Thoughts on Earth Day

Today is Earth Day, which is a good reminder to think about how all that we do affects the environment. Many of our projects at You Can’t Eat a Lawn are inspired by a desire to better serve the planet, along with the benefits to our health and pocketbooks. Eco-consciousness is always in the back of our minds, but today is a good annual poke to consider ways that we can do more. For example, it is our goal this year to add rain barrels to our homestead to conserve more water. But before that little project begins, here’s a look at some things we’ve already done with some success that anyone can implement to help the planet.

Compost – Earth Day always features a lot of talk about recycling, but composting is an often-overlooked companion to also reduce our amount of trash generation. Think about what you throw away and how much of it is organic material, or kitchen scraps. Simply piling that material in a bin with air, water and warmth allows it to break down into wonderful nutrients for plants without taking up space in a landfill. This is a double win since it saves you money on buying fertilizers. Even if you don’t have space for an outdoor compost pile, you can compost indoors with a worm bin.

Plant a garden – Walking through the produce section at the grocery store is like taking a virtual world tour. Tomatoes from Mexico or Canada, asparagus from Chile, oranges from Australia. Each one of those items was trucked, shipped or flown to your store, meaning significant carbon emissions into our atmosphere. And because it takes so long to travel that distance, most of this food is picked early and underripe. That’s why a store tomato cannot compare to the flavor of a fresh garden tomato. If you’re a novice, start small. How about a window box or small planter? Maybe start with herbs or greens before graduating to big items like tomatoes and peppers. And don’t worry about failure. We’ve lost more crops than we can count, but we keep plugging away.

Buy a share of an animal – We’ve said it before but it bears repeating that it’s impossible to raise pork chops. The tidy slices of meat you find at the grocery meat counter were once part of a full animal, including the less popular parts. For every chop, there is a pork hock, for every chicken breast, there is a hindquarter. When we buy only the mass-marketed pieces, that means the other portions are wasted. But there’s a silver lining – some of those less desirable parts are the most flavorful. You can’t make a decent split-pea soup without a pork hock, and chicken leg quarters have much tastier meat than the breasts. Factor in that you’re supporting a local farmer, and it makes a half hog or beef even better.

Learn to preserve – Canning is largely a fading art, although it seems to be making a bit of a resurgence. And it’s great for the planet, too. Suppose you get a bumper crop of a certain fruit/vegetable, and you’re absolutely inundated, as we’ve found ourselves to be on more than one occasion. You can try to incorporate that item into every meal, but even that might not keep up with your harvest. Learning to put that food up, either by canning or freezing, keeps you from wasting food. And later on, after the growing season, that preserved food can keep you from needing to buy grocery store produce from far-flung locations.

We could certainly go on with other ideas that can help you celebrate Earth Day and become more self-sufficient, but we don’t want to prattle on for too long. Harvesting rainwater helps protect our waterways and groundwater; incorporating shredded leaves into the garden loosens the soil while preserving our peat bogs; planting trees helps capture carbon dioxide, and if they’re fruit trees, they feed you too. The list goes on and on.

But as we reflect on Earth Day, perhaps the most powerful tool we can think of is to spread the word about what we, and you our readers, are doing. Surely each of us knows a person who says gardening is too hard, takes too much time, or isn’t worth it. Sharing our stories with these individuals, and the world at large, hopefully might lead to a small change. From shopping at a grocery store to a farmer’s market. Tearing up a small patch of grass to grow food. The more small steps like these that we all can encourage, the more of a change we truly can make for Earth Day, and for every day.

Breaking It All Down

This is going to be a totally rotten post. Ok, maybe it's just the topic that will be rotten. A few posts back, we told you about that lovely pastel compost bin made of dumpster fodder. Now it's time to talk about filling it up, and letting it rot.

First, a couple of composting basics. Compost is formed by the process of decomposition. During this process, bacteria that are found in nature feed on organic materials and turn them into humus, a fluffy, crumbly dark brown soil-like material that improves soil structure and moisture retention. Our goal then is to create an environment that will allow these bacteria to thrive. So what do the bacteria need? It's actually pretty simple: food, water, and air.

There are two basic types of food that any compost pile needs, commonly referred to as browns and greens. Browns are carbon-rich ingredients like dried leaves, cardboard, sawdust, wood chips, etc. Greens are nitrogen-rich ingredients like kitchen scraps, grass clippings, garden weeds, used coffee grounds, etc. A good compost bin needs the right mixture of both of these food sources. Bacteria really feast on the green material, but they need a good balance of brown material to keep the pile aerated. A pile with too much "brown" material won't decompose very quickly, but a pile with too much "green" material can get stinky. It may take some practice to get the balance right, but many internet sources suggest a ratio of 2:1 green to brown material by volume is a good starting point.

Greens: weeds, kitchen scraps, mushy Jack-O-Lanterns, and coffee grounds.

Browns: Shredded fall leaves.

The water part of the equation is much simpler. Don't keep the pile sopping wet, but don't let it dry out either. A good compost pile should be as moist as a wrung out sponge. Some people cover their compost bin with a tarp or scrap of carpet during the hot summer months to keep it from drying out.

