Category — Compost

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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Video shows us adding restaurant food scraps to the Dragon.

Trying out a mid-scale composter at our Compost Garden in Vancouver

We finally started up the White Dragon composter and have been adding garbage bins full of food scraps to it from a local restaurant for the past three weeks. We’ve successfully been using its younger brother, the Red Dragon, a smaller, family sized bin, for the past 12 months. Both bins change food scraps into compost in 24 hours using microbes in a heated holding tank in which stirring wings mix the material a few times every hour.

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How we compost at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden

Sharon Slack, head gardener at our Demo Garden, explains briefly what you need to do to make excellent compost at home. Using just your fruit and veggie scraps, some leaves and some garden waste, you can have great finished compost in 5-8 months. This cold composting method lets you use whatever organic waste you have on hand.

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Uniting a community in Northeast Baltimore through gardening

Hamilton Crop Circle is seeking seed money to help our various projects grow!

Some money will be allocated to developing worm composting systems other funds will be allocated to building greenhouses for year round produce production. Our projects will become sustainable economic engines thanks to start up funds.

Local Composting Program:
Hamilton Crop Circle works with area restaurants to collect compostable materials at no charge, reducing waste, while creating natural fertilizer.

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Brian describes how the Red Dragon works.

The Red Dragon has surprised us!

Six months ago, we sceptics reluctantly agreed to test out a plug-in composter from Korea at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. We’d already had a bad experience with one electric bin and were quite sure that this one would act badly too.

We put in the required mix of sawdust and microbes supplied with the bin, added some water and plugged the attractive machine into the wall. Then periodically we put in food waste brought from home.

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Dog carrying pig food to pig bin

Feeding food scraps to livestock in World War II

This practice is not common today and it is banned in most countries due to animal health concerns. But in England during the war, the activity was promoted and seniors, who grew up in England, remember the Pig Man.

Revised extracts from ‘A Sheltered Childhood ~ Wartime Family Memories of an East Acton Child’
Contributed by Brian Brooks
The Brooks family lived at 18 The Green, East Acton, West London.

“Not only paper and metal had to be salvaged but now food swill to feed animals, such as pigs, as well. This would help meat rationing. A round metal bin and lid, nick-named the ‘Pig Bin’, was put by the lamppost opposite The Bye, beside the path to the public air raid shelter on The Green. This was for everybody’s food scraps and meat bones. The bin was emptied every few days by unhappy-looking POW’s in a very smelly lorry.
The bin became very dented and the lid wouldn’t fit on properly. It also split and smelly yellowy gunge oozed out. People started to avoid walking too close to it because of the smell, unlike the flies which loved it. It was my job (more war work for me!) to take the food scraps to the pig bin.

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Providence resident Than Wood has transformed a vacant lot on Westminster Street into a vegetable garden. He’s using his bicycle and its trailer to collect compost from neighbors. (Frank Carini/ecoRI staff photos)

Providence resident transforms vacant lot into vegetable garden

By Frank Carini
ecoRI – Rhode Island Environmental News
Apr. 27, 2010

Excerpt:

PROVIDENCE — Than Wood spent much of the winter befuddling real estate agents with a simple question.

He asked the agents if any of the property owners they represented would be interested in renting unused land to an urban farmer. None of the nearly two dozen middlemen he spoke with seemed to grasp the idea of growing food where a building once stood.

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Vancouver’s Mayor Gregor Robertson, Steve Aujla of Fraser Richmond Soil and Fibre, and Sharon Slack City Farmer’s head gardener at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. Note: City’s backyard compost bin and worm bin on display. Photo by Michael Levenston

Vancouver allows food waste into yard trimming containers for pickup

Gerry Bellett,
Vancouver Sun
April 21, 2010

Excerpt:

Vancouver is marking Earth Day, Thursday, by allowing homeowners to put food waste into their yard trimming containers.

Mayor Gregor Robertson said, Wednesday, that the curbside pickup service for 110,000 households is the beginning of an attempt to reduce the city’s landfill waste by 40 per cent by 2020.

The food waste will be turned into compost-based soil by a Richmond company, Harvest and Fraser Richmond Soil and Fibre.

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Michael Levenston, executive director of City Farmer, is happy that Vancouver city council has passed a motion that as of April 22 will allow residents to dump fruit and vegetables into their yard waste bins for composting. Levenston is pictured at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden on Thursday. Photo by Jenelle Schneider, Province.

Fruits, Vegetables: Just Phase 1 of project

By Frank Luba
The Province
5 Mar 2010

Vancouver has made it easier for residents to be nice to the Earth on April 22 — which just happens to be Earth Day.

Starting then, people that live in single-family residences can start pitching their fruit and vegetable waste into their yard waste bins so it can be composted.

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By ProjectHDesign

The City Compost process: Turning yard trimmings into high value compost. Yard and garden trimmings (grass, leaves, plant debris) are screened for metal using a magnet, ground up, and arranged in long piles called windrows. Over the next six months, the windrows are periodically turned to maintain optimum temperature, oxygen level and moisture content. The finished material is then screened for plastic and oversized pieces, before distribution as compost. Larger photo here.

Factsheet prepared by the City of Vancouver, 2010

Composting conserves landfill space, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and creates nutrient rich soil. The City of Vancouver engages residents to work toward these goals, offering educational programs, subsidized home composters, and a yard waste composting facility.

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