After my sister-in-law told us that her 3 year-old son wanted to sleep under his Christmas tree, my husband and I remembered our daughter’s love of our Christmas tree when she was about the same age. When our tree was dry and brittle, we started to break the news to Lindsay that we were going to take it down. She was really upset and kept hugging the tree, which of course just added to the already alarming loss of needles. Every year we take our tree to a local park, where they have a chipping program called Mulchfest. We brought our tree there, much to Lindsay’s skepticism to “be with it’s friends”. She bid it a tearful farewell and fortunately didn’t notice the crew feeding trees into the huge chipper.
I always find it a little sad to see Christmas trees tossed out with the trash. The fact that they were once a treasured part of the holiday and are now tossed out on the street with the garbage bags always startles me. Plus it’s hard to wrap my head around all that organic matter going to a landfill with old batteries, diapers, etc. So, let’s try and come up with some great uses for old Christmas trees to prevent them from going into landfills. TREECYCLE!
Find out if your community has a tree collection or chipping program. Here in NYC we have mulchfest this coming Sat. 1/9 from 10am-2pm. You can look at this site to find a park in your area that will take your tree. And while you are dragging your tree down the street, why not stop and grab one or two others that are just lying on the sidewalk waiting for trash pick up? A lot of these programs allow you to bring some wood chips home with you for your garden.
If you don’t have a mulching/chipping program in your community, do it yourself. Prune branches off your tree and lay them down in your garden beds. Pine branches can look nice arranged around a tree on a city sidewalk. You can add them to your compost pile, although pine needles can take a while to break down.
You can prune branches and make small bundles. These are great to help start fires in your fireplace.
If you have the land, drag your tree out into a woodsy area to be used as a wildlife refuge for birds and small animals.
If you have a pond, weigh your tree down and put it in the water. It becomes a nice home for fish.
If you live near a beach, see if your community uses old Christmas trees in an effort to restore dunes like Bradley Beach in New Jersey.
You can save the needles and make potpourri or sachets.
If you have a great use for an old Christmas tree, please post!
Why is Portland light years ahead of New York City when it comes to just about every green initiative? With the population density that we have here it would make so much sense to have recycling cans on the street corners for all those darn water bottles, and to collect compost along with garbage. Not only don’t we have that, but now we don’t even have leaf pick up for all the fall leaves. But I digress…
This video was part of a Huffington Post article about Bijou restaurant in Portland and how they started composting all of their kitchen waste. Turns out Portland has a program called Portland Composts that connects businesses who want to compost, with haulers who specifically deal with compostables.
I live right by a huge restaurant row here in Brooklyn. With the restaurants came rodents, then hawks dining on the rodents and now raccoons dining on everything in sight, including attempts at eating my chickens. I’ve seen the amount of food that gets tossed by the restaurants and fantasize about opening a composting facility and stopping off at each restaurant to pick up the compost w/ a horse and cart. I doubt that fantasy will ever amount to anything, but it is nice to imagine.
The other day I did some work in my garden to prepare for the winter. I cut back and pruned a few bushes and cut down many of my tomato plants. I didn’t cut down my grape tomato plants because they are still producing. Fall is in full swing here in Brooklyn, so I took out my trusty Toro leaf vac/shredder and sucked up a bunch of leaves. The act of shredding the leaves makes them take up much less space than traditionally raked leaves. One bag of shredded leaves could be as much as 5-8 bags of un-shredded leaves.
I dug shovelfuls of beautiful compost that’s been cooking all summer and spread them out on my flower and vegetable beds. The soil looks so dark and rich, which is in contrast to the dry, lifeless, glass-filled soil that mostly exists in my yard. I still have straw and hay from fall scavenging, so I decided to add all of the shredded leaves to my compost bin. This is the one time of year when I have an abundance of “browns” in my compost bin. They will break down quickly though with the help of the amazing chicken poo. I swear that stuff is like steroids for the compost bin. I showed a friend my compost bin and she just kept saying, “Yeah, but where’s all the stuff?” She couldn’t believe she wasn’t looking at a bin filled with egg shells and broccoli stems.
I am not a compost maniac. I think that everything will break down on its own without a lot of fuss that many people suggest (shredding everything before adding to the bin, frequent watering, no cooked food, etc.) and my bumper crop of compost was evidence of my success. You can read my previous post about having an easy and successful compost bin.
