Category — Compost

See larger image of the Farm plan here.

By sydneycityfarm
18th November 2009

Sydney siders are one step closer to having a City Farm and Sustainable Living Centre with the unanimous support of the City of Sydney Environment & Heritage Committee to fund an investigation into potential sites and models.

City of Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore spoke in support of the proposal which goes before a full sitting of Council on Monday November 23.

“City Farms provide real, hands-on experiences to teach residents, businesses and schools about sustainable living. City Farms demonstrate the simple ways that everyone can Live Green and give the community access to local organic produce.”

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This electric, indoor compost unit comes from Korea. Photo Michael Levenston

The Red Dragon

You plug it in and hook up the exhaust pipe so that it vents outdoors. Then add a sawdust/enzyme mix and 2 litres of water to the machine. That’s it. You can add any food waste AND DOG WASTE to the mix and it will decompose the organic material.

That’s the promise. We are presently testing the machine at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden to see if it lives up to that promise.

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Photo by Michael Levenston

Bears are a part of city life in many municipalities in and around Vancouver. Our Hotline receives calls from residents about bears strolling into yards and knocking over compost bins in North Vancouver, Port Coquitlam, Whistler, Squamish and parts of Vancouver Island.

Laurie Chambers of Lund, BC, designed and built this beautiful bear-proof composter and we are lucky to have one at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden.

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Be sure to watch this video in High Definition. Click on the YouTube icon and then on the HD icon beneath the video.

Once you’ve had your worm bin for a few months and the worms have turned your food scraps into soil, you need to separate the worms from the compost so you can use the worms again in fresh bedding — and put the finished compost to work in your garden.

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See this video in High Definition. Click here.

We talk ‘worms’ every day of the week at City Farmer at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden – “Where can I buys worms?” “How can I get rid of fruit flies?” “Where can I get a worm bin?” “How much food waste can I add to my worm bin?” and so on.

Lauren answers some of those question in the above six minute video, shot in high definition at the Garden. All the basics are outlined, so if you’ve ever considered composting with worms, watch this video.

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Here’s The Dirt – Guide To Composting – GVRD (Metro Vancouver) – 1990

City Farmer has been promoting home composting at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden for almost 20 years. This video was created in 1990 by Marianne Pengelly for the GVRD (our regional government) and shows how we spoke about composting then. Our City Farmer staff at the time included Gill Elcock, Lorenzo Mele and Susan Ray.

Some of our instructions have changed over the years. Current information is available from our Compost Hotline: 604.736.2250 in Vancouver.

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Mumbai Port Trust Garden receives Friends of The Trees first prize for its Terrace Garden at the Central Kitchen from the hands of the Governor of Maharashtra, in Durbar Hall At Raj Bhavan.

This garbage dump doesn’t raise a stink. Rather, it helps produce exotic fruits, vegetables and flowers. Lekha Menon meets city farmers who have mastered the art of making the most out of waste.

By Lekha Menon
April 05, 2009
Mumbai Mirror

At 80, Y V Damle conducts laughter therapy classes for women at Hindu colony, Dadar East. But the “fees” for his efforts is rather interesting – a bag of garbage! On other occasions, he trudges to the Dadar sabzi mandi where, along with greens and fruits, he asks the vendors to pack in vegetable peels and sundry rubbish. All of which find their way into plastic bags, drums and laundry baskets in his terrace where the retired BMC engineer farms for veggies, fruits and flowers.

Sounds incredible? But that’s exactly what the magic of city farming is all about. Like Damle, quite a few Mumbaikars are recycling waste to generate organic farm products right in their homes. Not just an effective method of waste management, these green thumbs believe, this form of urban agriculture is just what the eco-doctor ordered for solving critical food security issues.

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30 Page Photo Album

Since 1990, the City of Vancouver and City Farmer Society have been working together at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden, to teach Vancouver residents how they can ‘go green’ at home. Composting is part of a larger City strategy named ‘Grow Natural’, which shows the public how to “save time, money and the environment by using natural yard care techniques.”

The Vancouver Compost Garden works in cooperation with a variety of City Departments (Solid Waste, Water Design, Parks, Health, Streets, Green Streets) to inform the public about these strategies, which include back yard and worm composting, water conservation (rain barrels, drip irrigation, permeable surfaces) safe pest control and natural lawn care. All of these ‘green’ activities overlap and involve other topics as well.

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Watch Composting in Singapore

With the sound of cicadas in the background, Esme shows us how she composts at home in Singapore and avoids attracting venomous snake such as King Cobras and vipers, and non-venomous pythons (adults grow to a maximum of more than 32 feet).

And for more about nature in Singapore, read the following article:

Wildlife’s revenge – Even in urban Singapore, it can sometimes be a jungle

Two to three times a week, Singapore police receive a call from a resident reporting a visit by one of Singapore’s many snakes.

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Watch Plant Canteen – A Compost Heap – 1944 cartoon

1944 Cartoon – Ministry of Agriculture & Fisheries “Dig For Victory Leaflet No 7

Commentary – “Thanks Mr Middleton. Mr Middleton – Good Afternoon, we all expect vegetables to feed us but we’ve got to see that we feed them properly too. Suppose we get down to the root of the matter. Plants need food just as much as we do, and it must be in a form they can assimilated. This is where humas comes in. Humas is composed mainly of decayed vegetable matter.

