THE Comp POST

Your weekly update on all things compost related!

Have I got some stories for you? You betcha! But before I give y’all the run down, I wanted to share last weeks Com POST with you. I posted it on our sister site the NOLA Artist Incubator, which is helping with the compost. You can read all about last week’s post by clicking the link below.

https://nolaartistincubator.org/2022/10/09/the-weekly-com-post/

We offer our site to the Incubator for their educational programming and Artist-in-Residency program. As last week they really took the lead in all the events they were a part of, we thought maybe they’d like a special edition Com POST on their website. Feel free to check it out and see all the creative ways they’re educating the community through the Galvez Garden!

Back to compost. This week we collected four bins of food scraps from the community. We are officially at capacity in our second bin. Well done everyone! I told y’all I had a tale for you, so I won’t keep you hanging. The short story is: last week I picked up one bin of food scraps from the Green Project. I came to learn that they had an additional full bin of food waste that was not picked up. In other words, this week when we went to collect from the Green Project we had one bin of food scraps from this week, and one that had been just sitting around from last week. Let me rephrase, the bin has been outside, in the heat, for a whole week.

Yikes.

Luckily, everyone was cool with it and everything composts. Unfortunately that was one stinky bin! We put the foul smelling stuff in our bin first, and added the fresher scraps on top. We added cedar sawdust and held our breath as we worked. The whole car had a funk despite driving with the windows down. I will forever double check before I make that mistake again.

Yuck.

Today when I went to add our collection from our weekly drop off I was surprised that there was only a vague scent and no flies. Thank goodness! I added more sawdust and plan to let it sit until next week, give it a good turn, and call the system closed. We’ll start to fill another bin (our third) for next weeks collection.

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We’re excited to be making some changes on the site. The original garden beds were terribly damaged by termites so I took them off of the property. We now have one longer cinder block bed in the farthest point of the property and have planted our veggies in there while we navigate the new developments on the site. We look forward to incorporating more permaculture based growing areas. Currently I’m taking a Permaculture Design Certification course so it was inevitable that I’d be influenced by the new learning and I’m excited to apply informed design to the garden. Here’s the Base Map I created for the course. Let’s call this “before”.

Stay tuned!

Here’s what the site looks like after removing the beds in the back.

I kept the pigeon peas and planted some Mexican Heather I picked up around the base of the plants. You can see how much shade they cast, so we placed a bench in between the plants to add to the new shady spot.

We also picked a few of our loofahs to take home to dry out with closer monitoring. It’s our first time growing loofahs and I read in our climate they can be susceptible to mold, so I picked some of the lighter gourds that we’re turning yellow. Check out the harvest!

The arbor is just filled with loofahs, but they are still maturing so we’ll leave them on the vine for now. You have to duck your head to go through it, but it’s perfect size for Dylan!

All in all the garden is doing great! Thanks to everyone for helping us do our part in diverting food waste from our landfills!

Until next week, happy composting, y’all!