My plants will be happy to have the added nutrients from the compost. I know my chickens were happy digging through the compost for bugs and worms!
A few days ago I wrote about eating at Blue Hill Restaurant for my anniversary. I didn’t go into the food in depth, so I want to say again that it was absolutely delicious. They used fresh, local ingredients that really stood out with their superior flavor. One course was a medley of vegetables and fruit and we found ourselves picking each piece and tasting it individually and then talking about what we had just sampled. The combination of superior cooking and local ingredients made the meal memorable.
We had a very nice waiter who was able to answer a lot of our questions about what farms supply them, etc. They partner with two farms in particular. Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires. Wait, did someone say the Berkshires?? It turns out that Blue Hill Farm, which was Dan Barber’s (the chef at Blue Hill restaurant) grandmother’s farm, is very close to Neil’s parent’s house. We decided that the next time we went up, we would try and track the farm down.
In the meantime, we decided to go to Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture the day after our fabulous meal. We packed Lindsay up after her sleepover and drove up to Tarrytown, NY. Stone Barns is set on 80 acres of gardens, pastures and woods. The mission of Stone Barns, as they say, is to celebrate, teach and advance community-based food production and enjoyment, from farm to classroom to table. We had fun in their impressive greenhouse finding some of the items in our meal from the night before. The different beds made a patchwork quilt effect.
We wandered through the fields and woods to see their animals. The animals were kept in very spacious areas, and you could see that they move them around to different pastures often. They used portable electric fences that were powered car batteries. There were quite a few pigs that were in the woodsy area doing the things that pigs love best; sunning themselves, sleeping and rolling in the mud. The word transparency kept coming to mind. This operation was beautiful, productive and offered the animals a very nice life. I guess it’s weird to say they have a nice life when they are meat animals, but it is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from feedlots.
They even have a big composting area. They compost everything from the farm and the on-site restaurant. There were machines that looked as though they chop everything up into smallish pieces and then lay them out into windrows (long piles of compost). The windrows were covered to keep in the moisture. I read that they were interested inharnessing the heat that the compost produced as a way to heat the greenhouse in the winter, and worked to implement a compost heating system. I love this place!!
It felt as though we were walking through a botanic garden as we toured the grounds. After we passed the laying hens out in their enormous field, we came across their bee hives. I am fascinated with honey bees right now, and have a friend who keeps bees in Brooklyn and sells her honey. I’m still too chicken to make the leap into beekeeping!
I’ve always been curious to try hunting for wild honey. That entails watching the direction bees fly from the flowers they are pollinating and triangulating the path back to their hives, which are often in a hollow tree. I don’t have much opportunity to do that in NYC and I haven’t found a cohort. Plus I think you need to destroy the hive to harvest the honey and I wouldn’t want to do that. Can you imagine thousands of really pissed off bees with no home? Okay, so I like the idea of hunting honey, but not the reality. So when I saw bees (or possibly wasps) flying into a tree during our walk I was really excited. That could be my elusive honey tree!!
At the end of our visit, we had a snack in their little café and peeked into the Blue Hill restaurant up there. It was a fun escape from the city on a gorgeous summer day.
Here’s some information on using coffee grounds in your compost from Starbucks. Besides getting spent grounds from Starbucks, I’m sure any of your local coffee shops would be happy to hand some over. You can divert great organic matter from going to a landfill and improve your garden at the same time.
Coffee grounds can provide a valuable source of nutrition for your garden. The proper amount to be used depends on the condition of your soil and what you are growing. Check with a local gardening expert or your local parks to see what is best for your garden. Here are a few general tips:Applying coffee grinds directly to your garden:
Coffee grounds can be applied directly as a top dressing to acid loving plants like blueberries, hydrangeas, and azaleas (acid loving plants thrive in areas where rainfall is common in the warm season). Adding brown material such as leaves and dried grass to the mulch will help keep a balanced soil pH.
Mixing coffee grounds in your compost:
Coffee grounds act as a green material with a carbon-nitrogen (C-N) ratio of 20-1. Combined with browns such as leaves and straw, coffee grounds generate heat and will speed up the compost process. Don’t make your coffee grounds more than 25% of any one pile’s content. To counter the acidity of the coffee grounds, consider adding 1 teaspoon of lime or wood ash for every 5 pounds of coffee grounds in your pile.
