Category — Compost

Mike Levenston, City Farmer executive director, displays a worm bin he encourages condo dwellers to use to recycle food scraps. Photo by Sharon Slack.

Stratas face extra cost, odours with food scraps

By Chris Campbell
24 hours
March 20, 2013

A local composting advocate hopes strata residents will take a lead in the transition to recycling food scraps in multi-family buildings by 2015.

Under new City of Vancouver rules, stratas face penalties if they don’t have programs up and running by then, said Mike Levenston, executive director of City Farmer, which runs the region’s compost hotline and offers recycling workshops.

“All these organics have to be recycled and there are easy ways to do it,” he said. “We’re here to help people get organized.”

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Sharon, Head Garden at Vancouver’s Compost Garden, stands in front of the Silver Dragon electric composter. Photo by Michael Levenston.

10-20 neighbours in apartments bring their food scraps to us

By Michael Levenston
City Farmer
March 6, 2013

Our newest electric composter, nicknamed the ‘Silver Dragon’, is midway in size between the home-sized ‘Red Dragon’(now white) and the ‘White Dragon’ (a larger size) in which we composted Bishops’ restaurant food waste for a year.

Over the winter, we signed up between 10-20 neighbours from multi-family apartments and they brought their food scraps to the Compost Garden on Wednesday or Saturday afternoons. (No meat/fish/dairy waste accepted.) They met our gardener who inspected the waste and then unlocked the shed and placed the scraps in the Dragon.

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Nick Hermes is the founder of green-tech startup Urban Stream Innovation that has created a way to eliminate organic waste. Photograph by: Mark Van Manen.

Self-contained system is small enough to fit in a single parking space

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
February 22, 2013

Excerpt:

Urban Stream Innovation, a Vancouver-based sustainable tech firm, has installed its first self-contained prototype composter and vertical growing system designed to eliminate kitchen waste and produce restaurant-quality herbs and greens.

The staff at Luke’s Corner Bar & Kitchen will donate about 45 kilograms of vegetable waste, old coffee grounds and used tea bags each day to the micro-farm’s two-stage composter housed in a shipping container, parked behind the Granville Street eatery.

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The revolutionary composting vertical food garden that transforms your kitchen scraps into organic fertilizer for fast, abundant growth

The Garden Tower

- Holds up to 50 plants
- Is faster and more abundant than conventional gardening
- Can grow anything; veggies, flowers, herbs, etc.
- Turns your kitchen scraps directly into organic fertilizer

The design is elegant, simple, and set-up is straightforward and easy! Our patent pending internal worm-driven composting system makes The Garden Tower is the only garden planter that can generate it’s own fertilizer and self-conditioned soil. Along with its low-evaporation design and other innovative features, it creates incredibly healthy growing conditions.

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Jose and Compost Students with over 80 bags of compost. Lo de Marcos is a small town of some 3,000 people one hour north of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Photo by Amigos de Lo de Marcos.

Jardin de Composta in Los De Marcos

Piles of yard waste no longer sit on the streets of Lo De Marcos. Burning of yard waste no longer pollutes the air. As well residents of the town receive a small income from selling the finished compost. Students at the local schools are involved in the compost process and the community garden.

Excerpt from Recycle Committee Report
November 2012 – Amigos de Lo de Marcos

Compost is being screened and bagged every Saturday morning by our compost students (Beto, Neto, Fernando, Adrian, Francisco, and Esteban). Last Saturday, they filled more than 80 bags in 4 hours.

55 bags of Compost Futures have been redeemed – 125 bags remain to be redeemed. Your compost futures may be redeemed on Wednesday or Saturday mornings at the Compost Lot.

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“A pictorial calendar that will get you to rethink all your waste, even your daily # 1′s and 2′s.”

By Fertile Earth Foundation
KickStarter

Excerpt:

Fertile Earth Foundation is an environmental nonprofit based in Miami mostly known for our composting initiatives. We’ve been teaching people to rethink their waste for over 4 years. For those of you who don’t know what composting is, it’s basically turning organic waste into rich fertile soil. Organic waste is stuff like kitchen scraps, newspaper, yard trimmings, manure, even your very own poop! Anything that is not plastic, metal, or glass can be composted

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Winners of the National Garden Association award, The Smart Mules themselves! Organizer Adam Guerrero with Jovantae Thomas, Shaquille Thomas, Jarvis Howard, Cortez Washington and Rodrick Daniels.

