Recycling Christmas Trees

After the holidays, I always feel a little sad about all the discarded Christmas trees. I feel sad that this once thriving tree was cut down to be enjoyed inside for a few short weeks. I was in Carl Shurz park the other day and saw that they were recycling the old Christmas trees by turning them into mulch to be used within the parks grounds. Every year the city parks department organizes a Mulchfest where the Christmas trees are collected and chipped into mulch. It's great that the trees are reused in this way, giving them a second life. And it makes the park smell so amazing with pine everywhere!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Jan 18, 2015 at 1:51pm PST

Composting for a City Girl

Every Saturday, I head to my neighborhood Farmer's Market to drop off my compost. Every since I moved into an apartment in Manhattan, I just don't have any outdoor space to compost like I used to. I used to have a substantial backyard in Staten Island where I could compost like this, and like this. and like this. Just because I downsized and live in a smaller space it doesn't mean I stopped composting. Nowadays, I keep my compost in the freezer until I can bring it to the drop off at the farmers market.

This compost collection center is organized by GrowNYC. From their website:

GrowNYC is a hands-on non-profit which improves New York City's quality of life through environmental programs that transform communities block by block and empower all New Yorkers to secure a clean and healthy environment for future generations.

 

 Every week, I'm so impressed with how much compost is collected. This bin is completely full!

And so are all of these! Wow! So impressive! The City of New York's sanitation department picks up the compost and brings it to composting sites. The ready compost gets used through out New York City in all kinds of gardening and farming projects. Here's more info about the compost program here.

The farmer's market near me only collects compost on Saturdays. So for a one day collection... This is pretty impressive. Over 1000 pounds of compost that won't go into a landfill. Awesome in my book! It's great that 171 people voluntarily composted but can you imagine if they made it a city law? Now that would be something to look forward to!

Compost Pile

My compost pile in the DIY bin that we made out of wooden pallets is definitely pretty full.  It's mostly a big pile of brown leaves.  I also throw in there dead plants from the vegetable garden.  I love composting.  It's like this fun game, I throw as much organic material as the space can handle and then "ta da" like magic, watch it transform into beautiful black rich compost.

One of my favorite tasks in the garden is turning the compost.  I just love seeing what stage the compost is in.  (LOL, I need a life.)  I just turned the compost recently and I can already see some black gold hidden in the middle and on the bottom.  Oooh, I can't wait until the entire pile turns into usable compost.  Hopefully by the spring, I'll be able to use it in the raised beds.  It would be great if I didn't have to buy any compost from the hardware store!  That is the goal at least.

A Close Second

A couple of days ago, I talked about how I was addicted to rain barrels.  That's not where my addiction ends though.  I must confess, a close second is my addiction to composting.  As I was writing this post, I was giggling to myself because I didn't realize how bad it was until I had to put it into words.  It floors me that we only started composting a year ago, and it didn't take me very long to become obsessed with it.  I think I love the idea of turning something that is normally thrown away into black rich food for your garden. Compost bin #1 is the first one we ever got.  Last year, as a housewarming present, the hubs parents bought us this composter.  It is my favorite of all the composters because you can pivot the composter upside down to easily mix the contents inside.  If we could, we would get a dozen of these babies, but they are pricey, so we only have one.  What's so awesome about this composter is that it makes compost in 4-5 months depending on the season and what type of organic material we put inside.  We also compost year round, even in the winter, so it tends to freeze up.  But come spring that baby is in action through the fall doing it's thing.

Our most recent compost bin acquisition was this DIY project.  With all the fallen leaves on our property, I became obsessed with trying to keep all the leaves for composting.  My little obsession with saving leaf bags got me in a bit of trouble with one of my neighbors though.  So that lead us to build this bin out of recycled wooden pallets.  This week, I cleaned out the strawberry beds, and all the leaves went here, on top of the existing leaf pile.  The bottom of the bin, I saw was already breaking down.  I layer soil in between the leaves to get the composting going.

When we got the nice composter from the in-laws, we quickly filled it up and realized we needed another interim bin to hold organic material while the other bin was busy composting.  So we bought a cheapy garbage can that has a screw on lid.  In our yard, it's important to have a can with lids that screw on tight because we have crazy squirrels that love to eat vegetables.  They blatantly steal tomatoes and eggplants off the vines, and apparently, one squirrel chewed a hole in the can's lid trying to get inside our bin.  See the hole?  Thank goodness the lid was fastened tight and thus the stupid squirrel didn't get in.  We also drilled holes all over the body of the can to allow air in.  Air is an integral part of composting, to help prevent mold which leads to a foul odor.

