California 2 Puerto Rico » Food

Composting Our Green Waste

Stefan — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:53:36 +0000

So, we’re not hippies, but we like to do things that are going to help our family sustain our lifestyle. My old polyester resin surfboards will out last Sydneys kids lives, I use red ant killer because those little bastards do no good at all and deserve to die a slow horrible death BUT we grow produce in our garden, we recylce and we compost religiously. Todays story from Rincon is about our compost.

Composting our green waste in the kitchen removes at least half of all or the waste from the trash can (that I bring to the top of the driveway. If all the kitchen waste is composted properly, it will provide a thriving environment for our garden, plants and trees. Compost inoculates soil with beneficial microbes (bacteria, fungi, etc.) and the habitat that the microbes need to live. These microbes are able to extract nutrients from the mineral part of the soil and eventually pass the nutrients on to our plants.

Kitchen Compost Container

Composting – Step 1

The first step to our family and visiting friends composting is making it easy for everyone. We have a small tupperwear container in the kitchen next to the sink that we dump all of our ‘green’ waste in to. We put everything in our compost except meats and dairies. A typical full compost bin upstairs will have egg shells, fruit peels, vegetable peels, discarded lettuce, coffee grounds (w/filter) and paper towels.

Compost Tumbler

Composting – Step 2

The indicator for moving to step 2, is that the tupperwear container next to the sink is full (sarcasm). Usually, once a day, we bring the container downstairs and dump it into our compost tumbler. The compost tumbler we have is perfect for a small family with a small yard. It is a round bin on a stand that takes our family (with guests) about 2 months to fill up. We turn it 1-3 times a day to airate it and I check it regularly for ant infestations. When you open the door to the composter, the interior of the tumbler is hot from the decomposition going on inside it all day long. The balance between vegetable matter and dry grass/leaves is important. The correct balance will leave you with a compost that does not smell at all.

Composting – Step 3

Backyard Lasagna Compost - Making Black Gold

Once the compost tumbler is full, we roll it on down the hill to our compost area in the yard. We built a 4ft x 4ft round fence away from the house that is effectionally known as our lasagna compster. We put a layer of leaves, palm frons and grass clippings and then we dump our 3/4 decomposed compost matter into the ‘lasagna’. We then add another layer of leaves, palm frons and grass clippings and let the sun, rain and elements do their job. The four vital ingrediants for compost are air, nitrogen, carbon and water. The two major foods a compost pile needs are browns and greens.

Now, after a few weeks of lasagna composting, we get what is referred to in the garden world as BLACK GOLD. Black gold is the finished product of composting. It is very dark, almost black, earthy and smells like soil (not rotting veggies). You should not be able to recognize any of the original ingredients. If you want to learn more about composting, check out this Wiki on composting.

Summer and I compost because it is satisfying and rewarding. The little bit of extra work has worked its way seemlessly into our routine and we reap the benefits everytime we enjoy vegetables from our garden.

Eating Food We Grew

Stefan — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:48:07 +0000

Yeah, that’s right. We grow our own food!

We have two main food sources from the property right now, the garden and our fruit trees. Our garden is doing really well and is starting to produce tomatoes, snow peas, cucumbers and spicy lettuce. We have some other stuff coming in too like jalapeno and habanero peppers.

Spicy Lettuce and Summer

Most of our grafted fruit trees are not really producing yet with the exception of the first Starfruit (Carambola) tree we planted. They are all too small and although some of them have flowered and started to grow fruit, nature took over and made all the fruit fall off so the tree could grow up big and strong.

The exception to our ‘non-producing’ fruit trees are our banana trees. Wow, they really exploded with growth this year! That is probably pretty apparent with all the ‘banana blog posts‘ we’ve done, but they are fast growers once they get established and 70% of our trees have produced bananas this year. Check out our most recent harvest!

Home Grown Bananas

Bienvenido a Mi Finca!

Summer — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:25:37 +0000

Right before we left for our two month excursion to California & New Jersey, I was walking around our property checking out the plants. One of the first things that we planted were a few little banana trees and they have gotten quite large. Since they havn’t produced any fruit, I was wondering if perhaps we planted non-fruit bearing banana trees and said out loud, “Hey, why havn’t we gotten any bananas out of you guy!?” (Yes, I talk to our plants…) I looked up and guess what I saw: Bananas!

Does any one know the best time to pick bananas? While they are still green or when they start to turn yellow?

In addition to bananas, we could not believe how much the papaya plants had grown in the two months we were off the island. I would say they are ten times the size from when we left and there are 20+ papayas hanging off of that tree!

In the madness of preparing for our first cross country trip with the baby we forgot to harvest and eat our first pineapple and it went bad by the time we got back…Bummer! But we do have 6 more pineapple plants in the ground so hopefully we will get another soon.

It’s so cool to finally be able to eat the fruits of our labor (literally)! So far we have produced the following food from our land: mangos, papayas, pineapples, avocados, kumquats, limon dulce, noni, tomatoes, lettuce, basil, rosemary, string beans, calabaza, snap peas, jalapenos, edamame, chives, bell peppers, peanut butter fruit, starfruit and cilantro. It’s like Farmville, but for real! Right Robin?