‘Harvest’ blight from the abandoned lots to compost and use as a mulch for a central mini-farm in Memphis.

Nov 10, 2012
Neighborland

Excerpt:

The “Smart Mules” are a group of talented young men led by former teacher and GrowMemphis board member Adam Guerrero. Jarvis, Jovantae, Shaq, Cortez and Rodrick “harvest” the grasses and organic material from overgrown, abandon lots that dot the Shasta neighborhood of Memphis. They use the harvest as compost and mulch, and together have a vision for creating a mini-farm on the corner of Shasta and Trezevant. With a $1,000 from the NGA, this pioneering group of young men will be able to buy new equipment, increase the productivity of their work, and move closer to their long-term vision.

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The project provides welcome jobs for the city’s farmers, many of whom work in the watery southern district of Xochimilco.

The Economist
Oct 27th 2012

Excerpt:

The 21 million residents of Mexico City have far too much rubbish and not enough healthy food. Now they can swap one for the other. A new monthly market run by the city government takes paper, glass, plastic and aluminium in return for tokens that can be swapped for locally grown food and plants. Since it began in March the “Barter Market” in Chapultepec park has exchanged 140 tonnes of rubbish for 60 tonnes of produce.

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Visitors can also observe how repurposed coffee grounds from nearby cafes (including Starbucks) become the compost that catalyzes urban agricultural practices such as this one.

Architizer News
February 23, 2012

Excerpt:

Olson Kundig Architects’ [storefront], Seattle’s homegrown gallery for urban experimentation, has been overhauled once again. Last month, it was a music lover’s haven, rekindling the cultural narratives of the world’s fast-disappearing record stores by inviting visitors to browse through neatly filed vinyl collections and stage listening parties. Their latest experiment takes advantage of the city’s thriving coffee culture, taking the form of an indoor mushroom farm nourished by nutrient-rich coffee grounds salvaged by local baristas

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Manoj Kumar training villagers.

A farmer’s son doubled the income of villagers by making them invest in organic manure.

Until four years ago, Mustafaganj was like any other Indian village. Its people had big dreams, but they killed them. Manoj Kumar, a gold medalist in geography from BR Ambedkar University of Muzaffarpur, knew what it meant to have unfulfilled desires.

Like most young men from Bihar, he wanted join the IAS. But couldn’t. In 2006, he returned home after completing his postgraduation, smack in the middle of the Maoist-controlled ‘red zone’, to discover people living on the edge. He convinced them to sign up for a club whose members would be engaged in the production of vermicompost and start organic farming.

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Bangalore produces over 2000 to 3000 tonnes of waste everyday. The centralized government composting plant can handle only 500 tonnes per day. The rest reaches dumps that are illegal.

In just five years the Daily Dump team has helped over 4,500 customers in Bengaluru to compost household waste in terracotta pots, and these customers keep around 5,522kg of organic waste out of landfills every day. What is remarkable about Poonam Bir Kasturi’s waste management process is its simplicity, and the cleverly designed terracotta pots add a touch of earthiness to it.

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Pee Wee returns with the 5th book in the series

By Larraine Roulston
2011

Pee Wee, the endearing little red wiggler, describes the joy of composting. ‘Pee Wee’s Magical Compost Tea’ illustrates the benefits of making and using compost tea. Each book contains resources and ideas for teachers.

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Video clip here.

Vancouver’s Inner-city farms uses restaurant produced compost to grow food that is delivered back to that restaurant

September 22, 2011
News, Canada, BC

A Vancouver company grows vegetables in front yards donated by homeowners, reports the CBC’s Bob Nixon.

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Ma, of Pops Predatory Plants, holds a bug eating Sundew, while her frightened niece looks on. Photo by Michael Levenston.

Sundews (Drosera): These sticky plants are great for trapping fruit flies and fungus gnats.

At City Farmer, we get a “horde” of calls about fruit fly problems on our Compost Hotline. The staff have a variety of answers and some of them were reproduced in the Globe and Mail newspaper last week. (See below.)

