The Compost Bin

Well another gardening season is almost here. It's been over 60 degrees for the past week and other than the giant piles of snow that I made when I shoveled, most of the snow is melting. And with the disastrous season that I had in the garden last year becoming nothing more than just a bad memory, I'm writing down some garden goals for the new year.

Winter Sowing - I've actually been winter sowing all winter long. Through the blizzards, the snowmaggedon and the snowicanne, I was filling up empty soda bottles and apple juice containers with soil and planting seeds. I've been known to do some leaf thieving in the fall to add to my compost bins but this winter I became a bottle borrower, going through my neighbors recycling bins. My kids like to say, "Dad thinks he's a hobo and goes through people's garbage."

Worm bin - The good folks at Natures Foot Print Inc were nice enough to send me a worm bin to review. It's a Worm Factory 360 and it's pretty cool looking. I even got a DVD with some nice instructions about raising worms and it says that the best temperature for worms are between 40 & 70. And that just happens to be the temperature of the inside my garage at this time of year. So I'll be buying some Red Wiggler Worms and vermicomposting real soon.

Raised Bed Cages - Between the rabbits, the woodchucks, the chipmunks, the birds, the squirrels it was a constant battle to protect my garden. A fence by itself just can't protect those fruits and vegetables from the daily onslaught of those hungry pests. So I'm going with a new protection scheme this year. I'm going to build hinged wire boxes over the top of my raised beds. The design I'm thinking about will also protect the garden from any freak hailstorms and I'll also be able to cover them with garden fabric for quick and easy hoop houses.

Grow a lot of food - That's my goal every year but it seems that growing your own food has suddenly become in vogue.

Canning - I'd really like to start enjoying tomatoes during the winter. Supermarket tomatoes and even expensive hot house tomatoes just really taste like crap. It's time to start saving the tons of tomatoes that I grow every year and the best way to do that would be to get one of those home canning kits. It's something that I've always wanted to try.

Well those are some of my goals for now. I'll provide more details and photos of these and other projects in the weeks to come. I haven't posted in ages and I'm looking forward to it. Happy Gardening.

Round 5




Round 6

I'm enjoying these Compost-Off videos by Gaiam. But both the Earthmaker Composter and the Bio-Orb Monster Compost Bin aren't doing that well. Well at least that what they're focusing on in the videos.

I'll defend these products a little bit and say that neither bin is really a "set it and forget it" type of product. You're going to have to watch your compost and tend to it's needs.

For example, if your bin is stinky (like the bio-orb is these videos) then add more dried leaves or shredded newspapers. And if it's drying out (like the Earthmaker) well then water it. Or maybe even leave the lid off when it rains.

Well that's my two cents. Enjoy the videos.

Round 2


Round 3


Round 4

Have you ever wanted to see a compost bin throwdown? A real side by side blind taste test? Well the good folks at Gaiam have done just that.

Check out this video where they compare the Earthmaker Composter and the Bio-Orb Monster Compost Bin. With the video you can get a good idea what it's like making compost with these things. And there's going to be more videos in this series. I'll keep my eye out for them.

Image via Wikipedia

If you follow composting news (and who doesn't) then you probably heard about several compost fires recently.

There was one burning in Maple Valley, Seattle earlier in the week and another in Saginaw, Michigan yesterday.

Now before you get worried about your kitchen compost crock bursting into flames on your counter top, both of these fires took place at composting facilities. These are really large processing plants that compost for a whole town or city and their piles are probably larger than your house.

Can a compost fire start in a home compost bin? It's probably possible but it's rather unlikely. Some of the factors that cause compost to spontaneously combust are the following:

• Large Well Insulated Piles
• Limited Air Flow
• Dry Pockets in the Pile

What happens is the biological activity in a compost pile generates heat. And if the pile isn't aerated (which is common when the compost pile is bigger than a house) decomposition will be anaerobic. One by-product of anaerobic composting is methane. Now you've got heat and fuel and all you need is for this to happen near a dry pocket of unfinished compost in huge well insulated pile and poof, you've got a compost fire.

This isn't likely to happen in your average home composting set up but it's not a bad idea to give you compost a mix now and then.


Sources: 1, 2

Here is a list of the most popular compost tumblers on the market:
(according to Amazon - 08/19/09)



#1 - Achla CMP-05 Spinning Horizontal Composter
I find this hard to believe actually. It's not the cheapest tumbler out there (see #2) and it's not the most well known brand either. But I guess it's the fact that it looks easy to use and it's decent price make it very popular among people shopping to compost tumblers.









#2 - Envirocycle Composter
The Envirocycle Composter being on this list makes more sense to me. It's nice looking, doesn't take up a lot of space, easy to spin and has the lowest price on this list. And I think that's why this model is a very popular choice with school gardening programs.












#3 - Tumbleweed Composter

I don't know why it's called the tumbleweed composter since it doesn't really look like a tumbleweed. It's more of a garbage can that was skewed through the middle by an axle. Well, regardless of the name this thing mixes compost ingredients well. A slow spin will cause the contents to move from the top to the bottom and back again. The legs look a little flimsy though.







#4 - Back Porch Compost Tumbler
I can see why The Back Porch Compost Tumbler belongs on the back porch. It's ugly. It looks more like something you'd see at bingo night instead of in the garden. But regardless, it has a great reputation for making fast compost.









#5 - MANTIS® ComposT-Twin

At $499, I'm surprised that this one even made the list. It's the Cadillac of compost tumblers. If you want a big tumbler, that spins easily and you want it from a brand name that you can trust then this is it. I still can't get over the price but at least they offer free shipping, a money back guarantee, free activator and a Guide to Composting. It's not in my budget but it is on my wish list.

Now here's something that you don't see every day. A banana tree with little bananas on it in New Jersey.

I'm a big fan of the hardy banana plant, the musa basjoo and I have been growing them for years now. Every fall I dig them up, wrap them in newspapers, bubble wrap or burlap and overwinter them in my garage.

But this is the first time that I've ever gotten the plant to flower and actually make tiny little bananas. How cool is that?

What's even more interesting is that because of the Crazy June Hailstorm that we had here in my area, the plants lost all of their leaves and looked really beaten down most of the summer. They really are the smallest and have the fewest leaves since I bought the original plant years ago.

But maybe that stress forced the musa basjoo survival instincts to kick in and they tried to create some seeds. Well whatever the reason, it's pretty neat to have a banana tree with bananas. We don't have a long enough summer for them to become fully grown and I don't think the musa basjoo fruit is edible but I'll be watching these plants with great interest for the rest of the summer.

Have you been searching for a rotating composter that looks like a lunar lander? Well if you are then I've found exactly what you're looking for.

How cool looking is this thing? I'm sure you've seen typical compost tumblers that look like a big cylinder on it's side. Stuff goes in the top and you spin it around. Sounds boring right? Well if you want to make your composting much more exciting then you should try out this STC Green Ecomposter. I think that aliens might come down to your garden and rotate this bin for you.

It's made from recycled plastic which is nice and it's a pretty big composter. The dimensions are 32"x32"x31". I guess it's not quite a perfect sphere but it looks like it.

It's on the expensive side, coming in at over $200 but that's still less than the Urban Compost Tumbler which in my opinion is one of the best tumblers on the market.

And if you're into modding your compost bin then may I suggest getting some black and white plastic spray paint and turning this thing into a big soccer ball. My son would get a kick out of that (oooh, that one was bad). Either that or the lunar lander that I mentioned earlier. Even when you're not composting, this rotating composter will be fun for the whole family.

Here’s a great gardening tidbit that you don’t often see in gardening books. Frozen ice balls falling from the sky for almost an hour are really not a good thing to happen to plants. So you should try to avoid that if you’d like to have a great garden. Unfortunately I was not able to take my own advice and as I’ve mentioned before, a freak June hailstorm in New Jersey left my vegetable garden shredded.

But here it is several weeks later and some plants have started to bounce back. Now don’t get me wrong, I still totally consider this year’s summer garden to be a disaster but all is not lost.

Usually around the 4th of July all my tomato and pepper plants are rocking. They would be full of flowers and really starting to reach for the top of the tomato cages or stakes or whatever I decide to use to keep them upright. This year, I’m just happy to have a few leaves on the plants. I figure the storm set me back about a month.

I knew that my perennial berry plants would be fine for next year but this years blueberries and blackberries are actually looking pretty good. The June bearing strawberries were cut short by a week or two but the plants have recovered nicely. I’m also lucky that the smaller ever bearing strawberry plants that I have on my patio were spared from the ice storm.

And I’m really surprised that my zucchini and squash are growing nicely again and even flowering. I think I may have to grab some blossoms and make a nice omelet sometime soon. After the hailstorm these guys looked like they went through the garbage disposal. They’re really wasn’t much left. But I guess that having healthy roots planted with lots of compost was enough to keep them alive even though there were no leaves left. Good for you zucchini. I vote you as the comeback vegetable of the year.

The new rhubarb plants that I put in this spring are questionable. I was planning on letting them grow some deep healthy roots and not harvest any this season but the hailstorm decided it wanted some rhubarb and broke a bunch of stalks off for me.

Other than that, I’ve got tons of hostas that look like an army of slugs had their way with them. But hostas really are bulletproof. By the end of the month most of the ripped leaves should be replaced with new ones, so no worries there.

And the same goes with all of my hardy banana plants. Oh they look awful right now but given some time and perhaps a few doses of compost tea, new shoots should start outnumbering the tattered confetti like leaves that now have the majority.

So that’s where I am right now in the garden. I also bought a few seedlings to fill in some of the vast expanses of emptiness in the garden that I’m not used to having in July. Things could have been a lot worse so I’m thankful that I’ll still get a chance to enjoy a garden fresh tomato sometime this summer. Hey it might not be until August but I’m not better late than never.