Using coffee grounds in your worm bin:
Worms fed with coffee grounds and other vegetarian materials will flourish.
What’s in Coffee Grounds?
Starbucks commissioned a study in 1995 to better understand the make up of the organic matter we call coffee grounds. The following is the result of the analysis performed by the University of Washington, College of Forest Resources:
Earth Baby was founded by three California Bay Area families who saw the amount of disposable diapers they were sending to the landfill and wanted to do something about it. They launched Earth Baby, which is a service that delivers diapers and wipes. They come later to collect the used diapers and bring them to a composting facility. The composting process uses only .5 watt-hour of electricity per diaper (equivalent of running a 60 watt light bulb for 30 seconds), no water or chlorine bleach.
The diapers themselves are made of natural unbleached FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified wood pulp and a super-absorbent gel. They are 100% chlorine and fragrance free. The composted diapers are turned into a high-quality top-soil, which is used at local golf courses and sod farms.
I am a sucker for the stats that show how many trees have been saved by using recycled paper towels for a year, or how much energy I’ve saved over a year with just one compact fluorescent bulb. If you are like me, you will like to know that as of June 26, 2009, Earth Baby has composted 29,220 pounds of diapers to date.
They currently only service the Bay area, but their business is growing rapidly, so hopefully they will be available in other cities soon.
I love my backyard chickens for lots of different reasons. Here are a few:
1. They produce tasty eggs. Besides giving our chickens table scraps (lettuce, broccoli, fading fruit, etc.) we let them graze in our backyard. They eat a lot of grass and ivy (and just about anything that isn’t nailed down), which gives them added beta carotene. This in turn gives their yolks a rich, deep almost orange color. There is some debate as to whether pastured hens (those that eat a lot of grass instead of corn-based feed) lay eggs that are lower in cholesterol. All I know is that their eggs have a meaty taste that you don’t get with grocery store eggs.
2. They are funny and friendly. We raised our hens from chicks, so they are quite fond of us. Of course they are walking stomachs and I feed them, so I’m sure they love me for that too. When we sit out in our garden and they are roaming around, they often jump up into my lap for a little cuddle. Our silver-laced Polish Andie (with the big pom-pom hairdoo) has some trouble seeing because of the feathers in her face. She has to tilt her head to see things and sometimes she still bonks into furniture. It’s pretty funny to watch her.
3. They eat bugs. They dig and scratch in the dirt looking for bugs, but they are also hunters of mosquitoes and ticks. My girls don’t seem to be too interested in slugs, but I’ve heard that chickens like to eat slugs. That makes up for the garden nibbling they are prone to. My girls will grab a mosquito right off my leg for a snack. Love that!
4. They are educational. Lindsay has learned all about chickens. We also have lots of curious friends and neighbors come through with lots of questions. Probably the top two questions are: How can you get eggs without a rooster? (You can get eggs, but you can’t get fertilized eggs w/out a rooster) Do they smell? (They only smell if you don’t clean up after them. Much in the same way cats can smell if you don’t clean their litter box) We just had kids from Lindsay’s school come to meet the hens. Many had never touched a chicken before or seen a green or blue egg before.
5. They are a great ice breaker at parties. We live in Brooklyn and it is pretty unusual for people to keep chickens. People either think we’re cool or really weird. I can live with either of those.
6. They are great composters. As I mentioned above they eat all manner of kitchen scraps. We keep two tubs by our kitchen sink. One is the premier kitchen waste, which goes to the hens. The other goes into our compost bin. The chickens eat the scraps and poop out nitrogen-rich droppings. Their droppings go into the compost bin, which kick-starts the bin to really speed up the decomposition process. My garden is thriving with the added nitrogen.
Food scraps turn into compost and eggs. What a great system.
Here’s a product called the NatureMill that’s been getting a lot of publicity lately. The company says that it will turn your food scraps into garden-ready compost in 2 weeks.
I am a bit skeptical about this product for a few reasons. My first doubts are with their claim to speeding up the decomposing process to only take 2 weeks. I’ve generally found that compost happens on its own schedule. A good hot pile takes a couple of months.
