View allAll Photos Tagged compostable
7DOS ... Wk4 ... Down to Earth
This is my kitchen compost bin. All the organic waste from cooking is added each day and when it is full it goes into the big compost bin until it breaks down to compost.
Compost which is rich in nutrients is used as an additive in gardens and agriculture at which point it comes back to the earth, so completing the cycle.
I wanted to try and make a compost tumbler using only reclaimed wood from a shipping pallet. There is enough wood from one 42x42 pallet to make the stand - just be careful with the nails!
The rain barrel was donated (thanks to a wonderful friend!)
I bought the caster wheels from harbor freight for about 8 bucks.
You can now _buy_ compost at Whole Foods. Why bother doing it yourself when you can feel good by spending money to do your part?
I think it's kind of ridiculous.
Harvested garlic from Upper Roof which was planted in November 2016 as a test to see if garlic would grow in containers on that section of the roof. Bok Choy, lettuce leaves and small green onions.
attn moustache house residents past and preset: the year of composting finally paid off! about 2/3 of the current compost pile was this perfect decomposed matter. it is now in the garden.
not looking forward to (potentially) living on a 3rd floor with no garden...
The water butts are full of couch grass and nettle roots. Four bins full and counting...
They were drowned in water for 6 months, then poured out into a heap, covered with tarpaulin for another 6 months, then levelled and raked out.
Sunflower clippings tossed into the compost pit will be pitched out and chopped up with hand pruners. (Purchase of a Briggs & Stratton chipper proved an expensive mistake; it kept clogging so badly that when I listed it on Craig's List, it was as a giveaway.) Reducing sunflower arterial branches (most of what is pictured) that go into this pit in large quantities every year is a scratchy, awful job that only pays off in the spring when emptying last year's compost produces about 20, hell, maybe even 30 cubic yards of new soil.
Last year the Chicago permaculturist Nance Klehm (website: spontaneousvegetation.net ) came to Pasadena to give a composting class at Huntington Gardens. There students, including several of my friends, emerged almost hyper-mindful about whether their compost piles were "thermophillic" (hot) or "mesophillic" (warm). Khlehm was interested when I showed her the old concrete -lined compost pit, put in the garden ca. 1950, and she explained that dry climate composting often benefits from buried pits to help keep up the water content beneficial to the decomposition process. At her class, Khlem taught students to layer compost with dry elements (leaves, chopped twigs etc) and wet ones (grass clippings, cover crops, food scraps). A friend, skilled gardener Kazi Pitelka, who took the class, later proudly built piles with layers that were the world of rot's answer to a mille-feuille.
Chad made me a compost bin. I still need to put a lid on it, but I've been dumping food scraps into it. It's been a great feeling to do.
Every couple of weeks or so I turn them over, unstacking them, setting them up next to the old location, and shoveling the contents over. This keeps the oxygen in the compost bin and speeds up the decomposition. In between turns, I bury kitchen scraps in the compost for the red wiggler worms I added. Then I keep them covered with fallen leaves to cut down on flies, which usually are not a problem, but the leaves also help add carbon. The worms love the scraps, and I get some really great compost out of the deal.
Compost making exercise
Permaculture Design Certificate
With Nick Ritar + special guests
Alexandria, Sydney Australia
May-August 2010
I thought my stream was in dire need of a splash of color in what has otherwise been flowing with blacks, whites and grays of late.
This is another in my series of compost compositions that I made a few months ago. The wrinkly red thing is a red pepper ripped open and stretching to touch the stalk of the yellow zucchini. Behind the vegetables' romance is a coffee-ground stained egg shell. As I mentioned earlier, I was drawn to this subject because of my interest in food and the roll it plays in culture not to mention our health. Incidentally, everybody ought to read "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan. The book has a lot to say about this subject.
Anyhow, I made the photographs as a celebration of food. Whole, real food.
Since I made these photographs our garden has sprouted a plethora of tasty tomatoes, zucchini, onions, carrots, peppers, peas and squash. There is truly nothing like plucking ingredients straight from one's own garden, and fixing up a delicious stew or salad knowing precisely where it came from and the work that was spent nurturing it. There is a quote underlined in my copy of Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" (another great read) that I especially enjoy. It reads:
"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery store, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue."
Living the self-sufficient life that Leopold led is by no means easy or necessarily for everyone, but a garden is relatively simple and nearly effortless here in Oregon and the sense of connectedness to life that one gains is overwhelming.
Composted cow manure – like that produced at this western Washington dairy – is clean, odorless and rich in natural nutrients. It makes an outstanding soil amendment and is increasingly used as a healthy material in which to bed cows.
This rotting old bridge crosses above the abandoned Delaware and Hudson Albany-Voorheesville line in Voorheesville, N.Y.
It's an odd type of bridge I haven't seen before, with a steel frame but wooden support beams and a wooden deck. The deck is soft and mushy, basically a flat compost heap with a small jungle growing on it. There are gaping holes rotted through.
I have no idea what it once carried ... it looks like a railroad or trolley bridge but seems too light for either. It goes from a farm field to an overgrown farm field. It's not on any of my older maps. I asked a nearby resident what it was. All he knew is that it has always just been there.
On Wednesday, October 23, at the Western Branch Yard Waste Composting facility in Upper Marlboro, MD, the Prince George’s County Department of Environmental Resources (DER) Waste Management Division (WMD) cut the ribbon on a food scrap pilot project that will compost yard waste and food scraps bulked together.
Our second compost bin is getting full, so I took one of the tiers from the first bin and placed it on the second... making this one 4 tiers high.
We have stopped placing compost in the first bin, so it will finish the final step of composting before we empty it out.
[Update] This photo appears in the book "I Garden: Urban Style" by Reggie Solomon and Michael Nolan.