The Compost Bin

If I ever get my hands on a fully operational time traveling machine I would, like most people travel back in time to stop my younger self from making a terrible mistake.

You might think I’d want to give young Anthony some stock market advice or perhaps the final scores of the last 15 Super Bowls but those facts just aren’t as important as the knowledge that I would share with myself. Young Anthony must be told that he’s missing out on the great vegetable known as Swiss Chard.

I had never grown Swiss Chard before this summer and I never tasted it either. And what a shame that is because it’s really easy to grow in a home vegetable garden and tastes great. It’s a cool season crop but it doesn’t really bolt in the heat of summer like other greens. When my Brocolli Raab and Arugula bolted, this chard was still going strong.

My wife told me about how she used to love when her Grandmother cooked chard. She’d saute it with olive oil and garlic and then sprinkle it with parmesan cheese. And now that I’ve had it, I totally agree.

Swiss Chard will play a big role in my fall/winter garden too. These plants in the picture are gigantic because I’ve been doing the “cut and come again” thing whenever we need some leaves for dinner. But just in case, I also planted more chard seeds about two weeks ago.

But now that you mention it, I might want to let the younger version of myself in on some other important information. It’s not everyday that you get to travel through time so I might as well make the most of it. Young Anthony, you should try beets too. You wind up loving them in the future.

Thanks to all the rain last week, my garden is showing signs of life. Just about all the salad greens and root crops that I planted have germinated.

Yes, they're fragile little seedlings at the moment but with some TLC, I'm hoping that they become a thriving fall and winter garden.

If last year's weather is becoming the new normal, then these plants should be okay until Halloween. I was still picking hot peppers and tomatoes at that time last year. Global Warming/Climate Change is making gardening interesting lately.

So that gives me about a month to get a mini hoop house built. Yesterday was hot and humid in the 80ies here in New Jersey so I'm more worried about watering my seedlings at this point.

These raised beds don't look very impressive right now but this is a picture of part of my fall vegetable garden. Shortly before Tropical Storm Hanna pelted New Jersey with about three inches of rain, I got out to the garden and planted some seeds.

Since I probably should have done this about 4 weeks ago, I tried to stick to things that would germinate and grow pretty quickly. I planted mostly salad greeny types of things like a Mescalin Mix, some Simpson Lettuce, Radicchio, Arugula and Swiss Chard. Then I figured why not try some other stuff. If it doesn't work, I'm only out some seeds. So I also planted some carrots, beets and bok choy. It might be too late for them but if good weather lasts until October like it did last year, they should be okay.

The goal is to have the fall vegetable garden become the winter vegetable garden. Ever since reading, Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long I've wanted to try to grow something through the winter.

First I'll try using some of this Garden Fabric to build some mini hoop houses over my raised beds. Most salad greens can survive cold weather as long as they are protected from the wind. In the worst case scenario, I think I should be able to have a fresh salad for Thanksgiving dinner.

Then if I have some success with the hoop houses, maybe I'll build some cold frames. We'll see how it goes.

But thanks to Tropical Storm Hanna, my Fall Vegetable Garden seeds have been watered nicely and should germinate in another week or so. Thanks Hanna.

Here's some shots of my strawberry plants trying to take over an entire 4'x4' raised bed. I was hoping that they would do exactly that so I very happy to see the plants sending out tons of runners. I guess they liked the compost rich soil that I planted them in.

You can never have enough strawberries.

Holy cow, I have figs!

I'm shocked because I only bought the fig tree this season. I guess I'm used to fruit bushes and trees not doing anything for years. My blackberries took three years to produce fruit and my climbing hydrangea is on like it's 5th year without any signs of flowers. The can learn something from this fig tree.

Image via Wikipedia Compost never ceases to amaze me. It looks like scientists have discovered that a bug that's commonly found in compost can be used to help the biofuel making process become more efficient.

Normally corn or sugar cane is broken down by yeast, into small forms of sugar that can be fermented when making traditional ethanol. But with the help of this compost bug, they believe that they'll be able to use grass, forest waste and other non-food items and do it more efficiently that ever before.

Since I'm a blogger with zero journalism experience, I'd like to use this part of this post to speculate and dream of how this news will effect things. No reason to just report the facts, when I can voice my opinions too.

Lets jump ahead 10 years for a moment and imagine what this could mean to automobiles of the future. Do you remember the Mr. Fusion that Doc Brown mounted on his Delorean at the end of Back to the Future? if I remember correctly, he went through the garbage and found a banana peel and some beer and dumped them into the device. Then the Delorean was all fueled up and ready to take Marty back to the future.

Well instead of Mr. Fusion, we could be fueling our cars with a Mr. Compost. Fusion sounds a little too, radioactive to have in your car but compost would be a lot safer. Ideally you would just throw some food waste into the tank, and then the onboard biofuel making stuff happens and you've got your ethanol. Ta-da!

Well it might take longer than 10 years for this to happen so someone should get working on this on right away. And if any of my biofuel industry readers need a spokesman, feel free to give me a call.

Composting in the future is going to be cool.

Have any of you bloggers out there ever sat down and really gone through your traffic logs? I'm not talking about your main traffic sources, I'm more interested in the stuff way at the bottom of the stats. I've found some interesting search phrases in my logs that make me wonder what kind of loony people are using Google.

Seriously, I don't know what's weirder, that Google ranks me high for "Pictures of Daffy Duck in a Pot" or that someone was searching for it.

And recently I posted an article about a guy getting caught with a large amount of marijuana, who then claimed that he wasn't selling it. He said he was using it for his compost.

Combine that with all of my aero garden posts and of course now Google sends me tons of people looking to grow "Aero Garden Marijuana".

And apparently the Marijuana growers out there are trying to do it organically because they're also searching for "egg shells and marijuana growing" and also "marijuana and fish water". Good for them. Who needs nasty chemicals in their drugs anyway?

And with Halloween coming up, those Trick or Treaters are getting a jump on the season with searches like, "i want to buy truckload of eggs" and "pumpkin ready".

Please feel free to share the best search terms you've come across in the comment section below. I think these things are really entertaining.

"Compost is the silver bullet that may allow Denver and the Democratic National Convention Committee to slash DNC trash to just 15 percent of the waste stream, their stated goal."

Source: Rocky Mountain News

DNC Composting Factoids:
- A1 Organics collected the DNC waste to be turned into compost
- They used special cups from cornstarch that could be composted
- Cardboard and sandwich boxes were composted
- A1 uses a special predatory wasp to control flies in their compost piles

Only 15% of the DNC waste stream wound up in landfills. The rest was composted or recycled.

Lately I've been moaning and groaning about how my summer garden has done so poorly. Well I may have to retract all that moaning and groaning because it looks like I may actually get some tomatoes after all.

In the spring, I started my usual blend of hybrid and heirloom tomatoes from seed with high hopes.

Then tragedy stuck! Well not really but that does sound more exciting than saying, I got too busy and made a conscious effort to cut way back on my vegetable garden. Unfortunately the timing was really bad because at the point in the season I should have been hardening off my tomato seedlings and getting them into the ground. The tomato seedlings sat there, overgrown, in their seed trays.

Very late in the season, I ran out to the nursery and picked up three tomato plants and stuck them in the ground. Looks like that desperation move has paid off because I've got some decent sized green tomatoes in my garden now.

And with the weather expected to be in the 90ies this week in New Jersey, I think everything will be okay. I'll have a fraction of the tomatoes that I usually have but at least I'll get something.