Tag Archives: composting

Stone Barns

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A few days ago I wrote about eating at Blue Hill Restaurant for my anniversary. I didn’t go into the food in depth, so I want to say again that it was absolutely delicious. They used fresh, local ingredients that really stood out with their superior flavor. One course was a medley of vegetables and fruit and we found ourselves picking each piece and tasting it individually and then talking about what we had just sampled. The combination of superior cooking and local ingredients made the meal memorable.

We had a very nice waiter who was able to answer a lot of our questions about what farms supply them, etc. They partner with two farms in particular. Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires. Wait, did someone say the Berkshires?? It turns out that Blue Hill Farm, which was Dan Barber’s (the chef at Blue Hill restaurant) grandmother’s farm, is very close to Neil’s parent’s house. We decided that the next time we went up, we would try and track the farm down.

stone-barns_22

In the meantime, we decided to go to Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture the day after our fabulous meal. We packed Lindsay up after her sleepover and drove up to Tarrytown, NY. Stone Barns is set on 80 acres of gardens, pastures and woods. The mission of Stone Barns, as they say, is to celebrate, teach and advance community-based food production and enjoyment, from farm to classroom to table. We had fun in their impressive greenhouse finding some of the items in our meal from the night before. The different beds made a patchwork quilt effect.

pigs

We wandered through the fields and woods to see their animals. The animals were kept in very spacious areas, and you could see that they move them around to different pastures often. They used portable electric fences that were powered car batteries. There were quite a few pigs that were in the woodsy area doing the things that pigs love best; sunning themselves, sleeping and rolling in the mud. The word transparency kept coming to mind. This operation was beautiful, productive and offered the animals a very nice life. I guess it’s weird to say they have a nice life when they are meat animals, but it is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from feedlots.

windrows

They even have a big composting area. They compost everything from the farm and the on-site restaurant. There were machines that looked as though they chop everything up into smallish pieces and then lay them out into windrows (long piles of compost). The windrows were covered to keep in the moisture. I read that they were interested inharnessing the heat that the compost produced as a way to heat the greenhouse in the winter, and worked to implement a compost heating system. I love this place!!

bee-hives

It felt as though we were walking through a botanic garden as we toured the grounds. After we passed the laying hens out in their enormous field, we came across their bee hives. I am fascinated with honey bees right now, and have a friend who keeps bees in Brooklyn and sells her honey. I’m still too chicken to make the leap into beekeeping!

I’ve always been curious to try hunting for wild honey. That entails watching the direction bees fly from the flowers they are pollinating and triangulating the path back to their hives, which are often in a hollow tree. I don’t have much opportunity to do that in NYC and I haven’t found a cohort. Plus I think you need to destroy the hive to harvest the honey and I wouldn’t want to do that. Can you imagine thousands of really pissed off bees with no home? Okay, so I like the idea of hunting honey, but not the reality. So when I saw bees (or possibly wasps) flying into a tree during our walk I was really excited. That could be my elusive honey tree!!

bee-tree

At the end of our visit, we had a snack in their little café and peeked into the Blue Hill restaurant up there. It was a fun escape from the city on a gorgeous summer day.

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Get Free Coffee Grounds from Starbucks

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compost

Here’s some information on using coffee grounds in your compost from Starbucks. Besides getting spent grounds from Starbucks, I’m sure any of your local coffee shops would be happy to hand some over. You can divert great organic matter from going to a landfill and improve your garden at the same time.

Coffee grounds can provide a valuable source of nutrition for your garden. The proper amount to be used depends on the condition of your soil and what you are growing. Check with a local gardening expert or your local parks to see what is best for your garden. Here are a few general tips:Applying coffee grinds directly to your garden:
Coffee grounds can be applied directly as a top dressing to acid loving plants like blueberries, hydrangeas, and azaleas (acid loving plants thrive in areas where rainfall is common in the warm season). Adding brown material such as leaves and dried grass to the mulch will help keep a balanced soil pH.

Mixing coffee grounds in your compost:
Coffee grounds act as a green material with a carbon-nitrogen (C-N) ratio of 20-1. Combined with browns such as leaves and straw, coffee grounds generate heat and will speed up the compost process. Don’t make your coffee grounds more than 25% of any one pile’s content. To counter the acidity of the coffee grounds, consider adding 1 teaspoon of lime or wood ash for every 5 pounds of coffee grounds in your pile.

