Art Deco
Well-Known Member
- Region
- USA
- City
- Selinsgrove Pennsylvania
We compost a lot, don't know how thermophilic it is, but we have 4 composters to support only 15 4x4 raised beds. Seems to work.
- Status
tomjasz
Well-Known Member
- Region
- USA
- City
- Minnesnowta
Steve Wynn built the Shadow Creek golf course at great expense by digging a giant gully in the desert. Rated at one time the 3rd best private course in the world. About a half-mile away there's a lig farm. They haul in semi-trailers of food waste from the hotels. It's coked and spread in a feedlot lot for hundreds of pigs. They tried to buy out the farm, and the exec that visited the farmers couldn't get the stench out of his Italian suit. And when the wind is right, Bill Gates level celebs get to golf in Ode De Porkus!
Handlebars
Well-Known Member
- Region
- Canada
There will be a remote kill switch on your vehicle for when it or other people decide it needs to be locked down. Public health is important, so this could be the sweetest lockdown music to your ears.
Mulezen
Well-Known Member
Meat is now butchered on huge assembly lines rather than small scale. This means if one carcass is infected (e-coli…mad cow whatever) and say hamburger is ground each of us can eat part of all the animals and Get a dose. This is yet another reason local is safer and more sustainable.
Actually NONE is safer for both ones health and the environment.
tomjasz
Well-Known Member
- Region
- USA
- City
- Minnesnowta
Arden Anderson DO author of science in agriculture and air force flight surgeon tells us grass fed beef fat is not as much of an artery plugger as conventional corn fed. But I agree beef is not sustainable. See “diet for a small planet”.
Art Deco
Well-Known Member
- Region
- USA
- City
- Selinsgrove Pennsylvania
My eldest daughter quit eating meat in her early teens ( she is now in her 40s) and has always been pretty healthy, other than allergies. Her sister, an omnivore like me, is also quite healthy.
I pay very little attention to my diet, but I don't eat meat every day either. I make a lot of vegetarian meals, but also eat bacon and eggs occasionally, as well as steaks and burgers on the grill. Just not very often.
I can get grass fed beef easily from the local farmers, and buy it for the taste and texture. If it's healthier, that's just a big bonus.
pmcdonald
Well-Known Member
A few years back I converted the back half of our yard from high-maintenance, underutilised lawn to a small food forest. I broke the area into a number of sections, each centred around a fruit tree. Around each I planted companion edibles and flowers with the aim of creating contained micro ecosystems.
Fast forward to now its been a mixed success. Despite the diversity I have had waves of pests sweep through at various times and devestate the garden. I'm a pretty lazy gardener, so I could definitely do more to manage them!
I do love the variety of crop I'm getting though. They mature nicely throughout the year too, so most months there's something to pick. My favourites include feijoa, Panama Berry, mulberry, Atherton raspberry (a native to Australia), sapote and ginger. I grow the staples like citrus, Asian greens, spinach, Kale, etc too.
It's always a challenge to keep up the nutrient inputs without trucking in external manure or fertiliser. I use the wonderful comfrey chop and drop style, and composted kitchen scraps and waste paper.
One unexpected delight with this approach to gardening has been the return of wildlife to the yard. Prior we'd just have mainly pigeons and noisy minors poking about. Now there's wattle birds, wagtails, lorikeets, parrots, magpies to name a few. Lower down blue tongue lizards have moved in, sunning themselves on rocks, slithering through the ground cover and eating any slugs or snails that have the misfortune of moving in.
On reflection, I think of the conversion less as a venture in productive food production and more as a living experiment in making space for things to live and prosper, with some tasty side benefits for the human overlords!
Fast forward to now its been a mixed success. Despite the diversity I have had waves of pests sweep through at various times and devestate the garden. I'm a pretty lazy gardener, so I could definitely do more to manage them!
I do love the variety of crop I'm getting though. They mature nicely throughout the year too, so most months there's something to pick. My favourites include feijoa, Panama Berry, mulberry, Atherton raspberry (a native to Australia), sapote and ginger. I grow the staples like citrus, Asian greens, spinach, Kale, etc too.
It's always a challenge to keep up the nutrient inputs without trucking in external manure or fertiliser. I use the wonderful comfrey chop and drop style, and composted kitchen scraps and waste paper.
One unexpected delight with this approach to gardening has been the return of wildlife to the yard. Prior we'd just have mainly pigeons and noisy minors poking about. Now there's wattle birds, wagtails, lorikeets, parrots, magpies to name a few. Lower down blue tongue lizards have moved in, sunning themselves on rocks, slithering through the ground cover and eating any slugs or snails that have the misfortune of moving in.
On reflection, I think of the conversion less as a venture in productive food production and more as a living experiment in making space for things to live and prosper, with some tasty side benefits for the human overlords!
Last edited:
Art Deco
Well-Known Member
- Region
- USA
- City
- Selinsgrove Pennsylvania
"living experiment in making space for things to live and prosper, with some tasty side benefits for the human overlords" ... that's a good attitude . People who start out trying to compete with the established and successful gardens often don't last very long.
Catalyzt
Well-Known Member
- Region
- USA
Can anyone recommend a good, basic composter for kitchen scraps?
