Getting Rid Of The Christmas Tree

With the start of the new year, it is time to get rid of the Christmas tree.

Many towns, mine included, have curb side pick up and then chop the trees into mulch which is then given out to local residents for free.

Some wildlife management departments will collect trees and sink them in local lakes to make habitats for fresh water fish.

This year I am going to chop up all the small branches and throw them in the compost pile. They'll break down a little bit slower than the rest of the pile and be slightly acidic, but both of these things can be easily corrected with some garden lime.

Last spring, I started a stick pile by the back fence. It used to be that when branches fell off trees, I would bag them for the yard waste pick up. Now I cut everything into 2 foot sections and stack it in a pile. At the moment, it is serving no purpose other than a hiding place for chipmunks (better there than in the house foundation), but it is better than the landfill. I'll cut the trunk into similar size pieces and add that to the pile as well.

Update On The Compost Heap

I’ve read in a few places that landfills are approximately 1/3 yard waste. In previous years, I would mow the lawn place the clippings in big, paper bags sold for this purpose and set them out by the curb for collection at the rate of 2 or 3 a week. This year, however, I’ve been dumping the clippings into a pile the vegetable garden and mixing them with leftover straw mulch and dirt. I mix the pile twice a week with a shovel although mixing is not quite accurate as I simply shovel the pile to a new location and “restack” the pile. I’m also supposed to keep the pile moist, but with the almost constant rain for the last three weeks that has not been an issue. The heat coming out of the stack is tremendous and the grass clippings are rotting away at a very rapid pace usually being mostly gone by the next mowing. The pile is also densely packed with very large worms.

The key to making compost that does not smell is making sure that sufficient air is allowed into the pile and the straw mulch and the frequent turning both provide this. Here are a good link on composting:

http://www.howtocompost.org/

Getting Ready For Spring; The First Tilling

Saturday was warm enough and the dirt was soft enough to give the garden the first tilling. The first tilling mixes in the straw, leaves and household scraps that were deposited during the fall and winter and will give it about two months to rot away before the second tilling.

I have a Mantis tiller and I hate it. It is as hard as can be to start and is very unreliable. The only reason I tolerate it is because it was given to me for free by someone else who could not stand it. It is not only me who has this issue as the web is full of postings by others with similar problems. One of these days Sears will have a good sale and I'll replace it with a Craftsman.

“For The Ecology …”

Back in the mid 1970's, my grandmother used to put coffee grinds, eggshells, and burnt pipe tobacco she had collected around the base of the plants in the yard and say it was "for the ecology". This is now something that I've started doing as well.

One of the key tenants of organic farming is that healthy soil leads to healthy plants without the need for chemical fertilizers and one of the simplest ways to get healthy soil is by the addition of organic matter to the soil. I've seen various numbers floating around the internet that 25 - 30% of what ends up in landfills is either yard waste or table waste which means most us are already throwing out what we need to make our gardens healthy and we had for free in the first place.

While many people maintain a separate compost heap, here are a couple of things I've simply been adding to the garden during the down season to "compost in place" which both enriches the soil and decreases the amount of what we are throwing in the garbage.

We've started keeping a bowl next to the sink and putting in all the clean vegetable scraps leftover from the preparation of the meal, used coffee grinds and washed egg shells. Every few days this simply gets dumped into the garden and rots away. Normally you should avoid meat, grease or anything else that will attract animals, but I've recently read about All Food Recycling Compost Kit with Bokashi which ferments the waste and apparently is great for the garden without some of the efforts of composting. Check out this link on youtube.com for details DIY bokashi and the rest of the Podchef videos there while you are at it.

The hardest part about raking the leaves in the fall was bagging them up. Now I simply rake them into a pile, load them into the wheelbarrow, dump them in the garden and bury them. They are gone by the spring. Grass clippings are eaten up just as quickly.

At the end of the season, I used to pull out all the dying plants in the garden and bag them up with the fall leaves. Now these simply get pulled out by the roots and tossed on the pile. Some people will argue that this propagates whatever plant diseases you might have had the season before, so be sure to include only healthy plants.

A bale of straw from the garden center is only about $8.00, but many people will buy these as a Halloween decoration and simply throw it out after Thanksgiving and you can pick them up for free. Spread this on top of the garden and allow it to rot away under the snow. I'm also planning on using straw as a natural mulch during the summer to keep the weeds down which also has the secondary benefit of supplementing the soil.

A layer of straw mixed with snow covers the garden: