Worms, Witches and Wreckage

We missed the Harvest Moon, but his weekend was worm harvest time. (It was actually well overdue, but who’s counting.) That means Zoey and I sorted the worms from the worm poo, then mixed up some new bedding to tuck those red wigglers in for the winter. We also expanded, adding another worm house, which makes it three total now. It’s really hard to separate the teeny tiny babies from the good stuff, so I’m letting it sit in a tub for several weeks, hoping those tiny worms get bigger and I’ll be able to pull them out of there.

Here’s the new bedding recipe, since I know you were dying to get your hands on it:

• 1/3 peat moss
• 1/3 soil (with some organic matter in it)
• 1/3 shredded brown leaves
• enough water to make it most and a bit sticky

I replaced shredded newspaper (an Uncle Carl trick) with the leaves, thanks to a tip from a worm-lover I met in St. Paul in April. It keeps the bedding more airy, and breaks down to give ‘em some extra snacking. I bought myself a little toy last week–a leaf vac and mulcher. Jon and Nicole got some help bagging their 10 million leaves this weekend…

In case you missed it, Halloween was Saturday. Trick or treating started for us at about 5pm, and wrapped up around 8:30. That’s crazy long, but when you go trick or treating in the country, stuff takes a while. We had a witch, a fairy princess, and a box of popcorn heading out of our house this year. All costumes made from stuff we already had, except a bit of face paint. (Not pictured: me after Zoey painted my face last night.)

And finally, we’re in the midst of a construction project. With baby on the way, it’s time to finish up the basement and add a couple bedrooms. Thanks to help from Brooks and Dad, I have it ready for sheetrock on Wednesday. One step this weekend was tearing out the temporary wall at the bottom of the stairs (we reused everything but the sheetrock). After I smacked a little hole in the wall just to startle Colleen, the girls’ eyes all got huge and a chorus of “Can we try that!?” cam soon after. So, take a look at this video to see the demolition crew in action.

 

Weeds and Neighbors

Both are growing at our place.

We’ll have new neighbors next door by Fall. The footprint of the house is staked out already, and word is the basement will be dug this week. It’s a great thing for our community–our soon-to-be-neighbor is a young and wonderful music teacher that we all figured would be whisked away by some other school district with better pay and bigger band budgets. Thanks for planting some roots in our little village Mr. Whitcomb.

rows of weed

And then the weeds…I had more weed than crop. No, not the kind Justin likes to plant in the hidden confines of the backyard cornfield. I’ve been ignoring my gardens (and my family, for the most part) the past week and a half. We launched a trashy new program at work, and it piled up a bunch of long hours for me lately. So, my neglect packaged up with boatloads of rain mean the gardens were green, and plumb full of weeds. I went on a ruthless killing spree last night out there. No undesired plant stood a chance…

Oh, and check out what my radishes did during the week of neglect. Skyscraper root veggies.

Those are a couple of homemade compost bins cookin’ in the background. I invited Rani to add to my newest pile any time she wants. Since she politely listened to my detailed DIY compost bin instructions before telling me she’d rather give the stuff to me instead.

Community Gardening

The Montrose Community Garden is different than most. No plots you can rent. Just a group of volunteers who plant and nurture veggies out there, and harvest them every early Saturday morning to share with the whole village. Donations are accepted, but not expected.

This past weekend, the bounty was beets, carrots, onions, monster cabbage and zucchini. All wonderful. We were too late to grab some carrots, but Uncle Ray invited me to come down any evening and dig a few up. I think I will, but it’ll be more about digging stuff up with Ray than about wanting carrots.

Because of all the beets, there were a whole lot of greens piling up around the garden market on Main Street. The community gardeners sent all the “waste” home with me to turn into compost. It took two trips, and I found about a dozen beets in the bottom of one container that were missed (I brought them back uptown).

trimming beets

ready to compost

Hot Sludge Sundays and Landfill LeachAde

Mmm, mmm good.

I hosted a group of high school science teachers and some sustainability interns on a garbage and recycling learning journey yesterday. It was great, and exhausting for some reason. We hit a high school lunch room, the hazardous waste facility, Millennium Recycling, a couple of green buildings downtown (this one and that one), and the big ugly Landfill. We also toured the City of Sioux Falls’ Wastewater Treatment Facility, where we learned what’s green in the sewage business, and were introduced to a little taste of heaven: “Hot Sludge.”

The Hot Sludge Lake Boat.

