It's a Bug's Life

It was sunny today, so I hefted my bucket of compost from last year down to the communal garden. The compost is still in decomposing mode so it was pretty mucky and smelly. I spread all the contents out with a shovel. It should dry out and continue breaking down into nutritious soil by the time I can start gardening in earnest.

When I stuck my shovel into the dirt, I came upon a mysterious inhabitant. Here he is below:





No, I didn't smash him with my shovel. I buried him again. He's safe and sound waiting for some yummy roots to eat now. Technically, I SHOULD have smashed him since the roots he'd be eating would be my plants, but I'm not ready to garden yet and I hate to kill anything unnecessarily in the garden. I found this same kind of grub last year, and it didn't seem to do any damage. Besides, he might be a June Bug larvae, and I LOVE June Bugs. I think they are so cool cuz they're so big and look so pretty with their pale green and white striped backs.

Maybe I'll see this little soil inhabitant again one day when he's all grown up!

Cool Animation on Composting

I found a cool flash animation on composting on this site.
They also have a lot of good recommendations on how to make a good compost. I learned that you can reduce the stench of your compost by adding brown materials like leaves, straw, hay, and shredded newspaper so that your compost is less compacted and wet. I think I will add some shredded newspaper to my compost. My compost really reeks and mushrooms are starting to grow all throughout it. I'm not an expert on this, but be careful of the mushrooms that grow in your compost. They can be poisonous and inhaling the spores when you stir the compost can make you feel sick. Fungi is part of the decomposition process, but I think mine is growing mushrooms because it is too wet. There's a good article with pictures on how good compost should look like here.

Giant bag of coffee grounds

My dad brought home a GIANT bag of coffee grounds yesterday. I topped up the remainder of the existing compost bucket, and was able to fill up a second bucket. Afterwards, the entire garden area smelled like coffee. It was really quite nice. The best part is that the annoying fruit flies which have started to colonate in my compost again recently will be moving house quick. Gotta love those coffee grounds. Perfect in the morning, and great in the compost. I've heard of some offices putting an empty coffee tin beside their coffee maker to collect the coffee grounds for use in the garden later. Coffee grounds can be put straight into your garden to be used as a slow-release nitrogen source if you don't have a compost. Free fertilizer - you should cash in now before they start packaging and selling them.

We make a lot of garbage

After only 2 days of making collecting scraps from the kitchen easier, my giant bucket of compost is almost full to the top again. I'm going to need a second bucket! This has brought to my attention just how much garbage a family can produce each day. If everyone started a compost, the landfills would be a lot smaller. If you add recycling to that, the garbage strike in Vancouver would hardly affect anyone.

I went on a Treetops Tour in Whistler, Vancouver about a year ago and the tour guide talked about how Whistler residents compost, recycle and reuse in order to heavily reduce the amount of garbage they produce. There's no such thing as easy garbage disposal up there, so the residents take extra care to reduce how much garbage they need to transport to the landfills. You can call it lazy, but being a little bit lazy is helping keep Whistler environmentally friendly. Perhaps if the garbage strike keeps up, more people will start to compost and recycle to keep their level of garbage down too. That would be a very good side-effect to the unsightly garbage strike. Have you seen the alleyways in Vancouver recently?

I love composting!

I am happy to announce that my first "batch" of compost has finished decomposing and was added to my garden this weekend. The coffee grounds from Starbucks did wonders for getting rid of the fruit flies (it really worked!) and speeding up the composting process. The coffee grounds also neutralized the smell. Every composter should go to their local coffee shop to pick up a bag of coffee grounds!

I've also been trying to find a better way to collect food items to add to the compost. So far, the best method has been using a large yogurt container with a lid. You keep it in the kitchen and just add all the peelings and such to the container while preparing meals. The fact that you can seal the container after adding contents means no smells or yuckiness. Then, at the end of the day, you just take the container to the garden and empty it into the compost. Remember to add a shovel-full of dirt on top to cover up the new additions. Every once in a while, use a long stick or shovel to give the compost a good stir. It will help add air so that the compost works faster.

Composting is a lot of fun and it reduces the amount of garbage that we produce by a lot. I hope every gardener and environmentally aware person starts one.

Cheers!

Building a Compost

I've been trying to be more environmentally friendly lately, and I've started a compost in a very big and tall bucket. I started dropping fruit peelings, plant cuttings, leaves, and dirt in, and the compost is slowly growing. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I drop quite so much fruity things in there, there are A LOT of fruit flies. They rise like a rapidly spreading cloud when I lift the lid to the compost and I have to bat at them with my stirring stick to ward them off. I read that it was important to stir the compost once in a while to add air to the mixture and combine the "ingredients". I've got to do something about those fruit flies, though. It seems very unsanitary and it's very annoying to have them zipping around me as I work on my very colourful and disgusting pile of muck. I like to think that it will all become wonderful, rich, and nutritious soil for my plants one day, so I put up with it all. Building a compost reminds me of my childhood when I used to create imaginary soups and meals with collections of flowers, dirt and other things from all around me. I think I added worms and bugs if I found them too.

Today I picked up a bag of used coffee grinds from Starbucks. Coffee grinds are supposed to be a good source of slow-releasing nitrogen for plants, thus making used coffee grinds a good fertilizer for the garden and a great addition to a compost. Coffee grinds also help balance the pH of the soil. The coffee grinds look like very dark coloured dirt. It definitely LOOKS like it would make good soil, and it smells of coffee, which isn't so bad. I'm going to collect a bag every once in a while and add it to my compost. Here's to hoping that fruit flies hate coffee.