Turning Compost
The Archdruid has turned his peak oil/deindustrializing blog into a course in Green Wizardry. His first practical assignment is to learn to make compost and think about rethinking our industrialized food growing system and start solving our problems within the ecological system itself using what nature already offers more efficiently and with little waste instead of mining all the necessary nutrients separately and ripping off mountain tops to do it or other such ridiculously destructive thing.
Catherine has taken over the composting regime because she wanted to make sure that the proper amounts of carbon were mixed in with the kitchen scraps and then watered. I was being too lazee fair about it and not keeping things moist. She says compost making is just like cooking. Here we can see the lovely redwood shavings I got from Martine and Hilary's house. They live in the redwoods and a fallen tree from last winter was cut up into firewood leaving three giant bags full of wood shavings.
I like to turn compost and sift it. It's very meditative. The Archdruid talks about what I call the ick factor and he calls the Squick factor that keeps people from returning to earth based systems. When I kept a worm bin, my worms were so happy they multiplied prodigiously and when I went to harvest the vermi-compost I was left with a 7 lbs mass of wriggling worms that tipped even my ick factor, but then I adjusted; they were very clean and looked like lava flowing. Wish I had a picture of that, but it was pre-digital.
Turning Compost
The Archdruid has turned his peak oil/deindustrializing blog into a course in Green Wizardry. His first practical assignment is to learn to make compost and think about rethinking our industrialized food growing system and start solving our problems within the ecological system itself using what nature already offers more efficiently and with little waste instead of mining all the necessary nutrients separately and ripping off mountain tops to do it or other such ridiculously destructive thing.
Catherine has taken over the composting regime because she wanted to make sure that the proper amounts of carbon were mixed in with the kitchen scraps and then watered. I was being too lazee fair about it and not keeping things moist. She says compost making is just like cooking. Here we can see the lovely redwood shavings I got from Martine and Hilary's house. They live in the redwoods and a fallen tree from last winter was cut up into firewood leaving three giant bags full of wood shavings.
I like to turn compost and sift it. It's very meditative. The Archdruid talks about what I call the ick factor and he calls the Squick factor that keeps people from returning to earth based systems. When I kept a worm bin, my worms were so happy they multiplied prodigiously and when I went to harvest the vermi-compost I was left with a 7 lbs mass of wriggling worms that tipped even my ick factor, but then I adjusted; they were very clean and looked like lava flowing. Wish I had a picture of that, but it was pre-digital.