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Welcome All! I'm a dreamer, I hope you are too! A Posse ad Esse, or From possibility to reality, is a general state of mind. I hope you'll share your possibilities with me as I will with you. Namaste~

March 21, 2008

outsourced compost

Although I do actively produce compost at home, and it is of very good quality, I simply can't make enough of it to bring my very clay rich, soil to the level and quality that I want it to be at. Because of this I have, over the last couple of years, taken to buying compost from our local waste management facility. i.e. "The Dump". I did this last weekend, and wanted to share it with

you sooner but with being sick most of the week, I just hadn't gotten around to it. You can see I was kinda running against the weather clock here. Luckily I got up at a decent hour and got an early start, but even at that, the weather was coming down the mountains so I had to get going.
Now when I said I got the compost from the dump, some of you probably cringed, however, the facility and the quality of the compost that I've received from here is, I have to say, very high. Above you can see the pile of the sort of green waste that is collected. Gardeners, lawn care, tree trimmers and such dump their "waste" here under constant supervision. Anything inappropriate is removed and only compostables are allowed to be processed.
Throughout the summer and winter, long (100+ yard) piles of compost 5 feet high are lain out and mechanically turned and watered with agricultural sprinklers to maintain optimum moisture and temperature conditions. This facility also produces three different grades of mulch, from essentially chipped and shredded wood. I've used this before, also with good results. But today, compost was the order of the day. If you click on the picture for a larger image of it, you'll see that I am only paying $20.00 per yard, a VERY good price, (The mulch is only $5.00 per yard.) and a yard is a healthy amount of compost. They are figuring about 1600lbs with it as wet as it is right now. You can see the dump bucket below, it basically fills the bed of my truck.
After getting it home and waiting till the next morning, (That's weather in Utah, snowing one day, and blue skies and clear the next) my backyard neighbor let me back up into his yard to dump the compost straight out of the back and into my back garden bed (Below). I was pulling some weeds at the time, but with the help of my strapping young boys and the lure of a couple of dollars, I got the compost unloaded and the garden prepped. At least part of it.
Below is the area I've chosen to plant my peas in this year. I'm trying a new technique this year; it's trellising, but with a twist. Rather than just go straight up and have my peas in a row, I decided to try something new to optimize the planting area. You may be able to see that the steel trellising is not vertical, but A-framed.
The theory is that when the peas get to a point where they are reaching the top of an A-frame, I can either add another A-frame on top between two frames (Like a pyramid), or simply run some twine between the frames and let the peas run on them. It's a new theory, so we'll see how it works. I'll detail my thoughts on this more in a later post.

Well, that's how I outsource my compost. Do any of you have similar things available to you?


2 comments:

Robbyn said...

Sounds great! Don't know if we have that available, but sure am going to ask! Hope all in your household are feeling better :)

P~ said...

Robbyn,
You really should, I think a lot of communities are starting to do this sort of thing. Hope you get lucky.
P~