Taters

This year we've paired our potatoes with corn and beans. The taters were buried in trenches while their companions were settled on the top of the mounds. The plan was to fill the trenches in as the taters grew. So we did just that.


We got some straw and chopped it up a bit with some hedge clippers. By the way this is not easy, straw is tough. Meg has got some guns.


After we filled the trenches pretty good with straw, we looted some compost from a heap of leaves that was left in our yard since before we even moved here. The compost was pretty good, but Meg ended up getting some poison ivy on her face. It's not too bad, but it still sucks all the same.


We topped off the straw with the black gold and gave it a good bit of water. What all this will do is allow the potatoes to produce tubers off their buried stems and it will also allow the corn and beans to generate stronger root systems. Oh, and it looks real nice too.

Want a free compost spinner thing?

Hanna at This Garden Is Illegal got offered a free compost tumbler that she's not going to use, so she's holding a contest to give it away. You can enter once a day until the end of the month, and I guess the company that makes the thing will ship it to you. It's shaped kind of like a cannon, which makes me think it would look pretty sweet with our pirate flag, but alas, we have ten thousand compost schemes going already and really don't have a need for a tumbler. We make the chickens turn our compost, anyway.

And, hey, since we're not entering the contest your chances of winning are that much greater. Go for it!

The Refill

As promised, here are some photos of the chicken composter refill.

With the leaves already bagged, the process was a snap. There was no raking involved, because the leaves had been confiscated from a neighbor who already had them bagged. Each of the bags I'm emptying here couldn't have weighed more than 30-35 pounds; and it took maybe eight of them to fill the pen back up. I'm guessing that once the leaves break down we will have over 250 pounds of compost from this one round alone. Multiply that by three batches (There are about ten more bags waiting for the next load which will hopefully be in about a month) plus the stuff we made at the end of last year and you've got yourself a shit load compost.

I can't even begin to express how easy this whole process has been. With the two of us working together, each flip took only a few hours. After everything is said and done, I'm figuring that we will probably invest only a day in labor. Hmm, over 1,000 pounds of compost for one day of work; it feels like we're cheating.

Adventures in Composting

Today was the day for rotating the leaves in our chicken composter. With the aid of our feathered friends we were able to collect all of the scratched and shat upon leaves into an impressive mountain of rich compost. As we said in the last update, we're guessing that the first string of warm weather to roll through will roast this stuff into black gold.

We thought that we may have lost a lot of mass from the months the leaves spent in the pen, but the material we gathered today was able to heap over four yard cart loads. Once it was all out, the pen looked a bit barren. I can't wait until we plant rye in there; it should grow like crazy. In the mean time, we have about twenty bags of salvaged leaves to fill the pen at least two more times. We'll probably post on the refill tomorrow. With the weather warming, we shouldn't have to keep them in the pen as long as the first go around.

I must say that the cache of compost from this first haul was impressive. We have five compost bins and all of them were filled to where it was running out the front. I'm sure we'll use it all once the garden gets going this spring. The compost we get from rounds two and three will serve as a refresher for the garden in the summer and fall.

Chicken Composter Update

The leaves in our chicken powered composter are beyond ready to go into a more traditional compost bin. Using the chickens to compost our leaves has been a huge success. I suspect that as soon as the temperatures rises above 60° Fahrenheit , the final break down will be quick. The only snag to the experiment has been that the ground, and the leaves along with it, have kept us from being able to gather them up with any hopes of reasonable success. As I may have said in a previous post, at least one more round of leaves will go into rotation before spring. Afterwards we're thinking of planting rye in the pen. While the rye sets, the chickens will earn their keep in the garden scratching through the beds before we start planting.

Fun With Scraps

The weather today was very agreeable for building compost bins. We found some metal posts in the basement and some pieces of leftover fence in the lower shed to cover all the materials. So we were off to a great start.

Material Costs: $0

Meg took charge of hammering in all the posts, while I measured and cut the fencing. Overall the project took us about an hour. Each of the three new bins are 3'x3' and will become the new home for the leaves that have been fermenting in the chicken's pen. We'll be sure to share some photos when we swap the leaves around.

Warmer Weather Approaches

Apparently the area where Meg and I live will be in for some unusually warm weather this weekend. I learned this while talking to Steveo outside, freezing our asses off, this afternoon. While conversing about the family, food, and drink of the holidays, he said that he heard on the weather station that we will be expecting Saturday to hit 50°F and the days to follow will get steadily warmer.

