Salvage in the Garden

Salvage is something gardeners can sometimes carry too far.  The woods around the community garden are dotted at irregular intervals with little piles of treasure stored there by enterprising gardeners over the years: orange snow fences, large straight sticks of all sorts, old beat-up tarps, broken storage totes.  Junk-looker that I am, I certainly can't throw any stones.  Yes, those are milk jugs holding down a protective net covering made from the crinoline of my wedding dress.  (It just made it too bulky to store, okay?!)

Community garden plot

In one respect, however, garden hoarders are far ahead of their time: the use of leftover, excess, and unwanted food materials to enhance the soil.  It really makes me sad to think how many people will get up tomorrow and make coffee for themselves, throwing yesterday's grounds into the trash.  I can't escape the thought that some portion of the materials used by the coffee plant to make those beans came directly from the soil and will now end up locked away in a landfill.  How long can this continue before we have to start digging this precious stuff back out?

Gardeners know better.  My local Starbucks bags their coffee grounds and filters separate from the trash and leaves them out back for a guy who comes every day to pick them up.  Where does your food waste go?

A beautiful Valerie lettuce plant, with scattered coffee grounds on the right

Composting Monologue

I just wanted to point out that I'm adding a page to this blog about composting.  It's an email I wrote to my nephew when he was thinking about doing a boy scout badge on composting, and includes probably far more information and opinions than most people ever wanted to see on composting.  Check it out if you're interested.

Compost Gift

I have been meaning to post this for some time - it is a big bag of compost given to me by N's uncle T. We went to visit their homestead in PA for Father's Day, where they have a huge garden with beautiful soil. (Oh, my soil envy knows no bounds!) I watched my 5-year-old niece's feet sink into the nice, soft, soil and disappear. They used to run a CSA from this garden, so they really know what they are doing.

I am pretty certain that T makes his compost with manure from local animals. They are surrounded by farms, including many Amish households, so it is easy to get manure. Here it is not so easy to find, and I am always a bit reluctant to bring in manure to my compost pile, knowing that it will be only several yards away from my neighbor's home.

Anyway, T. said I should put it in a raised bed and plant something there that I want to just grow and grow. I think I'll put it where my tomatoes were and plant my garlic in there this fall. I sure would like to have some luck with my garlic next year!

Coffee and Compost, I

As you may have noticed, I've had a "take bucket to Starbucks" on my to-do list for some time now. Well, I actually took my bucket to Starbucks quite a while ago, but I discovered to my dismay that someone else had tapped my coffee grounds source and drained it dry! Apparently there is a man who visits that Starbucks twice a day and takes all the grounds they have. Big, big bags of grounds every time! What is he trying to grow?

I've been sort of floundering for a new solution since then, though now I don't know why. One day, a light bulb came on in my brain and I realized, I work in a building with a cafeteria that serves coffee every morning! So, voila! I have all the coffee grounds I need and then some!

This has prompted me to re-evaluate how much compost I can produce in a year. The great thing about coffee grounds is they have a high enough nitrogen content that they can keep a compost pile nice and warm. Normally I can only do about 1/3 cubic yard per year (final volume) because it takes me that long to gather enough nitrogen-rich materials to break down the appropriate amount of fall-gathered leaves, my main carbon-rich ingredient. With this much coffee grounds, though, I may be able to do twice that much, depending on how I manage it and how much carbon-rich material I can find. (Hmmm, maybe Starbucks will give me their newspapers...)

If you would like to learn more about composting, I really like the Washington State University's website on backyard composting, both the layout and the content.

Composting and Friends

From time to time I see people ask on message boards what they should hold their kitchen scraps in until they are ready to dump them in the compost pile. This is what I use: a tall glass jar with a tight-fitting lid from IKEA. I leave it open most of the time without odor problems. From what I have read, the reason that rotten plant material (not meat) starts to smell bad is usually because of a buildup anaerobic bacteria. They can only live in the absence of oxygen, so if the jar is open and doesn't have water in the bottom of it, it doesn't really get smelly. Some people keep their jars in the fridge, but this is only necessary for me if it takes longer than a week to go empty it.

I also have, from time to time, apartment-dwelling friends who want to compost but can't have a pile of their own. I have accepted donations in jars and 5-gallon buckets. Recently I received my last donation from a pair of good friends whose landlord let them keep a trash can full of rotten kitchen scraps outside his home. They drilled holes all over a regular outdoor plastic trash can to allow air to flow in and liquid to drain out, and put in all the veggie peels, apple cores, corn husks, coffee grounds and eggshells they produced. (They eat mostly freshly-prepared vegetarian, so it was probably more than the average married couple.) About half of it would be completely broken down on arrival, and I was always interested to see what was still identifiable at the bottom! Once when they delivered during winter I found a layer of dead maggots just above the frozen-solid stuff - fascinating! Sadly, they are moving on and I will be missing their scraps - as well as RM's company.