Image via Wikipedia

Since I’ve got a lot of free space in the vegetable garden lately, I’ve been on the look out for something interesting to try growing. Sometimes I’ll go to the store to buy tiki torch fuel and I wind up coming home with a new plant. That’s exactly what happened this week and now I’m going to try growing kohlrabi.

Kohlrabi definitely seems like an interesting vegetable to try growing. So what exactly is Kohlrabi? Kohlrabi is also known as a German turnip. It doesn’t taste like a turnip though. People say it has a taste that sort of is a cross between a broccoli stem and an apple. I think technically the vegetable is related to cabbage but it must be a third cousin or something because I just don’t see the family resemblance.

I planted them a few feet apart but only because of all that space in the vegetable garden that I’ve mentioned before. You can put them a lot closer together if you’re short on space. The rest of the planting instructions are pretty typical, well drained soil, amended with a lot of compost, heavy feeder.

So what can I do with this Kohlrabi? That’s a good question. I’ve looked up some recipes to try and they seem pretty simple. You can eat it cooked or raw. You can fry or grill kohlrabi with garlic and oil but that’s not very exciting. You can cook and old shoe with garlic and oil and it’ll still taste good. I also found some coleslaw recipes that use kohlrabi instead of cabbage. That sounds good. I’ll definitely give that one a shot.

Well I hope to be able to try these recipes, but that depends if the plants don’t get eaten by a woodchuck or get bombed with several inches of hail. It’s been a weird gardening season so far but hopefully I’ll be able to remember it as the first season that I grew kohlrabi.

Well here it is, the middle of June and I don't have a vegetable garden anymore. The day before the hail storm in New Jersey, I had tomatoes, peppers, squash, zucchini, rhubarb, corn and more but now I have nothing but shredded wheat.

It's really amazing how a bad hail storm can destroy a garden. I was so worried about the woodchucks eating my plants that I never considered that I should worry about ice falling from the sky.

Its definitely too late to start over using seeds. I may pick up a few tomato plants at the nursery just so that I can get something from the summer garden. But mostly I'm just going to move on and focus on planning the late summer/fall garden. There's lots of great cool season crops and root veggies that I've been meaning to try.

Well I'll start planning it once I clean up this mess.

Just when I think I've got the yard word under control mother nature decides that there's a lot more to do. Northern New Jersey was pummeled by a freak hailstorm yesterday that not only left several inches of ice on the ground but also shredded all of my plants and trees.

I took these pictures 4 hours after the storm when I got home from work and you can still see the ice in my yard. It was really weird to be outside in June and be able to see your frozen breath and we usually don't have ice on the pool toys.

Looks like I'm going to be pretty busy with the clean up for the next few days. Check out this local news video for more on this crazy weather.

Image by Walter Parenteau via Flickr

San Francisco recently approved the most aggressive recycling law in the United States. Residents will now be required to separate their garbage into three color-coded bins, blue for recycling, black for trash and green for composting. You read that right. San Francisco now has mandatory composting.

I think this is definitely a step in the right direction. Keeping this waste out of the landfill will cut down on landfill methane.

They’ve found that around 30 percent trash that goes to the landfill is compostable. But in landfill conditions, that waste is composting the same way it would in a home compost bin. In the landfill the piles don’t get to breath as much and the decomposition is Anaerobic. And the number one by-product of anaerobic decomposition is methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. If the production of methane can be reduced it would definitely help reduce our carbon footprint.

Okay, now this is getting ridiculous. Somehow my yard has become a hotel for ducks.

As long as they stay out of my garden, I'm okay with my new tenants. It's the woodchuck that has to go.

Have you ever wanted to kill zombies by strategically placing pea shooting plants all over your yard? Nope, me neither. Well that is until I started playing this addictive little game called Plants vs. Zombies. Now all I can think about is killing zombies.

You may be wondering what gardening has to do with the undead. To tell you the truth, I don't really know. But the makers of this game had a cool idea and then ran with it. You place pea shooting plants, mushrooms, cherry bombs and lots more stuff all over your yard and collect as much sunshine as you can while you wait for the zombie horde to start marching towards your house.

And the cartoon zombies will amuse you with their crazy ideas on how to protect themselves. Some wear a traffic cone on their head, some hold screen doors and like to pole vault. In the later levels, they even wade through your pool with inflatable floaties.

Plants vs. Zombies is an easy to learn Flash game that will have you hooked in no time. This is one of those games that you'll start playing and then the next thing you know it's two in the morning and you didn't get anything done all night.

Check out the game demo video.



It even has a free demo version that you can download to try before you buy.




I was just going to play the free version myself but I wound up buying the full version after playing it for a while.

So load up on peas, frozen peas, flaming peas and all the mushroom spores that you can because "a huge wave a zombies is approaching."

My pest control motto for berries has always been to stop worrying about the birds, chipmunks and squirrels that are eating some of the berries and just keep planting more of them. Eventually there will be enough for everyone.

This year that might actually be true.


Blackberries


Strawberries


Blueberries