Meg and I agreed that we would be fools not to take advantage of the heat wave and get some much needed work done outside. As we've said in earlier posts, we inherited more leaves that need composting attention and the shredded leaves in the chicken pen are ready to be gathered. Before any of this can go on we need to make room for it all.

We decided that the best place for some new compost bins would be on the northern end of the garden. This is actually where we kept our cache of composting leaves last year before we shoveled it out and stored it for next spring. I don't want to say to much about it until we see how it plans to turn out.

What we're intending to do is make two 3'x3' bins on the left side of the fence (top photo) and a third 3'x3' bin on the right. The reason for the spacing is because we are going to make a second gate in the middle so we can access that part of the garden more easily for watering and what have you. The building of the bins shouldn't take too long, but the leaf swapping may take a few hours. Like I said, I'm not to sure how it will go until we get to it, but hopefully by the weekend we'll have five compost bins going.

Compost Update

The leaves in our chicken composter are ready to be hauled out. As you can see in the top photo, the chickens did a remarkable job of shredding, stomping, shitting, etc. I like seeing the contrast between the leaves in the pen to those just on the other side of the fence. Once we pull this load of leaves, I believe we will fill the pen again with the leaves we acquired yesterday from our neighbor. The two rounds of chicken-pen-leaves plus the 100 gallons of compost (bottom photo) from earlier in the year should last us through all of next year. I know that we plan to cover all of our beds with a couple inches at planting time and the rest will probably be used when we rotate the crops come late summer.

Jackpot

We arrived home from Pittsburgh to find a note from Chris, our landlord, stuck in our door: "Meg and Kelly, Tom [a neighbor] has many bags of leaves waiting by his garage to be taken if you're interested. Too much for me to carry alone." This afternoon when we came back from the grocery store there was another: "There are now more than 13 bags of leaves in Tom's yard (As of 3:02PM)."

We are always interested in getting more leaves for our ongoing compost projects and Chris seemed especially intent on us picking up leaves from Tom (whose German shepherd was once attacked and chased away by our chickens, incidentally), so this afternoon we dragged the yard cart up the road to get them. We ended up with twenty huge bags of leaves, and there are still about ten big piles on the ground in Tom's yard waiting for us if we want them. We're stashing them near the shed until we find a drier home for them, and in the spring they'll be turned into piles of nice new compost.

Beaver Blogging: Big Town Compost

While working on the Jeep we noticed a very large and curious piece of machinery in one of the garage bays. We asked Dan for the info and he said that it is the borough's leaf shredder. Apparently this thing is strong enough to suck bricks (and one very unlucky cat) off the pavement. What's really cool is that they take the leaves to a site right outside of the town and make the compost available to anyone in the borough who's interested.

Satellite Compost

Though the chicken composter experiment is coming along fantastically, our yard contains way more leaves than the chickens can handle. We talked about various ways to manage all the leaves next year, since it's kind of a pain in the ass to gather three acres' worth of leaves and haul them to a central location–and we've got to do something with them, since we can't let all that future compost go to waste. We eventually stumbled onto the idea of erecting compost bins all over the place, so the leaves and grass clippings and various other yard junk could decompose in their respective areas. Last weekend we gathered up some random metal stakes and pieces of fence and built a shiny new compost bin. This one is near the garlic, and will get leaves from the orchard and the gigantic old tulip poplar that's nearby.

Here is where a photo would be if Blogger wasn't always so ornery.

Chicken Powered Composter cont.

As I mentioned the other day, the leaves in the chickens pen needed a little muddling. After we had filed the pen, it rained plenty for most of two weeks. All of the precipitation weighed heavily on the leaves, forming a thick matted layer that stuck itself to the ground.

We got a few rain showers earlier this morning, but the sun came out later in the afternoon and it warmed up quite nicely. Armed with a pitchfork and camera, I set out to turn the tangle of leaves. I chose to use a pitchfork instead of a rake for this job because any rake we own would either too flimsy or would uselessly clog. I believe that I chose wisely because the job took only about fifteen to twenty minutes.

Afterwards it was obvious that the leaves were well on their way. They still need to be broken down a bit more, but there was the musky smell of composting and the chickens seemed to have an easier time making their way through the heaps. I suppose that we could give it another two weeks and then it would be time to collect the lot into a more tradition compost bin.

When the leaves are removed there will obviously be nothing but bare earth in the pen. This may be a little messy when it starts to snow. I think we may look to add another batch of leaves or some straw. We'll revisit the subject when it comes about.

Misty Morning

Its been raining for a few days so there hasn't been much outdoor activity to post about. The rain is helping with the leaf project going on in the chicken coop. The wet is weighing the leaves down and softening them up. I think we're planning to fluff them back up with a rake when the weather dries out. This muddling should help in assisting the chickens with the shredding end of the business.