Our compost doesn't smell foul.  It has an earthy smell.  Here's a look inside the can.  I layer our yard leaves in between uncooked organic kitchen scraps.  Most of the kitchen scraps that go into our bin are coffee grinds, tea leaves, rinds, veggies and fruit scraps and egg shells.  Last year was our first time composting and I learned a big lesson.   We didn't add enough browns or leaves to our compost and it was a wet mess.  This year, every time I put in organic green material, I throw in a few handfuls of brown leaves.  This worked wonders!  Yesterday, I took our nifty mini-hoe and mixed the contents of the bin.

Here's a closer look.  Deep in the bottom of the bin, most of the material has already turned into black gold.  This bin has been working all winter.  On the top you can see the newer material I added recently, such as the asparagus spear bottoms and lemon rinds.

 

As if 1 interim garbage bin wasn't enough, we added a 2nd one this past winter.  LOL.  Sound a bit overboard, well, not really.  The compost bins are all in different stages of composting. The other garbage bin is already half way in the process of composting, while this newer garbage bin will start collecting the newer kitchen scraps.  Once the "official" composter above finishes with the composting process, Garbage bin #1's contents gets thrown into the "real" composter to finish processing. The garbage bins mainly act as "storage" for the organic material until it can go into the fancy composter bin.

 

Here's a look inside garbage bin #2. Again there are holes drilled into the side of the bin. As you can see, we just started putting material into this one, and so there isn't much in there yet.

So there you have it. You think I should start a New York chapter of CA? Composters Anonymous?

How to make free compost bins!

Last week the hubs and I went to a mom and pop hardware store to look for pectin and canning lids. It's impossible to find these supplies here in Staten Island, the big box stores don't carry it. I saw a circular advertising some canning supplies as Doody Home Center, a family owned hardware / home center. I love giving business to local family businesses. When we got there, I bought canning lids, but they didn't sell pectin. (sigh)  I guess I'll have to order it online.  The trip was not a wasted one though, when we were walking to our car, I saw in the corner of my eye, that they had wooden pallets.  I looked over to the hubs and said, I wonder if we could ask them if we could have these?  He gave me this look like, "Oh no, not another one of your ideas!"  I said 2 words, "compost bin".  He just smiled and begrudgingly said "Um... Oh... okay".  LOL!  What he puts up with!  So we did, we asked the guys at the loading dock, and they said, sure, take the ones by the dumpster.  Score!!  We piled 4 pallets into our car and brought them home.  We decided to use them to make a compost bin for leaves and grass clippings. 

Okay, so the pallets were not "pretty".  They were very used and beaten up looking but who cares, it's usable and is only going to hold organic material.  The hubs helped me drill the pieces together.

He had to cut some notches in the wood to fit the drill in.

This is what it looks like done.  We didn't put a door on it yet, the last pallet we got was too short to fit as a door, so we'll have to keep an eye out for another pallet that we can get for free.  It's not the prettiest looking compost bin, but it will definitely work!!

If you wondered what 800 pounds of dirt looked like...

With one season of gardening under our belt, we decided that we needed to expand our garden. Seriously, do we need a lawn at all?  Raised beds here we come.   If you ever wondered what 800 pounds of soil and compost looked like, well here it is.  I don't think I've ever bought so much dirt, I mean "soil" in my life!  When we got a composter as a present, I was so naive to think that it would create more compost than I needed in the garden.  hahahahaha, silly amateur gardener!  I still get annoyed buying so much soil, but what choice do we have?

We also bought 6 pieces of 2x6 untreated Douglas Fir lumber measuring 8 feet long so we could make 2 raised beds that are 4x8 feet.  Once we loaded all the lumber and 800 pounds of soil / compost into our car it was so heavy that the tires were lower!  I love our Honda Element, so many things can fit in it!

The hubs built these with all the wood we bought and he decided to put spikes or anchors on each corner of the raised bed.  It's not necessary to add these but he wanted to make sure that the bed won't move anywhere.

We removed all the grass and dug up all the rocks in the dirt.  Our backyard has a lot of rocks and glass.  Apparently the previous owners used to bury glass in our yard!  How annoying!

We wheelbarrowed all the rocks and glass away.

 

Then added the bags and bags of compost and soil.  We did a mix of both in each raised bed.  We're using composted manure, going organic all the way again.

It took twelve 40 pound bags to fill the 4x8 ft raised bed. 

We also had some of our compost ready from our compost bin. One compost bin only produced 2 five gallon buckets of rich compost. I was hoping it would produce more, but I guess it's better than nothing.

Look how rich our compost looks compared to the one we bought at the store!

I raked everything together so it was well mixed.

Here are the two raised beds finished.  We plan on putting in two more additional raised beds, a project for another day.

Feeling Cheated

We bought this bag of composted manure from Home Depot, and noticed that the bag contained a lot of little rocks. I guess that is normal. But look at the rock I found in the bag! I put my gardening glove next to the rock so you can see the scale of it. What the heck? I have enough rocks in my garden already!