And the final ingredient is air. You'll remember that we liked the used shipping pallets because they would allow air to flow between the slats. A good supply of air will allow your pile to grow lots of aerobic bacteria. These bacteria will quickly break down the material into fluffy humus and leave a pleasant, earthy smell. If the pile doesn't get enough air, the decompostion will be slow and you can start to notice a stinky rotten odor, caused by anaerobic bacteria. One of the best ways to incorporate air into your compost is to turn the pile with a pitchfork. The more often you turn a compost pile, the faster it will break down. It's a good idea to turn the pile at least every 7 to 10 days.

So there's the rundown of how to make compost. We've got to thank the folks over at Home Composting Made Easy for our rotten education. If you're interested in starting a compost bin of your own, you should definitely check our their website.

But how are we doing so far? Well, it could be better. We're pretty happy with our initial ratio of browns and greens, but we haven't been diligent about turning the pile or keeping it moist. We could probably also increase our bacterial growth if we added more material to the bin. We'll keep working at it, and we'll be sure to post more updates along the way!

Fall's First Harvest

You might think that late fall is a quiet time on the urban farm, but we seem to always be busy. In fact, the past few weeks have been prime harvesting time. But what are we harvesting? Didn't we already say that there was no food growing on our homestead when we bought it? Well, here's a bit of a clue. This picture of the house shows one section totally harvested.

Yep, that's right. It's a tree with all of its leaves already fallen. And where are said leaves? Certainly not on the lawn...

That's because LEAVES are our first harvest in our new home! Now don't worry, things haven't gotten so dire yet that we plan to eat them. Just like you can't eat a lawn, you can't really eat fallen leaves either. But I suppose after several steps through the food chain, these leaves will provide us some nourishment, albeit indirectly.

You see, leaves are a vital component of great compost. We told you earlier about the compost bin we built, but we still haven't done much to fill it. Lots of different kinds of organic matter can be composted, and we'll get into more detail on how that all breaks down in a future post. But leaves are a really handy source of carbon-rich compostable matter, and with all these trees, we had a great source of them.

The best way to compost leaves is to shred them first, but having bought our home in October, we haven't actually bought a lawn mower yet (and weren't quite ready to decide on one anyway). So we found a different tool.

That's Greg using our Toro Ultra Leaf Blower/Vac. This thing really sucks. Literally. And it shreds and packs the leaves into the attached bag. It's been a near-daily task the past month to spend at least a  little time working on vacuuming the leaves off the lawn, and as you saw in the first few pictures, we're pretty much done with the front yard. The back is still a work in progress, but it's not just busywork when you think of it as a harvest. Check out our bounty!

With any luck, these leaves will last us well into next year as we add them bit by bit into the compost bin. And if we do that right, eventually we'll have fantastic broken down material to add to the soil in our garden boxes. So, from that perspective, I guess we actually will be eating these leaves!

One Man's Trash...

The day that we moved our belongings out of our suburban condominium and into our new house, we were fortunate to have help from Stacia’s Mom.  She traveled down to Des Moines from the Minneapolis area and brought along a trailer to haul our bigger items across Des Moines.  We hauled all the furniture you'd figure we would have in a condo, plus a few other things that you might not expect.

Among the rest of our furniture, we loaded up a stack of four used shipping pallets.  These pallets had been collected from beside a dumpster, where they were likely bound for a landfill.  But we spotted them, and saw a new purpose in their future.  Stacia’s Mom didn’t even have to ask about the shipping pallets before we explained that they were to become our new compost bin.

Some parents might still be a bit confused after that explanation, but not ours. Both our families have had compost bins in their gardens since we were young, and they're definitely into the idea of creative recycling.  On top of that, Stacia's Mom is known for having plenty of “brilliantly crazy ideas” of her own.  If we had a plan to take something useless and create something of value, she was on board.

Just a few short days after our move-in we tackled the construction.  It was a pretty simple project, perfect for our level of woodworking skill.  We took our four shipping pallets (all approximately the same size), then added four L-shaped brackets, two hinges, a gate latch, and a caster.  We placed three of the pallets in a U-shape and used the brackets to hold them together.  The fourth pallet would serve as our gate, so we raised that a few inches off the ground to prevent it from dragging and attached it to one side of the U with our hinges.  We added the gate latch to the other side so that we could close it up.  The bin wasn’t quite rigid enough to hold the gate up, so we added a caster under the end of the pallet with the latch to stop it from sagging.  And here’s what we had created:

It had everything we needed in a compost bin.  It allowed us to contain a pile of decomposing material, provided needed air flow between the slats, and gave us an easy access through the "gate" to allow us to turn the pile.  We had just one problem; it was pretty ugly.  Go figure that a bunch of old shipping pallets don't exactly look like they came out of Better Homes and Gardens. So in an attempt to keep it from looking like something we snatched from a dumpster, we added a coat of paint.  And we were finished!

The color is just a bit more tropical pastel than we were expecting, but it lends a little brightness to the garden anyway. Now we’ll just fill it up with organic stuff and if all goes well, we’ll have rich compost to use in our garden next year.  It seems fitting to be turning what's essentially trash into a really useful material inside a bin that itself was saved from the landfill. We’ll keep you posted to see how it goes!