UFC: Ultimate Feathered Composter

See all those leaves? You know what they mean? Oh, yes, it's Chicken Composter time! The brilliant plan this year was to stuff the chickens' pen full of all the Fall leaves we could get, let the birds stomp and chomp them up, and wind up with boatloads of compost in not much time.

Kelly's brother Derrek and I raked for about an hour, and managed to cover about 1/6th of the yard. We made six massive piles. It took another hour to transport them all down to the coop. First, we raked the piles onto big tarps.

Then we hauled them through the yard and stuffed the big bundles of leaves through the door to the chicken run. (And by "we" I mean Kelly, Derrek, and Steveo. Someone's got to take photos.)

At first the chickens were terrified of the big blue tarp, and they huddled together in the corner of their pen.

They didn't really know what to make of the situation. They caught on soon, though, and started mowing through the leaves as we filled up the pen.

This is literally 400 cubic feet of leaves, minus the volume of the three chickens that are buried within:

That will give the ladies something to do all day now that they've had enough time to destroy their grass, and we should have sweet sweet compost by the Spring. Thanks, chickies!

What Not To Compost

Meg shared with me an interesting fact the other day. She said that tomato plants are susceptible to somewhere around 10,000 different diseases. How accurate that number is, I couldn't say, but this doesn't detract from the fact that your tomatoes should be treated like the boy in the bubble. Okay, that is an exaggeration, but I'm not kidding you when I say that the slightest thing to go askew could spell disaster for your plants.

Since the tomato plants can potentially harbor some nasty little nasties even after they are uprooted, it is highly suggested that you do not try to compost them (translation: don't even effing think about it). So, for those of us who are lucky enough to have the space to plant more than a few tomato plants, this may lead to some questions as to what should be done with the mountain of dead plants come fall. From what we've read, there are two simple solutions: one is to bag them up and send them to the curb



and two is to torch them. As you can see we are leaning heavily towards option two, because, well, it's fire and fire's cool.

What To Do With Leaves

Maybe ten years or so ago, our landlord planted a row of four paulownias behind the house. He planted these gigantic weeds to replace the shade that was lost when a pair of tulip poplars fell. The reason he chose to substitute the poplars for paulownias is quite simple; he wanted big trees fast. The paulownia can grow up to thirty feet in just three years. Unfortunately thirty feet isn't quite tall enough to shade the third floor where Meg and I live so he could have planted moss for as much as shade is concerned.

If you can't tell by my tone, I really don't think to much of the paulownia. While the leaves on every tree in our yard are changing colors, the paulownias are slowly changing from green to shit. Pretty soon we'll get a real hard frost and then every leaf will croak and fall. Actually when they fall it is quite fascinating. Since the leaves are so large and dense, when they fall, they fall fast and loud. The sound isn't deafening, but you certainly know something serious is going down in your back yard.

Last year was our first paulownia experience. After the great fall, Meg and I went outside to check it out and I remember thinking, "Wow, that's a shit load of leaves." There was never any question what we were going to do with them. No organic gardener in their right mind would not see this pile of leaves as anything other than sweet sweet compost. However, there's a small catch.



These leaves are f@&*ing huge. I wonder if I could use a few of them to patch the leaky roof?

Anything we've either heard or read about composting says that the fastest way to get good compost is to do a great deal of the breaking down of the materials before you add it to the pile. Mike McGrath suggests running your leaves through a shredder to chop them up real small. That sounds great, but Meg and I aren't too keen on the idea of using gas or electric power in our garden unless it is absolutely necessary. Sorry Mike.

Last year we put the leaves in a big pile and covered it with grass clippings. Every so often we would turn the leaves to encourage the braking down process, but ultimately it took all summer to get good compost. This year we plan to to shred the leaves, but instead of using gas or electric, we plan on using...



Chicken power! We figure that if we fill their pen with a foot thick layer of leaves, they'll have it shredded far better than any machine in less than a day. John Henry would be so proud. When this experiement takes place, we'll be sure to take some photos and post. Hot damn I can't wait!

Dirt

We've amassed quite a nice pile of compost. This afternoon we shoveled it all into a giant compost container thing that Steveo found, since we didn't want it all to wash away before we get to use it.



That container holds about 100 gallons, and we still had some compost left after it was filled. Since there were some worms and bugs crawling around at the bottom of the pile (plus a mole, which tunneled away before we could photograph him), we threw a few scoops of compost at the chickens for them to snack on.