The joys of discovering something for free

Last autumn, I found, hauled and shredded leaves from my block to make four large compost bins. I mixed the leaves with coffee grounds and let them sit over winter, mixing several times this spring, and had beautiful compost mulch for nearly all my gardens.

Nearly...

I was so pleased with the resulting compost that I wished I had hauled more leaves home last autumn, as dry leaves that don't contain grasses and weeds are hard to find in the spring and summer.

A treasure of shredded leaves waiting for me to haul away.

The other day while eradicating Canadian thistle in my community garden, I wondered over to our compost pile where I was sure to find some. Indeed, I found the mother of all thistle colonies. While there, I also discovered a beautiful pile of shredded leaves. It must be where the landscapers for the surrounding area dumped them.

I immediately recognized the solution to my lack of leaves problem. Today, while running errands around Madison's east side, I backed my car up to the pile and dug in. The leaves on top were crispy and not very decomposed, but just a few inches into the pile and they were wet, decaying and smelled wonderful. I filled two collapsible containers and the trunk (which I had lined with a tarp).

Passengers, you can't see in the photo, but they are belted in!

I stopped at the two Starbucks that are on my way home from work and one of them paid off with four bags of coffee grounds. Not enough for all the leaves I had collected, but a good start.

Back at home, I filled a compost bin, put down a layer of coffee grounds, then a load and a layer of too fresh horse manure, then a load and coffee grounds. I'll add water (or let it rain, whichever comes first) mix it up a few times and it will be a steaming pile in a few days; and should be beautiful compost to put my beds to sleep with this autumn.

My plan is to repeat leaf and coffee ground collection until all four of my bins are full. This should be enough for autumn mulching. After I empty them this autumn, I'll fill them again with leaves from the block. My ultimate goal is that I don't need to buy hay for mulch any more. I almost made it this year, but ended up buying two bales at the last minute when I ran out of my own compost.

How to get free mulch and help your local waterways at the same time

One of the permaculture principles that I continue to work toward more fully integrating into my garden is to reduce importing energy and materials from outside our property. For the last couple of springs, I have purchased hay bales to use as mulch in the garden. It's locally sourced, and I organize my neighbors to have a large truckload delivered to our block, so it's a fairly efficient and cost-effective way of getting mulch for lots of people.

Still, I've been thinking of how I can use what I have or can get my hands on locally that will serve the same purpose. This weekend I found a great source of mulching material that is nearby and easy to gather. You of course know of the "manna from the sky" that happens in the autumn, as the leaves fall to the ground. However, our backyard doesn't have a lot of trees, and our neighbors leaves mostly fall into their yards.

But as I looked around my street, I noticed that some of my neighbors were piling their leaves on the curb to be collected by the city. I also saw a lot of leaves in the gutters, just waiting for a rain to wash them in the storm sewers and out into our lakes. Here in Madison, we have a "Don't leaf our lakes" campaign to encourage people not to put leaves in the gutters because they add significant source of pollution to our lakes.

So this afternoon in about an hour, I accomplished to wonderful things; I easily collected a lot of leaves that had gathered in the gutters, and for my small part, remove these from the potential of washing into the lakes.

I found it very easy to rake leaves into piles right there in the gutters. Way easier than raking the lawn! Some of the leaves were a little wet, and I had to scrape them off the pavement, but it was a relatively easy task. Then I brought out my trusty tarp, and loaded it up from the piles I made.

I then hauled my leaves into the backyard. The tarp had grommet holes and I put a long nylon rope through several of them on one side. I was able to loop the rope around both my shoulders and just haul them like they were a big, heavy cape behind me.

I dumped them in a corner of our back yard, where I will run over them over with our electric lawnmower, put them into compost bins, add coffee grounds, mix and wait for the magic to happen before using this compost next spring for mulch around all my veggie plants.

Compost bin experiment solves a small problem

Chicken word of the day: Cock-and-bull: a fantastic story that is unbelievable.

Months ago, my friend Angie gave me kraft paper bags of leaves and sticks she collected from her yard this spring. Jay and I also drove by a house in our neighborhood that had leaves in these paper bags and we threw them in the back of my car.

I finally got around to emptying and moving my compost pile last week. I tore open the collection of bagged leaves, and chopped them up with the lawnmower. One of the big advantages of chopping up leaves is they compost much faster than had I left them whole. This pile could be done by the end of autumn. However, the small leaf pieces also fall through the large openings in the sides of the compost bin.

Compost is made up of "green" materials which supply nitrogen, and "brown" materials which provide carbon. Paper is a brown material. So I'm looking at these paper bags and think to myself, "Well, this is brown, why not put it in the compost pile?" Then I got a better idea.

I lined the compost bins with the kraft paper bags. My thought is they will keep the small leaf bits in, and may help keep the pile from drying out. On the other hand, I'm hoping the paper will allow the pile to breathe.

The leaf bits didn't fall out of the bin. Shown here is a layer of coffee grounds that I layered between thick layers of leaf matter. In a couple of weeks I'll turn the pile. I also need to add a few scoops of dirt to inoculate the pile with some good bacteria.

Free compost until it's gone, then it's gone forever

This is a real kick in the pants, but take advantage as you're able. We've used this for years, and used a lot of it in our orchard sheet mulching project.

Loss of Leaves and Compost Material from City of Madison, Other Municipal Partners Means No Material Available for Future Years

Dane County will be giving away compost by the car and truck load for free over the next several weeks, after recently being notified that municipal partners like the City of Madison won’t be bringing compost material to county sites any longer.

The county compost sites in Verona and Waunakee will stay open until around July 1st to help backyard gardeners and growers get through another growing season. After that, those two sites will be permanently closing.

Madison has signed an agreement with a company in DeForest to process all of the leaves and yard waste picked up by the city. Material from Madison represented nearly 80% of the content that had been brought to the county’s compost sites and converted into compost and mulch.

After the compost sites close this summer, residents will still be able to drop off compost at a compost operation at the county’s Rodefeld Landfill (7102 US Highway 12 near Cottage Grove), but compost will no longer be sold. The landfill is also home to the county’s Clean Sweep program.

Beginning Friday, May 23rd, the county will offer one load of free compost for residential use per person, per day, at the Verona and Waunakee compost sites through June to exhaust its current stockpile.

The Verona and Waunakee compost sites will be open from 7am to 3pm Monday through Friday, and 7am to 11am on Saturday. The sites are closed on Sundays.

“While the situation is not ideal, we hope residents will take advantage of our compost giveaway to start this growing season,” County Executive Joe Parisi said.

For more information on the compost site closure and the free compost offer, residents are encouraged to call John Welch at 267-8815.

Scrambling for coffee grounds

I don't drink coffee, but by the smell of the inside of my car, you'd think I had a more than a little coffee problem. Well, you're right, but not the problem you're thinking.

Sometimes I wonder if the coffee odor inside my car is so strong it's permeating the fabric and other materials and long after this coffee jag is over, my car and I will both continue to smell like a rude mix of dark roasted vanilla hazelnut espresso.

Here's the story in a nutshell:

• I'm in a race against the first significant snowfall to collect coffee grounds from cafes across Madison's east side to turn wood chips into organic matter by next spring.

Why coffee? What's the rush?

Coffee grounds are an excellent source of nitrogen. Great compost organic is created by mixing the proper amounts of carbon (in my case, wood chips) and nitrogen (all those coffee grounds).

There are many ratios depending on what goes into the compost mixture, but typically, it's a Carbon:Nitrogen ratio of 20:1. Too much carbon and it stays a dry heap. Too much nitrogen and it gets too hot and kills all the good organism OR it turns into a sloppy, smelly mess. Get the ratio right and it warms up, decomposes and results in a lovely compost for the garden.

Killing grass with wood chips

In our back yard and on the terrace between the sidewalk and street, Jay and I put down a heavy layer of wood chips to kill the grass in preparation for garden beds next year. The wood chips alone will kill the grass but won't be a great medium for planting next year. 

Enter the coffee grounds. I pour them on the wood chips, rake them in and let the two work it out.

So, before the snow covers up the wood chips, I want to cover and rake in a lot of grounds so the wood chips have time to decompose over winter and into next spring.

I'm currently collecting from seven different places, and have a morning and an afternoon route to collect grounds, swap out 5-gallon buckets and take them home to spread out. I can't reveal my route or my sources, but I'll share them with you AFTER my coffee mission is complete :)

Getting excited about garbage

I haven't been this excited about garbage in years. 

My neighborhood is participating in the East Madison organics collection pilot program, and this spring and summer I have noticed with envy my neighbors putting food scraps and yard waste into black bins that the roll out to the curb on trash day. Our house didn't come with a bin, and I wanted one. I learned that it's a pilot, and I requested a bin.

So you can't imagine my excitement when I got the following email from George Dreckmann, the recycling coordinator, "We will get you signed up. This brings our Eastside pilot up to 302 households which is over our limit so we cannot add any more right now."

In addition to the 35-gallon bin, we also got a 2-gallon kitchen collector with a close-fitting lid and a carry handle. We also got some compostable bags that allow kitchen scraps to ventilate and evaporate moisture while keeping smells and other nasty things in the bag. What I'm most excited about, to be perfectly honest, is the ability to include small amounts of yard waste. Seriously, that apple tree doesn't stop dropping fruit!

From left to right, green bin for recycling, brown for garbage, and the new little black bin for compostable materials.

