Composting

Composting is the ultimate in recycling.  You eat a banana, throw the peel into your compost, it rots and becomes rich compost, you use the compost to nurture your vegetable garden.

So…how do you get a compost bin?  Easy!  You can buy one, or make one yourself.  OR, if you’re lucky, you can get one for free.

Check both your city and your county websites for free compost bin offers.  Sometimes they’ll make you take a class or take a quiz.  I had to read a short booklet on composting, then took an online quiz.  Our compost bin showed up on the doorstep a few days later.

If you don’t have this option, you can purchase one from your local hardware store.  There are some pretty fancy compost bins out there with some neat features – it all depends what you’re willing to spend.

My mom built hers out of 1/2″ hardware cloth.  She shaped it into a cylinder, and it sits inside her garden.  It works for her.

What goes in a compost bin?
-Kitchen scraps
-Grass clippings
-Leaves
-Paper
-Manure from poultry or herbivorous animals
-Hair

What doesn’t go in a compost bin?
-Meat
-Bones
-Greasy foods
-Invasive weeds

The materials that go into a compost bin can be divided into two categories: Green (nitrogen-rich) and Brown (carbon-rich).  Green items include the aforementioned manure, hair, green leaves, fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, grass clippings, and weeds.  Brown items include coffee filters, dry leaves, dried and brown grass clippings, dry leaves, paper, and eggshells.  Ideally, you’d want a 3:1 ration of Brown to Green.  Your bin can take anywhere from 3-6 months to turn into compost, depending on how well you tend to it.

Keep something on your countertop in which to place your kitchen scraps for composting.  We use a tupperware container.  Something with a lid is preferable.  That way you’re not walking back and forth between your kitchen and the compost bin.

A larger container with a lid would be nice...we're working on that

Once in a while, you’ll need to water your compost bin (should have the moisture of a damp sponge).  You’ll also need to turn the bin once every 1-2 weeks.  You don’t have to literally turn the whole thing upside-down (though there are commercially sold bins out there that you CAN turn!).  We use a cultivator tool and just rake it so that everything gets mixed up.

This is ours with fresh scraps thrown in

Refer to my prior post for what our freshly turned compost looks like.  If you do it right, it should only have a faint smell.

LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE: Put your compost bin in a convenient location.  We had ours by the back fence before, and none of us wanted to walk out there to throw the scraps in.  We’ve put it in our vegetable garden, close to our kitchen (that’s it there on the left).

It's right next to the gate. That there is the kitchen window.

Also, if you end up getting one of the plastic ones with no bottom, dig it into the ground a bit.  This will make your bin more sturdy, and less likely to fall over on a windy day or if someone accidentally leans on it or if your dog is trying to eat something in it…you get the idea.

INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT: 5 minutes-1 hour, depending on how you go about acquiring your bin.

DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 5 minutes to toss stuff into the bin, 10 minutes every 1-2 weeks to turn the bin.

Stay tuned for quails!

Fruit Trees

We went to Lowe’s today to grab some supplies for our sprinkler system in the veggie garden and came back home with two fruit trees.  Funny how that works, huh?

The three of us eat a lot of fruit – they make great snacks, smoothies, and dessert!  We already have an orange tree in our backyard, so we bought an avocado tree and a tree with 4 types of pluots grafted onto it.  My parents are skeptical of the last one, but it looks like 3/4 branches are showing the beginnings of fruit.  The 4th has some blurb about cross-pollination with Japanese plums.  D’oh well.

First though, we had two trees in our yard we intended to get rid of.

Honey, you have to pull the tree out. I'm taking photos for my blog.

The first was this prickly evergreen.  I hate it.  Its needles go through my gardening gloves, and it looks dumb by itself.  We planted the avocado here ($25 at Lowe’s).

Much better!

We get high winds here, so it’s very important to support the tree.  The next tree to get the bucket (ha ha ha) was the willow tree.  Our neighbor gave it to us, so we planted it…but the more we looked at it the less we liked it.  We’re considering a heist-like maneuver and planting the tree out by the river when no one’s looking.

I think he can see into our yard too...here's hoping he doesn't notice!

We planted the pluot tree here ($60, ouch ouch ouch!  But the kid loves pluots, and so do we…).

I hope it eventually provides shade for the quail hutch

We also moved our compost bin from next to the quail hutch over to our garden.  Devin used to pick things out of it and chew on them (why, oh why, are dogs so gross?).  Since our garden is gated off, she won’t be able to reach it.  Plus, it’s a lot closer to the kitchen.

We'll be able to use some of this with the garden very soon

We’re going to get a few more trees for our yard – probably almond, dwarf cherry, and lemon.  Most trees come with instructions on how often they should be fertilized, how to care for them, and how to plant them.  If you can, buy plant-specific fertilizer.  I learned from my mom that the orange tree needed citrus fertilizer.  We were using an all-purpose fertilizer before, and it wasn’t working.

LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE: Shop around, and fork out a little extra $$ for the larger saplings.  Our orange tree was $15 and is about hip-height.  Pretty pathetic, huh?  We’re too cheap to replace it, but I would have much rather spent $10-20 extra to have something that is producing fruit now, instead of having to wait a couple of years.

INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT: 1-4 hours.  It took us 4 because of the rocks and tarp we have, plus our soil is hard-as-rock clay.  We mixed in a lot of planting soil.

DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 2-10 minutes.  It takes only a couple minutes to water (less if you have automatic watering set up), and a little more time 1/month or so to go grab the fertilizer and fertilize them.  When fruit is produced, you’ll want to spend some time picking them so they don’t fall to the ground and rot.  I’ve learned the hard way that rotting fruit is a welcome invitation for a fruit fly infestation in your home.

For this weekend, I hope to post an introduction to keeping quail, as well as keeping a compost heap and how you may be able to get a compost bin for free (depending on where you live)!