Ideally, this would be something that: Doesn't attract flies or vermin. (I think we have other creatures living in our house besides the ones who were invited.) I think there's actually some new law locally that mandates that we do this anyway, but we've tried various homemade systems using plastic containers that were unsightly and just generally kinda disgusting. Also, the dogs would get into them and lick the egg shells or do something entirely disgusting.
Some kind of temporary counter-top storage that worked with a secondary outdoor piece would be great, ideally something that is not an eyesore. Our front yard is tiny, and visible through a fence, and that's where we usually grow anything edible on the rare occasions that we do.
We used to have wild tomatoes in the backyard that were quite good. At the venerable age of 14 or so, our terrier (at the time) did figure out how to eat them off the vine after eyeing them covetously for several years. Old dog learned new tricks!
pmcdonald
Well-Known Member
Not sure if it's overkill for your needs but I've been using this one the last few years:
PRE ORDER OCT. - 245L MAZE Compost Tumbler - Maze Products Australia
PRE ORDER OCT. - 245L MAZE Compost Tumbler - by Maze Products -
www.mazeproducts.com.au
You can see it in one of my pics above. Its completely sealed from vermin and flies, though flies do linger around the dripping that run out of it if the mix is too rich. We add shredded paper. Autumn leaves are great too.
I've tried a few off the shelf options over the years and found this breaks down quite quickly too. You fill up one side, roll it each time you add, then move on to the other side while it cooks.
I'm sure there's a ton of brilliant DIY solutions. I'm all thumbs but anyone made anything cool in the compositing space?
Art Deco
Well-Known Member
- Region
- USA
- City
- Selinsgrove Pennsylvania
@tomjasz is the compost expert. All we use are the ugly black plastic upright barrel type that you can buy at garden centers. My daughter has one of the small ones that you can turn with a crank, which is faster, but I would never think to crank it. I pitchfork ours from one barrel to another once or twice a year.
No dog for years now, and she wasn't very interested in compost, or even allowed in the garden area very often.
Mulezen
Well-Known Member
I remember seeing that device in your picture and thought it was a discarded indoor cycleNot sure if it's overkill for your needs but I've been using this one the last few years:
PRE ORDER OCT. - 245L MAZE Compost Tumbler - Maze Products Australia
PRE ORDER OCT. - 245L MAZE Compost Tumbler - by Maze Products -
You can see it in one of my pics above. Its completely sealed from vermin and flies, though flies do linger around the dripping that run out of it if the mix is too rich. We add shredded paper. Autumn leaves are great too.
I've tried a few off the shelf options over the years and found this breaks down quite quickly too. You fill up one side, roll it each time you add, then move on to the other side while it cooks.
I'm sure there's a ton of brilliant DIY solutions. I'm all thumbs but anyone made anything cool in the compositing space?
Anytime.. I get tired of the know it alls too
Regarding the pig farm next to wynns golf course.. it’s gone.. moved outside of town now..
tomjasz
Well-Known Member
- Region
- USA
- City
- Minnesnowta
A microscopic review shows those composters do not create highly diverse biological populations. GOOD composts are either thermophilic or vermicompost. Based on 10years of lab reports and microscopic assays.
pmcdonald
Well-Known Member
Great insight, thanks for sharing! I run a little worm farm compost next to the roller bin but it would quickly become overcome with the volume of kitchen waste produced. Plus coffee grounds, onion ends and a few other things aren't ideal for worms I hear? Any thermophilic or vermicompost solutions work at scale?
tomjasz
Well-Known Member
- Region
- USA
- City
- Minnesnowta
Just sharing 20 years of microscopy and in vitro assays of compost that went through heat cycles. Thermophilic. Much greater biological diversity than found in compost that never reaches sufficient temperatures to kill pathogens and seeds. All good, just sharing what I know.
Art Deco
Well-Known Member
- Region
- USA
- City
- Selinsgrove Pennsylvania
Yeah, mine gets quite warm, but not really HOT, and we still get lots of weeds that we have to pull. But in Pennsylvania, weeds are everywhere. Damn ragweed will grow up my legs if I stand still awhile.
ActionJackson
Well-Known Member
- Region
- Asia
- City
- Tokyo
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. That’s the one thing the evil looking Greta got right. She’s wrong about everything else but she nailed that. All this armchair activism, composting, and ruminating won’t do squat to correct the ailing environment if it’s as bad as these PBS Nova scientists and their rabid followers are saying. And if it were you’d think we’d see pictures of a million of y’all in the streets making change happen. It’s for the largest part a political agenda and a scam. That’s why God is burning down California in the summers perhaps. Because He’s on the Right side. Funny how the people in other states on the other side of the argument aren’t whining about the weather too. I don’t see climate activist in Mississippi where I come from. Maybe that’s because the bayou is still about 3 feet below the bridge, as it always has been. Hurricanes no worse or less they have been. And perhaps climate change is selective to a certain locale like California, which happens to be the most populous state in the country, where they complain about human consumption. Maybe if you cram another million cars into your parched earth it’ll surely get hotter. Pump another trillion gallons of water across the mountains and desert. Pump another billion gallons of oil from beneath Los Angeles. Whatever you do, you should hedge for your grandchildren‘s future, and buy oil stocks. The Facebook farce is over. 
- Status
Similar threads
