compost

New compost location

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Yesterday, I moved the metal ring the compost pile was in to its new location. I ended up using the same wires to hold the seam together; they’ll just be much easier to undo in the future! That allowed me to simply roll the whole thing over.

This is where we decided to put it. I’ve trimmed around this old tree stump many times, but those little trees (several kinds of them) keep coming back.

In the background, you can see part of what was cleared to get at the chokecherry trees, including another tree stump, and the pile of spirea and thistles from clearing towards the junk pile.

Now that we’ve discovered her babies, I fear Butterscotch has already moved them somewhere else. I hope not!

After taking a pruner to the saplings and adding a pile of dried weeds and grasses I’d pulled up when clearing here earlier, it looks full already!

The tree stump does take up a lot of space.

Time to start burning!

I needed to burn out all around the stump, to hopefully kill off the root systems those saplings keep growing from.

By the time I was done, several hours had past, and it was completely dark when the girls came to help me make sure all the coals were out and put everything away.

I had the hose going so much, spraying around the fire and keeping the sparks from getting far, it was actually muddy by the ring.

On the plus side, I got rid of the pile of spirea and thistles in the process.

Of course, I needed dry wood to keep the fire going, since much of what I was burning away was pretty green. So I raided the pile of branches by the garage that’s waiting to be chipped.

I couldn’t see anything, but I am convinced there is a wasp nest somewhere in that pile. I can hear them, and the sound is NOT coming from the nearby Chinese elm.

!!

This is how it looked this morning.

Hmm. I am thinking I might need to do this again, before we start using it for compost. The stump didn’t burn much, but that’s okay. It’s the area around it that has stuff I want to kill off, so they don’t start growing into the compost when we start it.

I’m thinking this will be a good location. We’re happy enough with the nearby garden beds (even with the deer decimating our beets) that we will continue growing there, so having a compost pile nearby will be handy. It’s closer to the house – but not too close! This is near where we plan to build the cordwood shed to use as an outdoor bathroom with a composting toilet. It might be in the way during construction, but the way things have been going, I’ll be happy if we can just dig out the sod where we want to lay down gravel and level things, first.

Though we plan to have a composting toilet, the contents will NOT be used for compost in any of our garden beds. I’ve seen many sites talk about how great human waste is for compost, and it absolutely horrifies me. It’s not the waste itself I have concerns with, but what might be in it. Not many people are in my husband’s situation, having to take more than a dozen different prescriptions, but even if it’s just OTC pain killers, hormonal birth control, or other prescriptions, it will be an issue. So we will have a separate dumping site, well away from anywhere food will be grown.

So that is how things are progressing with the new compost location.

One of these days I intend to get some dual roller composting bins. They are supposed to compost a lot faster but, for me, it’s more about accessibility and mobility. We may not need it now but, at some point, it will be more of an issue.

That’s one thing I learned about living in the housing co-op we were in before moving back here. It was one of the few places that had a lot of wheelchair accessible housing, and many of my friends and neighbours had a variety of mobility issues. Now, I see everything with different eyes. It did make the transition to my husband becoming disabled much easier, to be honest. It can happen to any of us and, as we age, it’s almost inevitable. One woman I know uses the term TAB to describe people without disabilities: Temporarily Able Bodied.

Accessibility is now an almost constant thought in the back of my mind as we work on things and plan ahead.

Even with composting.

The Re-Farmer

Time to move the compost ring

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

When we moved here, the compost pile we’ve been using was already set up in a metal ring, near the old garden. It’s been pretty full for a while, and well past time to start another one.

Today, I decided to dig out the metal ring in preparation for that.

The first thing I did was use a potato fork to lever under it and loosen it from the soil, and clear away some of the mulch around it or things growing out from under it.

The ring is made of two pieces put together, and this is one of the seams that I cleared.

It’s held together with a combination of electrical wire and barbed wire (without any barbs).

Between my dad and my brothers, I think we ended up with a whole lot of scrap electrical wire available, because I’m finding it used for stuff like this, all over the place!

The barbed wire, however, is a new one. :-D Not that I haven’t seen it all over; just that it’s usually limited to jerry rigging barbed wire fences, so it make sense for them to be there.

It took some fighting with it, but I managed to get the wire unwrapped and back through the hole. Yay! I can move the rings now!

Or… not?

Ah. Of course.

Even though I’d lifted the ring out of the soil earlier, it wasn’t enough to reveal the second set of wires, holding it together.

*sigh*

The electrical wire was easy enough to get loose, at least.

Hmmm.

At this point, I got a pair of pliers.

A pair of pliers that also had wire cutters on them. Which I needed to use, after I unwrapped part of it. The wire ran under the ring itself, with no way to finish unwrapping it from this side.

Finally, it’s clear! I could leave the other seam as is, and lift the whole thing out from the compost pile.

I don’t actually have high hopes for the compost we’ll get out of this. What we added to it should be fine, but when I tried digging into it to turn it, earlier it the summer, I was still finding lots of wood (the summer before we moved here, my sister and her husband had piled pruned branches into it, with plans to burn it, until my brother pointed out that it was too close to an apple tree!). I also found plastic garbage and pieces of fabric rags. What else might be under there, I don’t know!

It’s free!

Plenty of roots were hung up on the wires at the seams.

After talking about it with a daughter, I think we will move this over a tree stump near near where the old wood pile used to be. The stump itself is in the way of things, and having a compost on top of it will encourage it to break down faster. Once the ring is in place, I’ll use it to burn some of the stuff I’ve been clearing out of the edge of the spruce grove. Things like thistles and spirea don’t belong in the wood piles we’re planning to have chipped. Before, I’d put them in the fire pit, but there’s so much of it, plus we’re actually using the fire pit for cooking, now. Some of the saplings I cleared away from around the tree stump are already growing back, so starting off with a burn will ensure those are killed off, too.

I hope I can find a better way to close up the ring than using those wires, though.

The Re-Farmer