THE Com POST

Your weekly update on all things compost related

This week we collected one bin of compostable material from the Galvez Garden and one bin of kitchen food scraps from the Green Project. The sawdust from last week worked great and the pile is plenty warm and without a foul odor. No flies, though they’re quick to show up when we drop in the collection. We promptly added browns, this week comprised of cardboard and leaves that are falling off of our beans.

We haven’t had rain and that’s been really great for the compost bin. Interesting observation: it doesn’t matter if it’s hot or cold outside, that doesn’t seem to affect the compost at all. But keeping the compost pile dry seems imperative to the process. The rain has its way of getting into the pile (that currently is only covered by a tarp) and it was making our compost too wet to do it’s work. I suppose with enough browns it can be managed, but browns are always the hardest material for us to salvage, so I’m grateful we had a dry spell for the compost. The garden didn’t appreciate the dry spell though, but that’s another story.

Two weeks until the garden is going to be featured at ACGA conference tour and we’re crossing our fingers everything stays beautiful for our visitors. Last week was very busy and the garden didn’t get as much love (or rain) as it’s been used to, so we lost some transplanted flowers I put in last weekend. They Black Eyed Susan’s however, look stunning (and now all I can think is how much I want more)!

If you look closely in the picture above you can see the size of the loofahs we’re growing. I have counted four so far. The beans are not disappointing either.

We’re excited to see the bin decomposition occurring, so we may have another week to fill the second bin. Also, we’re looking forward to presenting at the conference. I’ll be co-presenting with Lynne Serpe from Compost NOW, speaking on establishing and maintaining community compost collections. what a journey this has been! We’ll be sure to keep you updated after the event.

Thank you to everyone who came out to do their part this week in diverting food waste from our landfills. Thanks to Compost NOW for promoting and supporting our site so that we can continue to take an active role in protecting our resources.

Until next week, happy composting, y’all!