After the little micro-organisms eat up the poo and other nasties in an anaerobic digester, the remaining “solids” (which the dudes at the wastewater plant affectionately call hot sludge) get pumped over to Hot Sludge Lake–a settling pool. On this yummy lake is a boat, which operates a dredge that stirs up the hot sludge (which by this time is now just your average warm and soupy sludge) and scrapes some off the bottom to be turned into SiouxperGrow. Yes, the sludge eventually becomes a brand-named fertilizer for Minnehaha County corn and soybean fields. It’s injected by a fleet of honey wagons. Oh, one more thing: not only is there a guy who’s job it is to drive the Hot Sludge lake boat, but they also have to do maintenance on that sucker. Underneath the boat. While it’s still floating on Hot Sludge Lake…

And at  the landfill–which I learned is not a hole at all, but a gigantic mountain of compacted, decomposing garbage and earth that rises from the prairie at an alarming rate–we were shown the “Leachite Pond” (which for quite a few minutes, our group thought was called the “Leachade pond”). This is the holding pool for the “solids” left over from a literal mountain of decomposing garbage. The hot sludge of the landfill, if you will. It’s one of two byproducts (other than the mountain). The other is methane gas, which the Sioux Falls Sanitary Landfill is now piping to a nearby Poet ethanol plant to be used to make corn fuel.

Beautiful compost in the making.

The pipeline thing is pretty cool, and of course I was fascinated by the stretching piles of composting grass and leaves (get yourself some free compost–all you can scoop). But overall, the Landfill sucked all the energy out of me.  Witnessing rolling cornfields and precious wetlands in the process of becoming a giant garbage mound the size of Madison is tough stuff for me. Imagine this: you take the valley that Montrosians call home, and you fill it to the top with layers of garbage and dirt. Then you continue building up a mound that buries the water tower on the hilltop. Do that from the ballpark north of town to the south end of the Horstman Addition out by I-90. Now you’re mental visual is close to the real thing.  At least our tour guide Pearl was shining with hope and enthusiasm.

There are a couple of new “cells” ready to be filled up and mounded, with plans for up to five more on the land the Landfill already owns. These cells are about the size of Montrose, and take 5-7 years to fill up, based on the current five-county population the Landfill serves (which is estimated to more than double in the next 20 years).

We are wasteful creatures. But hey, we’re really getting good at helping nature make hot sludge and leachade.

Worm Fans and Farming Again

Busy day on the bartblog wire. Here’s my afternoon and evening:

1. Intended to plant a tree with Mesa. Checked two local nurseries, neither had any trees. (wtf?)
2. Picked up two used ice cream barrels that will soon become part of my rain water collection system. They still have some melted ice cream in them, if you’re interested. Free tastes for all.
3. Sent out my second red wiggler starter pack.  This one is headed for Brookings, SD. A friend of mine who works at SDSU came out with her husband today to see my operation, and went home with a bucket of composting worms for their fancy shmancy new hi-tech worm bin. Pictures are coming soon.
4. The girls and I (and Bailey) headed out to the farm for more calf tagging. Hope’s addiction to calving is really escalating out of control…I’ve put in about 8 hours of chasing and wrestling those cute little suckers in the past seven days–I’d say I’m damn near a farmer again. I’m also much slower than I used to be.

(taken with a grainy cell phone)

Alternative Mulch and that Compostable Cup

Hope, Zoey and I were out helping Grandpa Pat on the farm for a little while last night. While Dad was knocking the frame off the big shed door (you can ask him for details), I was gathering up a big pile of soybean straw that Duane emptied out of his combine while fixing something earlier in the day. This was a jackpot for me.

I tried a little mulching experiment last fall that I learned from my friends at the Prairie Arboretum in Freeman, SD. I went out to the bean field where the guys were combining and gathered up the soybean straw that is a byproduct of the combining process. So, this nice big pile right in the middle of the farm yard made it much easier this time. Turns out the stuff works pretty well. My biggest problem, being a windy hill dweller, is keeping my mulch in place instead of down in my neighbors’ yards. I even reused some emptied feed sacks from the silo shed, so it was a green project. Good price (free), recycled packaging, and local and renewable materials. Oh so green goodness…

recycled bags, soybean straw mulch

old stuff from last fall

the end game

emptied composter

the lid, three months later

that supposedly compostable cup

I also turned the compost in my homemade composter this morning (I dump it out once int he process to stir it all up and put it back in the barrell). This is the compost containing that supposedly compostable cup from Oscar’s Coffee that I put in there on June 22. Well, still looks mostly like a cup to me. The jury’s still out, I guess.

Wiggler Update (plus worm poop tomatoes)

What my worms love this summer: strawberries and zucchini. This stuff disappears in about 48 hours (that’s pretty fast eatin’ for red wigglers). They also gobble away watermelon, but I’ve been putting most of that into the big compost bin (without worms). The watermelon makes the whole worm box soaking wet. I’ve used it to my advantage though–I set up a pretty simple system to capture all that ooey ‘compost tea’ as it runs out the bottom of the worm box (see below).