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Compost making is what we do at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden in Vancouver, and it can’t be stressed enough, that fall leaves are the secret to making good compost at home. Collect enough leaves in bags NOW to last you through the next 12 months. Every time you add food scraps, grass clippings or plant waste to your bin, throw in a few handfuls of leaves. In that way you will have a good carbon/nitrogen ratio and you will get fine compost in 6-8 months.

Chris Olsen of CTV News visited us at our garden and also visited the Vancouver Landfill where they make compost on a large scale.

See his news video on this page.

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Cover photo of Eliza and Peter.
Published by Sono Nis Press in 2007

The Garden That You Are explores that culture through the lives and stories of eight gardeners who all live within a square mile of each in other, in British Columbia’s bucolic and culturally diverse Slocan Valley. Some garden for a living, others garden as a passion, but all have fascinating personal histories and gardening lives.

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CBC’s The X-Challenge

Canadian federal candidates debate economic issues facing Canada. The second debate on environmental policy aired October 8, 2008 on CBC Newsworld.

See candidates Lorne Mayencourt, Ujjal Dosanjh, Michael Byers and Adriane Carr in a town-hall-style debate moderated by Mark Kelley. A member of the audience mentioned worm composting and the moderator asked the candidates if they knew what that was.

See the complete CBC show here.

Photo by Michael Levenston
The City of Vancouver and City Farmer have provided worm bins to City residents since 1991.

By Carlito Pablo, Georgia Straight
October 9, 2008

Friendship can grow from just about every imaginable place and situation. For Farhat Khan, one blossomed out of the compost she creates in an indoor bin.

A few years ago, while Khan was volunteering for City Farmer, a Kitsilano-based group that teaches urban farming to Vancouver residents, a woman approached her and asked if she knew anyone who could give her some compost. The woman had a plot at a nearby community garden but didn’t have a composter.

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Sharon, head gardener at City Farmer, gives Tasha a tour of the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. They look at the cob shed and oven, compost toilet, and bird baths.

Sharon is a passionate birder and even brings her dog’s hair for the chickadees who build their nests with it. Maria places colourful flower petals in the bird baths every morning for our pleasure as much as theirs.

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Breakfast TV Comes to the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden

Sharon talks with Tasha about how we make compost at the garden. City Farmer staff answer composting questions on the Compost Hotline six days a week all year long – that’s around 5000 calls.

Staff speak to the media every week about other subjects as well, such as green roofs, shiitake mushrooms, composting toilets, local food, natural lawn care, pest control without pesticides and so on – everything to do with being environmentally friendly at home in the city.

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Photo from ‘Cowfiles African Gardens’.

From: ‘Ideas that will catch on here.’
July 12, 2008, BBC

“Another fantastic idea I picked up – which could make its way onto my allotment before long – is the keyhole veg bed. This is a raised bed with bells on: it’s about 1m (3’6″) high, and the outer bed, where the vegetables are growing, slopes down from a central hollow column. There’s an access path to the column (giving the bed a “keyhole” shape viewed from above) and inside it is what amounts to a compost bin, held in with hessian: you fill it with kitchen waste, stable manure, grass clippings – whatever you’d put on your compost heap.

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Photo by Ian Lindsay. City Farmer’s instructor Lauren Welch in centre. Alexander Dallin and Maren Gilbert Stewart are the students.

[Since 1990, City Farmer and the City of Vancouver have held worm composting workshops for City of Vancouver residents who live in apartments. For $25 participants get a worm bin, 500 worms, Mary Appelhof's book "Worms Eat My Garbage", a trowel, bedding and a one-hour class. City Farmer also holds classes for school kids who come with their class.]

“Decay: It’s bad enough you need to compost organic waste; now you need to have worms eat it for you.”

Article by Denise Ryan
Vancouver Sun June 14, 2008

Since our cat, Gordito, died last year, and hard on the heels of the end of our morbidly bloated gerbil population, my son has been lobbying hard for a pet. Preferably a dog. It doesn’t need to be a big dog, Alexander says. A terrier, a wiener dog, even a chihuahua would do.

When I announce that as part of greening our home we are going to get some pets — 500 of them — he is pretty excited.

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Rebecca Gerendasy makes great videos for her web site “Cooking Up A Story”. This one features the Bijou Café, which now composts all its kitchen waste.

Rebecca writes: “I had heard about a program at the Office of Sustainable Development called Portland Composts! This makes so much sense, but how does one go about learning how and what’s entailed? I set out to learn from one who knew firsthand, and I found that one of the best local and organic breakfast places in town has been participating in this program since its early days, the Bijou Café.

“Kathleen Hagberg and the crew at the Bijou have made the change from going to the dump to going to the composter. And it wasn’t all that hard for them. It seems to be working in Seattle, and San Francisco too.”

See more about “Commercial Composting” on “Cooking Up a Story”.

Preet is our Punjabi host.

Hong speaks Mandarin

And Patrick, Cantonese, in these scripted videos.

Many Vancouver residents want to compost but cannot speak English, so we’ve made three instructional videos, which are available on the Web.

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