making dirt

Composting!  I love it!  I first became actively interested in composting when I read Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson.  I was impressed and inspired by how her family is able to use composting as a way to reduce waste in her home.  Learning that I could reduce waste, while adding good nutrients to my garden soil, made me excited to get a pile of our own going.  

So, last fall, Dan built us a compost bin out of wooden pallets that we got from my uncle's manufacturing company.  It's a simple design, but it works great.  We then began adding leaves, yard waste, and kitchen scraps.  As we got it started late in the season, it didn't reach a healthy composting state before winter.  This meant that it froze solid pretty early on in the winter and once it finally thawed in May, it was a bit on the stinky side (because it was unbalanced and not really composting).  After a month of adding greens and browns (nitrogen and carbon), it heated up and began to really break things down quickly!  We now have quite a bit of finished compost that is ready to go into the garden this fall! 

After composting for a year now, there are a few things that I've learned.  

  1. I love it!  This is weird, I know, but the reason I love it is that I feel less wasteful when I find nasty celery in our fridge because I'm putting that nasty celery to use by turning it back into dirt.  I've also found that our trash can in our kitchen stays fresher longer, as we're not filling it with as many things that get stinky.  
  2. We waste less!  We're just not throwing as many things away, because we're compositing more.  I'm also more mindful of what food I toss, because I'm taking the time to decide between compost or trash with each and everything that I toss from the fridge.  I've found that I'm using more of what I buy and tossing less.  
  3. It's easy!  It's pretty easy to keep a compost pile in the kitchen and bring it outside every day or two, or three.  The hardest part with composting is fighting fruit flies in the house in the summer.  We've solved this buy keeping a bowl for compost scraps in the fridge and just emptying it more often than we need to in the winter.
  4. The soil is fantastic!  Because we didn't have any ready compost in May, I wasn't able to add any to our garden.  However, in July, I planted some lettuce and kale on our deck in boxes.  When I planted them, I added half dirt/half compost to the boxes and we were amazed by how quickly and how well those greens grew!  There was a definite difference between what I grew in the boxes and what I grew in my garden.  I'm excited to get the compost added to the garden for next year's plantings!  
  5. It's fun!  It's so fun to watch those corn husks slowly disappear and that dark, moist organic matter to appear!  Sometimes, when I walk by the chicken coop, I stop by the compost bin just to stir it for fun (weird, yes, but fun!!)

If you're interested in finding out more about composting, there are a few books that I've found to be helpful.  

Happy dirt making!!

garden notes :: 8.18.14

The garden is mostly happy these days!  Our tomatoes are ripening and the peppers are doing great!  The herbs are also doing well!  The zucchini and summer squash are not fairing as well as I'd hoped.  They are fighting some late season blight and have not been very productive yet. My kitchen has still been filled with squash from other sources, though, so it's working out just fine.  The pole beans have just started producing, which is wonderful, and the bush beans have just rebloomed and are producing again.  Yay!  I unfortunately lost an entire basil plant.  I'm not sure what happened, the bottom of the stem just stopped taking in water and the plant slowly started drying out.  So, I pulled it out of the ground and am now drying the leaves.  Oh well.

I hope your gardens are bringing you an over-abundance of produce and that your kitchens are busying putting it up for winter!

drying herbs

Last summer I grew several different types of herbs on my deck.  My garden was new to me and I wasn't sure if I wanted to put the herbs in the ground or in pots on the deck.  I opted for pots on the deck, but as the summer progressed, I realized that many of the herbs I had planted were perennials.  It seemed like a waste to buy new herbs each year, when they were fully capable of making it through the winter.  However, knowing how some of them could spread and take over, I was a bit hesitant to put them in the ground.  Practicality won out, though, and before winter came I decided to create an herb section in my garden.  Then during the long, long winter, winter I started collecting glass herb and spice containers with the hopes of being able to utilize my homegrown herbs throughout the year.  

This summer my oregano has taken off!  It was maybe an eighth of the size that it is now when I put it in the ground in the fall.  I've been so impressed with it's growth (and slightly alarmed as I imagine having to keep it under control in future years).  So this weekend, as I looked at the flowers and seeds forming on it, I decided it was time to start the trimming and drying process.  

Herbs are supposed to be dried in a dark cool place.  However, I find that half of the fun of drying herbs is seeing them and smelling them...so, I typically hang them in my kitchen, especially when I'm just drying one or two bunches at a time.  

It will take a few weeks for them to be crumbly, but I'm excited to watch my jars begin to fill with my own freshly grown and dried herbs!