My second issue with the product is the fact that it uses electricity. They say that the machine uses about $.50 of electricity a month. I just think it’s weird to take one of the most natural processes on Earth and make it use electricity. When most people start composting, it’s because they are concerned with the environment and want to reduce the amount of garbage that’s going into a landfill. The rich garden soil is a bonus.
However, if people begin to compost with this product who would never have composted before I think it’s a positive move. If the amount of electricity is offset by the reduction of waste hitting a landfill and all of the energy costs involved in that process, I will keep my mind open. Anybody use the NatureMill or know of anyone who does? I’m curious to hear feedback on it.
A few posts back, I wrote about the fact the NYC schools use styrofoam trays for their student’s breakfast and lunches. This is such an ecological horror. I can’t imagine where they are shipping all of this mess.
It was nice to see the following story about an alternative to the styrofoam.
A South Carolina middle school is experimenting with lunch trays made out of bamboo and sugar cane to see if they might be the answer to the millions of Styrofoam trays the state’s public schools send to the landfill each year. WFAE’s Julie Rose reports:
There’s been a trend in public schools over the last decade to trade washable plastic lunch trays for disposable ones made of Styrofoam. About half of South Carolina’s public schools use those trays, according to Education Department spokesman Pete Pillow. He says it’s because they’re cheaper and easier.
“Remember, you’ve got to heat that water to a certain temperature. You’ve got to have the suds and the soap,” says Pillow. “If you’re feeding a thousand students a day that’s an awful lot of dishes to be washing to be washing according to all the state health regulations.”
And that requires someone washing dishes pretty much full-time, says Pillow. But the cost savings come with environmental consequences.
Pillow says South Carolina schools dump about 40-million Styrofoam lunch trays in the landfill each year. Over the next six weeks, Hand Middle School in Columbia will try out disposable trays made from bamboo and sugar cane that will then be chipped into pieces for the city’s compost.
The bamboo trays cost about three times the Styrofoam ones, but will save the school landfill fees. If it proves cost effective enough, Pillow says the state will consider using the trays in more schools.
When I first mentioned to Neil that I wanted chickens, his initial response wasn’t very positive. He grew up in the Berkshires and sometimes the farm aesthetic was pretty awful. We have a small yard, so any chicken coop we got (I was working on him!) had to be attractive. We spent way too much money on the Eglu by Omlet. It’s a beautiful coop and very easy to clean, which was a big bonus for me.
So everything was going well in our beautiful backyard farm until I took a couple of composting classes at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The teacher was great and very inspiring as to how to scavenge materials in the city. Coffee grounds from your local coffee shop, bales of straw from neighbor’s Halloween displays, etc. It was armed with the information from this class that I purchased a Toro leaf blower and decided to vacuum and mulch my leaves. It actually took a lot of restraint not to become the crazy leaf lady and walk up and down my block vacuuming up the neighbor’s leaves. Hey, I only have a finite amount of “browns” for my compost bin!
Well then I happened upon an autumnal display (this was in October) that had bales of straw and quickly asked them if I could have the straw when they were done with it. I was able to cart off 2 bales. Those suckers are big and heavy and you definitely look like the crazy straw lady when you are wrestling them down the streets of Brooklyn on a cart. I generously spread a layer all over the backyard and piled the straw up in the plant beds. I was glowing with how the straw would break down by the springtime and help my crummy lifeless soil become rich with nutrients and life. Neil was skeptical, but has gotten used to my crazy schemes, so he didn’t grumble too much.
It is now spring and as you can see from the photos, I have plenty of straw on the ground and in the beds. It has shown very little signs of breaking down. The grumbling has gotten quite audible. I planted grass seeds and there are tiny little green hairs peeking up. Hasn’t shown any sign of covering up the straw.
Even I have to admit that my fabulous composting endeavor looks pretty awful. People who come over think that the straw is for the chickens and this is exactly what Neil wanted to avoid in the first place. Neil encouraged me to pull out the leaf blower to suck up some of the straw and grind it into smaller pieces. That seemed to work, but I didn’t put it all back. I think I will dig it into the beds over the summer and fall and add it to my compost bin. I think the grass will grow through what’s left and my backyard will look a little less like photos from the Dust bowl fairly soon. Cross your fingers!
