Living Small in Austin TX

Black gold!

Look at this!!!  I think I'm as proud of it as I've ever been...of anything!

We've finally lived somewhere long enough to have seen a compost pile through to its mature stage. Here's our current set-up.  

The black bins are both currently accepting greens and browns.  The buckets belong to the Compost Coalition.  They really deserve their own post.  Basically, I can exchange buckets with local businesses willing to set aside coffee grounds and/or kitchen scraps.  Right now I pick up a five gallon bucket coffee grounds from the little grocery down the street from my daughter's school once a week, but once in a while someone can't get to their pick up and the call goes out over facebook.  So, last week, my black bin received a big infusion - 5 buckets of "future soil" all at once!  The hardware cloth corral in the middle is our maturing pile.  There's enough room to the side of it to turn the pile weekly to speed up the process.  

I never used to turn my pile.  First of all, I've never had a pile really get big enough to outgrow its container, so I'd be trying to churn it all around with a shovel at the most awkward angle.  I'm not a large person, and my arms are embarrassingly floppy little noodles, so I'd sort of half-heartedly move things around a bit and then give up.  After all, it's going to compost eventually, isn't it?

At Master Gardener training this spring, I was inspired to really get serious about our composting operation.  It helped that I was running out of room in both black bins.  I learned an awesome little trick to make turning the compost a little easier.  Really, a more apt description might be flipping the compost.

Here's a close-up of the corral for my maturing compost:

So once my black bin is all filled up, I move everything into this and then, once every week to ten days, I just unlatch the closure, pick up the whole cylinder and move it over a couple of feet.  Then I (or, who am I kidding, it's usually "not-noodle-armed" Nate) shovel the pile back into the corral in it's new position.  It gets the pile nice and hot and speeds the process up immensely.

So this week my goal was to get my potatoes planted, and I was all set to run down to the nursery to pick up some of their compost, when it occured to me that I might actually have enough ready.  

There's still some chunkier stuff, but I sifted that out and had a couple barrows full for my potato bed!  I'll admit, I was one part thrilled at all that lovely crumbly good smelling soil, and the little thrifty part of me was all, "Hell yeah, no trip to the nursery!"but there was another part of me muttering, "Awww, no trip to the nursery?"

Soil!  My sieve is just the old screen door from the little chicken coop I dissassembled last year.  I could definitely use a bigger one, but this was already made and just hanging around.  Use what you have! It's a good mantra to have at the ready!

Burclover and my "un"compost pile

Burclover.  Does it have any redeeming qualities?  My chickens won't eat it.

I know what I don't like about burclover.  You ever step on one of the burs?  It stays stuck in you and if you try to pull it out, it pulls your skin up into a little baby mountain.  You have to just wince and keep pulling until it finally wrenches free.  It goes right through bike tires...I had to replace the inner tube on my jogging stroller twice last summer, and I hardly ever use the darn thing!

Have I mentioned my little boy doesn't like to wear shoes?

I have spent most of the spring planting season on gardening infrastructure as opposed to actually gardening (I know, I know...) and so the burclover sort of ate our vegetable garden.  I noticed the other day that I was almost out of salads and the thought of actually having to buy lettuce at the grocery store, or even the farmer's market pains me. Time to clear things out in the hopes that I'll have something other than chard and carrots to harvest.

So, aside from scattering about a zillion little burs all over the darn place, thus ensuring I have an even more abundant bounty of burclover next year, what did I notice?  The burclover kept the ground underneath moist and soft - huzzah for living muclches!  There wasn't really anything else growing under it - let's go weed suppression! Big, stubborn, deep roots - aerating the soil!  Lots of critters - spideys, snails, grubs, caterpillars, ladybugs, ants...I know some of them eat my food, and some of them sting the heck out of me (why, ants??!?! why?!?!) but it's always a good thing when the microherd is movin' and groovin'.

That's my "un"compost pile to the left.  It's just a cylinder of wire fencing.  I put yard waste in there that I don't want mixed in with my compost - bermuda grass, weeds that have gone to seed, the big spiky "leaves" of the palm out front - anything that would overwhelm the compost bin, or deposit unwanted seeds.  There's all the burclover I pulled sitting on top.  I'm not sure what else to do with that stuff.  It will break down eventually.  I never seem to run out of room in the "un"compost pile, so something's happening down below;)

Here's what the interwebz had to say about burclover, or Black Medic...it fixes nitrogen in the soil, prevents erosion, builds quality soil, and mines minerals from the subsoil.  A significant percentage of the seeds are "hard seeds" meaning they can take 2 or more years to germinate.

I think I like burclover.  I think I like the name Black Medic even more.  A lot of what I found online related to the lengths people will go to eradicate it from their lawns.  One woman actually suggested using a shop vac to suck up the seeds to prevent them spreading in the yard!  And of course the usual suspects suggested broadleaf herbicides.  Crazytown and Twitsville.

I'm not going to let it take quite so many liberties with the vegetable garden in the future (famous last words) but a shop vac??  I'm going to let it be.  Suggest the boy wear shoes.  Stop taking shortcuts across the grass with my jogging stroller - maybe if I actually jogged with it, there'd be no need for shortcuts.

Combat Peak Soil with weeds!!!

 

Orange Blossom Special!

 

Last week, I picked up some really juicy little tangerines at the farmer's market.  Yesterday (probably as he was pissing in the compost pile), my man happened to notice several seeds from those same tangerines sprouting.

He took them out and plopped them into some of the amazing seed starter mix we picked up at the Natural Gardener a couple of weeks ago.  How cool would it be if these actually took and we ended up with a couple lovely little citrus trees?

However, as I've said before, I know next to nothing about saving and propagating seeds.  It occured to me that those seeds were more than happy to germinate in our hot compost, but may be very unhappy, now that we've moved them into decidedly chillier little pots.  I'm going to bring them inside at night, and I'm wishing I still had a grow light (no comment).

What's really cool is that I have these little seedlings, and while I don't know what to do with them, or if I even should have bothered to save them, all that will change the minute I go back to the farmer's market on Wednesday.  Because who knows these seeds best?  The lovely farmer who sold them to me last week!

And this, dear reader, is reason #56,897 why shopping at your local farmer's market is nothin' if not AWESOME.

In which the City of Austin makes composting a little easier

At least once a day, one of us trots our little plastic bin out to the compost pile behind the shed.  The bin holds 23 cups, so we're keeping 161 cups of egg shells, coffee grounds, bunny litter, vegetable peelings, banana skins, apple cores and so much more out of the landfill every week!

With all that organic matter going directly into the compost and slowly breaking down into a lovely fertile soil amendment for our garden, we really didn't have much need for a 60 gallon trash can. 

I figured I'd save us some money by swapping our big can out for a little one, but while I was poking around on the city's website, I came across the Green30 Challenge.  Switching out our trashcan meant we were eligible for a $75 rebate on a backyard composter. Sweet!

We already have a couple of different composting arrangements in the backyard, but I've been after one of those fancy tumbling barrel composters.  Supposedly they make compost much faster, and the Envirocycle also has a means of capturing compost tea in the base.  Besides, who can resist a good challenge?!?!

Apparently the City of Austin can't.  Did you know our Zero Waste Plan calls for us to collectively reduce the amount of trash we send to the landfill by 90 percent?!?!  We have untl 2040 to get there, but still...90 percent?!?!  I'm impressed.  I've been trying to stem the tide of things that come in and out of our household, but I'm just lollygaggin' compared to the city!