Our Bug Lady, Maria Keating added one more excellent suggestion, a small Sundew, a plant trap, that can be kept in the kitchen right next to your food scraps bucket. It’s sticky tentacles are ready and hungry for those annoying insects, which often show up on rotting food.

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Shot in portrait mode on an iPhone, the video does not fill the screen as it would in landscape mode . Try viewing it at the largest HD size, 1080p, by clicking the YouTube logo.

The Speedibin

In 1989, City Farmer was asked by Metro Vancouver to come up with an idea to prevent rats from accessing compost bins. Pest control experts said that the answer was to “build them out”. So a new compost bin had to be invented, with four impenetrable sides, plus a lid and base to prevent entry by rodents.

Inventors came up with plastic, wood and metal bin designs. One excellent metal bin, the “Speedibin”, was created by Fred Francis of Victoria, BC. A small number of his bins were manufactured, but because plastic bins flooded the market at a much lower price, the metal bins didn’t survive.

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Mike Levenston of the City Farmer Society puts meat and fish scraps, dairy and waste food paper such as pizza boxes in Vancouver’s yard waste bin. Photograph by: Ian Smith, PNG, Vancouver Sun

If it is successful, there are plans to expand it to all neighbourhoods next year

By Jeff Lee
Vancouver Sun
July 12, 2011

Excerpt:

It can take years for recycling programs to catch on. It took 15 years for Vancouver’s blue-box recycling program to achieve a 77-per-cent participation rate. San Francisco, which brought in its food-scraps program in 2000, has a 30-per-cent participation rate. Seattle, which began diverting food scraps in 2005, has a success rate of 50 per cent.

But the incentive is there, says Chris Underwood, Vancouver’s manager of solid-waste management. Fully 35 per cent of the city’s garbage – or about 129,000 tonnes – is made up of kitchen and compostable wastes, he said. Of the more than three million tonnes of garbage produced in the region, 55 per cent is already diverted to recycling and composting.

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My Garden Bag

At this time of year, our Compost Hotline in Vancouver receives lots of calls from residents who want to buy soil or compost for their gardens. We have to scramble to update our resource list so we can advise people about the various soil mixes that are on the market.

Most people who order a large quantity of soil will receive it as a pile dumped off the back of a truck. MyGardenBag.com is something different.

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Sanjay Bhas and his mulch at Bayview Greenwaste.

Bayview mulch has been a boon for private backyard gardens, too.

By Matt Baume
Grist
22 Feb. 2011

Excerpt:

Sanjay Bhas founded Bayview Greenwaste in 1998. The company, located on the city’s southern waterfront, collects plant waste — for a fee — and then grinds the organic matter into mulch that it gives away for free to anyone who wants it. Nonprofits, municipalities, private citizens, schools, and power plants (which burn organic matter instead of coal) count themselves among the company’s beneficiaries.

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Community composting – is this it?

By Colleen Kimmett
Open File
February 14, 2011

Excerpt:

When Michael Levenston was offered the chance to bring a dragon into his demonstration garden in Kitsilano, he was skeptical. After some convincing, the Red Dragon–a cherry-red electric composter–found a new home.

“So far it’s working like it’s supposed to,” Levenston says. “I’m very excited about making clean, good quality compost.”

The Red Dragon–about the size of a bar fridge–is the smallest of a line of electric composters distributed by GreenGood Composters. It runs on 60 to 80 kilowatts of electricity per month (about four dollars’ worth), and can turn up to 100 kilograms of food waste into several kilograms of compost in 24 hours. It was so effective, in fact, that City Farmer recently started using a larger version, the White Dragon.

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Anna Decker, left, Tony Hernandez, Yoichi Yamada, Nick Hooper and Myrna Duran rake through garden clippings and horse-stable bedding, which will be layered with compost to produce even more compost. Photo by Ann Summa.

Compost supplies all 500 plots and common areas and still produces leftovers for school gardens

By Jeff Spurrier
LA Times
Nov. 24, 2010

Excerpt:

When Warren Miyashiro started gardening at Ocean View Farms in 1985, he looked around for compost to amend the sandy soil. Finding none, he bought a bag from a garden store — his first, he says, and his last.

Miyashiro, a master of compost, has spent decades building a system here that is the envy of other community gardens. After years of tweaking it, he’s almost satisfied. It supplies all 500 plots and common areas and still produces leftovers for school gardens.

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