Our bin arrived today, and I went  to the website to see what other materials are being collected. They also collect house plants, weeds, and other compostable material such as paper towels, napkins and plates, pizza boxes, and any paper products too contaminated to be recycled. They also take pet waste of any kind including cat litter! (Although that's not a problem, because we use flushable cat litter.)

A 2-gallon kitchen collector with a close-fitting lid and a carry handle, and compostable bag.

Many of these items cannot safely be composted in a backyard compost bin, but they will compost nicely in the large scale compost system where temperatures are high enough to kill harmful pathogens.

So while on the farm we fed food scraps to animals, and "composted" everything else, I'm pleased that we will be more deliberate in our urban setting.

Sheet mulching - not 900-count, 900 square feet

Sheet mulching, otherwise known as lasagna gardening, is an organic practice of putting down layers of alternating carbon-rich in nitrogen-rich materials to accomplish a number of goals.

The first is to kill the grass. I know, lots of people worked their entire lives to get the perfect lawn, but the last thing I want to do with my life is mow it -- I'd rather kill the grass and plant something productive in that open space.

The second thing sheet mulching does is brings in a lot of organic matter to enrich the soil. Organic matter can be anything, leaves, manure, hay or straw, wood chips, compost, even on garden debris from last year. The trick to a successful sheet mulch is getting the carbon and nitrogen ratios right so you don't have an imbalance. Too much carbon and there isn't any organic activity; too much nitrogen and it gets smelly.

There are books describing the perfect sheet mulch project, so I'm not going to go into it here. (I'm reading Gaia's Garden right now, great book!) The sheet mulch layers we're going to use to smother the grass and create lovely soil for our orchard will look like the following. From the surface down:

• Woodchip paths or a 2" layer of compost seeded with a low-growing white clover
• 6 to 8 inches of marsh hay (doesn't contain weed seeds)
• 1 inch compost
• solid layer of cardboard
• 1 inch compost
• coffee grounds
• dead grass (leftover from the lawn)
• original soil

Many people who sheet mulch their yards spend a lot of time collecting compost, old hay, leaves, cardboard, wood chips etc. But since we didn't have much time before we wanted to plant our orchard, we're purchasing most of the woodchips, compost and hay; and we scrounged cardboard from the neighborhood and collected coffee grounds from local cafés.

I will take lots of pictures during the sheet mulch process and show you how it turned out in a future post.

Two juniper trees were removed this week. Props to Garret of Gere Tree Care for the short-notice job.

Garret left a load of wood chips (some from the branches of our tree, some from earlier jobs). The tarp is less to keep them dry and more to say "Not free for the taking."

Collecting coffee grounds - one man's garbage....

In order to properly balance the sheet mulch in our orchard, I wanted to find a free source of nitrogen.

A little research and I discovered that coffee grounds contain nitrogen, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium and trace amounts of minerals. One caution is coffee grounds are acidic and can increase the acidity of the soil. I'm not terribly concerned about this here in Madison, because our soil is quite alkaline, the opposite of acidic.

So a few weeks ago I gathered up all the 5 gallon buckets I could find, and started dropping buckets off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon.

The first café I visited, EVP Coffee on Madison's E. Washington Blvd. After a few days in the staff recognized me and just waved me towards the closet where I helped myself to my old bucket and replace it with a new one. At first I thought I was probably being a pain to the barristas, and then I realized I had to get in line! 

EVP on East Washington Blvd., Madison, Wis. where the staff were happy, even eager, to give me their coffee grounds.

The closet where the barristas store grounds for gardeners.

The same was true for Moka also on E. Washington Blvd. There, mine was one of two buckets receiving coffee grounds. I tried thinking of other high-volume cafés and realized that there are three coffee shops in my workplace (I work in a complex with three buildings and nearly 3,000 people!) Two of them are not far from my desk, so I've been bringing buckets to them as well.

No one even blinked an eye when I approached them to collect grounds, nor appeared to be bothered on my many rounds to swap out buckets. It wasn't until tonight however, that I realized how good the situation actually was.

I stopped in at EVP Coffee in the late afternoon, and it was pretty quiet so I got to chatting with the barrista. After swapping out my bucket, he told me that I was doing him a great service. Several years ago, before Madison implemented mechanized garbage pickup, the coffee shop's garbage bins got so heavy, garbage men refused to move them. Even though we now have mechanized garbage pickup, the employees are still happy not to throw the grounds away.

So this really is win win win. The coffee shop reduces its waste stream and I get a valuable source of nitrogen. And as of a few years ago, garbage men didn't get hurt moving heavy bins full of wet coffee grounds.

Garbage bags of coffee grounds sitting in my driveway, waiting for sheet mulching day, April 27, 8 a.m. - noon.