Using coffee grounds in your worm bin:
Worms fed with coffee grounds and other vegetarian materials will flourish.

What’s in Coffee Grounds?
Starbucks commissioned a study in 1995 to better understand the make up of the organic matter we call coffee grounds. The following is the result of the analysis performed by the University of Washington, College of Forest Resources:

Primary Nutrients

Nitrogen……….1.45%

Phosphorus……ND ug/g

Potassium…….1204 ug/g

Secondary Nutrients

Calcium……….389 ug/g

Magnesium……448 ug/g

Sulfur…………high ug/g

ND = indicates sample is below detection limit

ug/g = microgram/gram
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Earth Baby Compostable Diapers

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One Day of Diapers. Photo © Sean Dreilinger

One Day of Diapers. Photo © Sean Dreilinger


Earth Baby was founded by three California Bay Area families who saw the amount of disposable diapers they were sending to the landfill and wanted to do something about it. They launched Earth Baby, which is a service that delivers diapers and wipes. They come later to collect the used diapers and bring them to a composting facility. The composting process uses only .5 watt-hour of electricity per diaper (equivalent of running a 60 watt light bulb for 30 seconds), no water or chlorine bleach.

The diapers themselves are made of natural unbleached FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified wood pulp and a super-absorbent gel. They are 100% chlorine and fragrance free. The composted diapers are turned into a high-quality top-soil, which is used at local golf courses and sod farms.

I am a sucker for the stats that show how many trees have been saved by using recycled paper towels for a year, or how much energy I’ve saved over a year with just one compact fluorescent bulb. If you are like me, you will like to know that as of June 26, 2009, Earth Baby has composted 29,220 pounds of diapers to date.

They currently only service the Bay area, but their business is growing rapidly, so hopefully they will be available in other cities soon.

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The Great Thing About Our Chickens

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I love my backyard chickens for lots of different reasons. Here are a few:

1. They produce tasty eggs. Besides giving our chickens table scraps (lettuce, broccoli, fading fruit, etc.) we let them graze in our backyard. They eat a lot of grass and ivy (and just about anything that isn’t nailed down), which gives them added beta carotene. This in turn gives their yolks a rich, deep almost orange color. There is some debate as to whether pastured hens (those that eat a lot of grass instead of corn-based feed) lay eggs that are lower in cholesterol. All I know is that their eggs have a meaty taste that you don’t get with grocery store eggs.

2. They are funny and friendly. We raised our hens from chicks, so they are quite fond of us. Of course they are walking stomachs and I feed them, so I’m sure they love me for that too. When we sit out in our garden and they are roaming around, they often jump up into my lap for a little cuddle. Our silver-laced Polish Andie (with the big pom-pom hairdoo) has some trouble seeing because of the feathers in her face. She has to tilt her head to see things and sometimes she still bonks into furniture. It’s pretty funny to watch her.

3. They eat bugs. They dig and scratch in the dirt looking for bugs, but they are also hunters of mosquitoes and ticks. My girls don’t seem to be too interested in slugs, but I’ve heard that chickens like to eat slugs. That makes up for the garden nibbling they are prone to. My girls will grab a mosquito right off my leg for a snack. Love that!

4. They are educational. Lindsay has learned all about chickens. We also have lots of curious friends and neighbors come through with lots of questions. Probably the top two questions are: How can you get eggs without a rooster? (You can get eggs, but you can’t get fertilized eggs w/out a rooster) Do they smell? (They only smell if you don’t clean up after them. Much in the same way cats can smell if you don’t clean their litter box) We just had kids from Lindsay’s school come to meet the hens. Many had never touched a chicken before or seen a green or blue egg before.

5. They are a great ice breaker at parties. We live in Brooklyn and it is pretty unusual for people to keep chickens. People either think we’re cool or really weird. I can live with either of those.

6. They are great composters. As I mentioned above they eat all manner of kitchen scraps. We keep two tubs by our kitchen sink. One is the premier kitchen waste, which goes to the hens. The other goes into our compost bin. The chickens eat the scraps and poop out nitrogen-rich droppings. Their droppings go into the compost bin, which kick-starts the bin to really speed up the decomposition process. My garden is thriving with the added nitrogen.

