The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

As Dan and I were trying to come up with ideas for this blog he said, “we can always post about compost.”  Surprisingly enough compost is a tricky thing and one that is continual work on our small urban farm.  All the books about gardening make it sound so simply - pile your organic matter and wait until next year and you’ll have great compost for your garden.  Despite this relatively easy concept we’ve had to learn some things the hard way.  For example weeds can’t go in compost or else you’ll just spread your weed problem in your garden beds.  Also the bins need to be in direct sunlight at some point in the day (at least in Seattle) in order to break down stuff in a reasonable amount of time.  For some reason it also took us awhile to realize we need two compost bins/piles so one can rest while  you add new matter to the other. When we bought our bins from the city of Oakland them came with an instructional video (called Do The Rot Thing - seriously) which gave us some good basics, but we had to learn the hard way thateucalyptus leaves and palm fronds are too woody to break down.  The hard part has been how to get our compost to break down and be ready in a year.  I am sure some of our failed compost piles would have worked eventually, but its not much good if it takes more than a year. The addition of the chickens has helps since they sort of pre-process our food scraps.  Now we’re in the season of brown matter (i.e. fallen leaves) which will help balance out our very wet matter we have in there now (thanks to our apple pressing remains from a week ago). Plus we have a completed pile resting (or cooking) for the winter which looks like its going to be ready to add come early spring.  Hopefully we’ve gotten a good enough system down by now.  There is always more to learn, but yesterday Dan stirred the compost and got a beautiful sight - steam rising, which I think means we’re on the right track.

Our kitchen scrap bucket, which goes to the compost pile via the chickens.

This year’s most useful crop was definitely our green onions. As soon as they came up, they needed lots of thinning, and we could use them instantly like chives. All summer long, they’ve been going into just about everything (which is great, because usually they’re on my shopping list every time we go grocery shopping.) Since we’re getting the gardens ready for winter, and I don’t think they’ll do well once frost hits, I had to figure out what to do with the rest of them. I decided to pull them all out and originally considered dehydrating them. I vetoed that and am instead going to freeze them in baggies, in small quantities for adding to things we’re cooking. Hopefully when they’re cooked, it won’t be terribly obvious that they’ve been frozen; we’ll see.

My friend Zach was over and saw the pile of green tomatoes that we had pulled off our plants before getting the garden beds ready for the winter (more on that soon…). He said that his grandpa used to wrap green tomatoes in newspaper and store them in a box in the closet until they ripened. And he’s from Indiana so I think he knows. I’ll give an update in a month or so and let you know if this works.

I convinced my parents to bring their 350 pounds of apples and their cider press up to our house on the pretense that it was my birthday and I needed to be celebrated. We chipped in another 150 pounds of apples scavenged from trees around the neighborhood, and invited a bunch of people to come over.

It took about 4 hours to get through 500 pounds of apples, giving us about 20 gallons of cider. That’s enough for me and dad to do a 5-gallon batch of hard cider each, plus everyone took some home, and Alicia insisted that we freeze at least a little for mulled cider over the winter.