That stuff is supposed to be super fertilizer and a cure-all for sick plants. I’ve tested it twice, with mixed results. I put some on the cherry tomato plant in our garden, and we just harvested the best little ‘maters we’ve ever eaten. I also put some on a dying bush in our yard, and it just finished it off (it’s dead).

fully loaded

fresh fill

under the zucchini

compost tea

little veggie garden

cherry ‘maters

There’s also a shot up there of our veggie and bulb garden (and the cherry tomatoes we didn’t already eat). It’s commercial fertilizer and pesticide free. Only thing we added to our (lousy) soil was compost from last fall and some worm poop to each tomato plant. Two of the tomatoes are heirloom varieties, and they haven’t had any disease problems at all. All those marigolds are great natural pesticide too.

Beer Powered Cars

Beer can fuel a lot of things: parties, hobbies in the garage, indigestion, composting, sex drive, temporarily poor sense of beauty, bad fantasy football drafts, stupidity, aluminum can collections, etc. You know all those (except maybe the compost). I bet you didn’t know that you can run your car on Coors. Ethanol made from wasted Coors, that is. Sounds like the folks in Golden make 3 million gallons a year from beer that gets spilled or isn’t good enough to go into my uncle Joe.  Obama and the Dems will be riding around Denver in beer powered cars in a few weeks. Read all about that beer ethanol here, here or here.

I love beer. Not like a college guy loves beer (quantity wins), but more like a 31-year-old daddy who doesn’t think it’s fun to get hangovers anymore loves beer (quality wins). One, maybe two beers in any setting. And darker the better. It’s the kind of love wine conessiuers have with the vino. A beer can be art. Art that you drink. Or something…

Now back to work.

Ready to Rot: How I Built a Compost Bin For Free

[This is a post that I started last August (2007), but for some reason didn't finish and publish. I just ran across it recently and thought I'd wrap it up with a pretty bow for you.]

DIY Compost Bin Construction

It’s pretty easy (and free!) to build a compost bin for your yard or garden. I built this one all with stuff I found in my garage. Inspiration for the design goes to Mike McGrath’s Book of Compost (I think–not 100% positive where the idea came from).

You will need:

• One used 32 gallon plastic garbage can, with lid. Mine has broken handles and a couple cracks in the lid. I’ve had it for years in my garage.
• At least four feet of plastic drainage tile/tubing. I had dozens of feet of this black, ribbed stuff from when we built our house and I tried (tirelessly) to keep the rain spouts from washing away by grass seed.
• A utility knife
• A hand-held drill and auger bit. No precise size–I used a bit that drills a hole a little larger than the circumference of a pencil.
• Organic garbage to dump inside (see my recipe below).

Now the instructions are pretty simple.

1. First, cut the drainage tube to a length that will fit level with the top of the garbage can when stood up vertically on the inside bottom of the can (see the pictures below if that doesn’t make any sense).
2. Now drill holes all over the can, lid and tube. Space them about every couple inches; even closer on the tube. Just dot that sucker with holes.
3. Now, stand the tube in the inside center of the can, so the top of the tube is even with the top of the can. Check to be sure the lid fits nicely, with at least a few inches between the top of the tube and the lid.
4. Fill ‘er up and let it rot!

The tube allows air to circulate into the center of the can. This is great news, because it means you don’t have to turn or mix up your compost so often (I still mix mine once in a while).

Recipe

Here’s what I threw in the can:

• I filled the can a little over half full with brown leaves I collected at the ballpark. I also collected poison ivy during that expedition, so BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU GET YOUR LEAVES!!! While it’s fun to scare children with an elephant man face, it is

Compostable Cup (plus a great sunset)

I hung out for a couple hours on Friday at Oscar’s Coffee in Sioux Falls to get some work done. It’s a great spot for me–uncrowded, wi-fi worker friendly (free wireless and outlets by every booth), good drinks, some organic stuff and they’re at least attempting to be less earth-destructive. It’s also on the west side of town–not my favorite neighborhood–but it’s a quick escape when I forget to get out of town before 4:30. So, when I ordered a fair trade organic Dominican iced chocolate something-or-another, it came in a seemingly plastic cup. Broadcast on the bottom of the cup: “100% COMPOSTABLE. MADE FROM CORN.”

Interesting for sure. Especially since I was bashing corn (or corn syrup, at least) this week a bit. Thought I better test the claim in the ‘ol homemade compost bin:

I did go back and crush the cup a bit, just like I chop up other stuff I throw in there. I’ll check it in a month and give you an update.

BONUS

Last night’s sunset was absolutely fabulous. We were making some s’mores in the backyard following an afternoon at the lake with Nick and Julie. Take a peek at nature’s show (and Nick showing off his marshmallows):