Food scraps turn into compost and eggs. What a great system.

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Indoor Composting

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compostingro1

Here’s a product called the NatureMill that’s been getting a lot of publicity lately. The company says that it will turn your food scraps into garden-ready compost in 2 weeks.

I am a bit skeptical about this product for a few reasons. My first doubts are with their claim to speeding up the decomposing process to only take 2 weeks. I’ve generally found that compost happens on its own schedule. A good hot pile takes a couple of months.

My second issue with the product is the fact that it uses electricity. They say that the machine uses about $.50 of electricity a month. I just think it’s weird to take one of the most natural processes on Earth and make it use electricity. When most people start composting, it’s because they are concerned with the environment and want to reduce the amount of garbage that’s going into a landfill. The rich garden soil is a bonus.

However, if people begin to compost with this product who would never have composted before I think it’s a positive move. If the amount of electricity is offset by the reduction of waste hitting a landfill and all of the energy costs involved in that process, I will keep my mind open. Anybody use the NatureMill or know of anyone who does? I’m curious to hear feedback on it.

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Compostable lunch trays

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compostable-lunch-tray

A few posts back, I wrote about the fact the NYC schools use styrofoam trays for their student’s breakfast and lunches. This is such an ecological horror. I can’t imagine where they are shipping all of this mess.

It was nice to see the following story about an alternative to the styrofoam.

A South Carolina middle school is experimenting with lunch trays made out of bamboo and sugar cane to see if they might be the answer to the millions of Styrofoam trays the state’s public schools send to the landfill each year. WFAE’s Julie Rose reports:

There’s been a trend in public schools over the last decade to trade washable plastic lunch trays for disposable ones made of Styrofoam. About half of South Carolina’s public schools use those trays, according to Education Department spokesman Pete Pillow. He says it’s because they’re cheaper and easier.

“Remember, you’ve got to heat that water to a certain temperature. You’ve got to have the suds and the soap,” says Pillow. “If you’re feeding a thousand students a day that’s an awful lot of dishes to be washing to be washing according to all the state health regulations.”

And that requires someone washing dishes pretty much full-time, says Pillow. But the cost savings come with environmental consequences.

Pillow says South Carolina schools dump about 40-million Styrofoam lunch trays in the landfill each year. Over the next six weeks, Hand Middle School in Columbia will try out disposable trays made from bamboo and sugar cane that will then be chipped into pieces for the city’s compost.

The bamboo trays cost about three times the Styrofoam ones, but will save the school landfill fees. If it proves cost effective enough, Pillow says the state will consider using the trays in more schools.

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The Backyard

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backsteps

When I first mentioned to Neil that I wanted chickens, his initial response wasn’t very positive. He grew up in the Berkshires and sometimes the farm aesthetic was pretty awful. We have a small yard, so any chicken coop we got (I was working on him!) had to be attractive. We spent way too much money on the Eglu by Omlet. It’s a beautiful coop and very easy to clean, which was a big bonus for me.

So everything was going well in our beautiful backyard farm until I took a couple of composting classes at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The teacher was great and very inspiring as to how to scavenge materials in the city. Coffee grounds from your local coffee shop, bales of straw from neighbor’s Halloween displays, etc. It was armed with the information from this class that I purchased a Toro leaf blower and decided to vacuum and mulch my leaves. It actually took a lot of restraint not to become the crazy leaf lady and walk up and down my block vacuuming up the neighbor’s leaves. Hey, I only have a finite amount of “browns” for my compost bin!

Well then I happened upon an autumnal display (this was in October) that had bales of straw and quickly asked them if I could have the straw when they were done with it. I was able to cart off 2 bales. Those suckers are big and heavy and you definitely look like the crazy straw lady when you are wrestling them down the streets of Brooklyn on a cart. I generously spread a layer all over the backyard and piled the straw up in the plant beds. I was glowing with how the straw would break down by the springtime and help my crummy lifeless soil become rich with nutrients and life. Neil was skeptical, but has gotten used to my crazy schemes, so he didn’t grumble too much.

