stench produced by the decomposing organic waste. Nevertheless, according to a report in Galileu, designers will be unveiling a prototype in the near future.

Stench? I'll put up with that for a warm spot to enjoy a beer and a good smoke!

It's a sign

Image via Wikipedia

The joy of dirt

Soil is as essential a natural resource as air and water. Yet we’re running out of healthy, fertile dirt at an alarming rate. One man’s odyssey to retrace and reduce his soil footprint.


At the heart of Jeavons’ system is a maniacal focus on composting. Now, when he uses the term he is not merely referring to the quaint re-circulation of leftover bits of lunch. Jeavons recommends that a gardener devote a full 60 percent of planting space to growing crops the principal purpose of which is to add biomass to compost piles. Cereal grains, giant overgrown daikon gone to seed and six-foot-tall (two-meter-tall) cardoons are among the many plants born to die and rot un-tasted, cut down and fed through the system, capturing more carbon with each generation.

The sign?

Yes, you read that correctly. I have been composting my own dung in my backyard. Like many advances in human technology, the hegemony of the flush toilet is not forever, and as the planet has grown increasingly crowded, more people are reevaluating its merits. Every day, millions of tons of potential soil nutrition are sent downstream to treatment plants, where they are mixed with industrial effluent and spent pharmaceuticals, chlorinated, dechlorinated and condensed into a material that the industry likes to call “bio-solids,” but everyone else prefers to call by its old name: “sludge.” Most of this sludge ends up covering over the layers of garbage in landfills, contributing to the aforementioned methane problem. Then there is the dubious practice of soiling and cleaning our drinking water in an increasingly thirsty world.


On top of this, the nutrients contained therein are effectively lost forever. According to John Jeavons, all but a tiny percentage of the minerals necessary to produce a year’s worth of food for one person can be found in a year’s worth of that person’s waste.


My first step was to get a copy of The Humanure Handbook, published in 1995 by Joseph Jenkins, a slate roofer in western Pennsylvania. The Jenkins method is the model of simplicity. One merely expresses oneself into a bucket and covers it over with a carbonaceous material such as sawdust or rice hulls or ground coconut hulls or even finely ground leaves. Each bucket is then added to a compost heap, which is monitored with a thermometer to see that the pile generates enough heat to destroy any pathogens. After a year, the pile is closed down and a new one started, and after the second year the first year’s contents are ready to feed to plants.


I won’t lie to you: It took some skill and some tools to build my rodent-proof urban composting cage. Nor will I pretend that maintaining the system is as easy as pushing a little lever. There is significant hauling of buckets in and out of my house these days. I had to find straw to line the cage and I may spend the rest of my life on the prowl for suitable carbon-heavy cover materials.


The latter is crucial to the process for two reasons. First, its small particles cover your effusions, all but eliminating the stink factor. Then, when they are dumped into the compost pile, the dry carbonaceous stuff balances the wet nitrogenous stuff that comes out of your body, creating the ideal environment for the thermophilic bacteria already present in your gut to thrive. The fury of bacterial activity drives the temperature of the pile high enough to kill off pathogens. It takes 24 hours at 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) to kill all the bad bugs. At 115 degrees Fahrenheit, 46 Celsius, it takes a week.


The path of humanure is not one of instant gratification. Jenkins recommends you wait two years before feeding your plants, three if your pile did not get hot enough for long enough. For the time being, my reward came when I uncovered mine after a few weeks and discovered that every last vestige of stink had been gobbled up. What remained was the benign, earthy smell of a forest floor in spring. It will be years before the contents return as apples or tomatoes, so until then, this will have to do.

Yes, there it was staring at me. The humanure concept again. A sure sign that this may be my spring project. The muse is speaking to me.