It is now spring and as you can see from the photos, I have plenty of straw on the ground and in the beds. It has shown very little signs of breaking down. The grumbling has gotten quite audible. I planted grass seeds and there are tiny little green hairs peeking up. Hasn’t shown any sign of covering up the straw.

backyard

Even I have to admit that my fabulous composting endeavor looks pretty awful. People who come over think that the straw is for the chickens and this is exactly what Neil wanted to avoid in the first place. Neil encouraged me to pull out the leaf blower to suck up some of the straw and grind it into smaller pieces. That seemed to work, but I didn’t put it all back. I think I will dig it into the beds over the summer and fall and add it to my compost bin. I think the grass will grow through what’s left and my backyard will look a little less like photos from the Dust bowl fairly soon. Cross your fingers!

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Coen brothers production shows how to not trash the set

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March 26th, 2009

By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now

These days it’s not just individual Hollywood A-listers who are going green in their personal lives; they’re taking the entire movie set in a sustainable direction. Some eco-driven insiders have even started up side businesses to complement their work in film. And who knows, with emerging companies like Film Biz Recycling in New York and EcoSet Consulting in Los Angeles, the industry may have just conjured up a new wave of green troops.

Shannon Schaefer, founder of the fledgling EcoSet Consulting (website still in progress), is on the front lines. During her stint as production secretary on the Coen Brothers’ film A Serious Man in Minneapolis last fall, she helped the Coens and FOCUS Features studio divert more than 11 tons of waste from the landfill.

From unused film to leftover food to set props, Schaefer and others recycled or composted the kinds of things that normally end up in a trash dump somewhere.

It started when Schaefer, who has worked in film production for several years (and who officially started her company in December), made it known that she would take charge of greening the set, if the film’s muckety-mucks were interested. As it turned out, FOCUS Features had already instituted a policy to make its operations as eco-friendly as possible, so Schaefer founder herself in charge of not just clean-up, but green-up.

During the 44-day shoot, she says, 80 percent of the 14 tons of trash was diverted. To start, organizers avoided the use of plastic water bottles whenever possible – instead, providing water stations and reusable bottles around the location, preventing an estimated 10,000 plastic water bottles from going to the city dump. Yet only 6 percent of the diverted waste was recycled cardboard, bottles or cans. Surprisingly, 74 percent of the refuse went to compost, including virtually everything from catering and craft services – fruits, vegetables, meat, bones, dairy, paper and corn eating utensils (plates, napkins, cups, forks, knives). “Basically anything that was once an animal or a plant is now compost,” Schaefer said.

The way it began was organic, Schaefer says. She didn’t approach the filmmakers or the set supervisors; she was already part of their crew.

“When I was hired on, I let my supervisors know that I was interested in doing this, and so I was kind of figuring out the logistics for it at the beginning of prep. I’d written up a little memo to the crew and production office, sort of a sustainability statement saying we wanted the film to be as un-wasteful as possible. And so I was already working with my direct supervisors when it came from the top. FOCUS Features had to be the ones to say, ‘Go ahead’ – because often there can be additional costs to recycling and diverting waste.”

Once given the go-ahead, the production office worked with Minneapolis’s Eureka Recycling and local hauler Boone Trucking. In doing so, they were not only able to set a tone within the industry; they were able to show ultimate respect for their host town – by not trashing it.

“I’ve seen a lot of waste,” Schaefer says, “and I’ve been in the position to where even though I care about it, I’m too exhausted to deal with it after filming. So, I’ve been there – I know how hard it can be. But if you have the prep time, if you know you’re doing it in advance and that you just have to implement some new systems, it’s not that difficult.

“It’s something I really care about, and the industry has to change. I want to be part of that change. You can sit and talk about it all you want, but if you don’t do something, then you’re part of the problem.”

Schaefer says she believes that more and more film production crews and studios are moving in the same direction – away from the city dump and toward a self-created (or pre-existing) compost site.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

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Christmas Trees

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In an effort to offset some of the holiday excess, why not mulch your Christmas tree? In NYC they call it mulchfest and set up wood chippers in various parks across the city. You bring your tree there and they turn it into mulch. I usually drag a few trees I run across on my way to the park as well. I find the sight of abandoned Christmas trees to be very sad, especially if they have tinsel on them. If you are in NYC, you can look here to find out when and where to bring your tree. It’s this coming weekend near me. If you don’t live in NYC, there seem to be programs all over the place. I would start by contacting your department of sanitation to see what they are doing.

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