Hollywood actress Julia Roberts celebrated earth day in a unique way- by showing off her compost skills.The ’Pretty Woman’s star appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s green-themed show and showed how to mulch your own compost heap."I’m usually dressed like this when I do it," Contact music quoted her as saying.Sandra Bullock, who was involved in a car crash in Massachusetts on Apr 18, also taped a segment for the show before she hit the headlines at the weekend. Roberts has been honoured as the Best-Dressed Oscar winner in a new online poll.The Hollywood icon’s look at the 2000 Academy Awards, where she was named Best Actress for her portrayal of Erin Brockovich, has stepped ahead of Halle Berry in Parade.com’s Oscar Survey Spectacular.Del.Icio.Us Tags: Julia Roberts’ Earth Day with co
My compost pile loves me. I know this because it tells me so.
Since as much as 25% of landfill space is composed of organic waste, we're regular composters into a pile in our backyard. Raw vegetable and fruit scraps, coffee grounds and egg shells go into a container just outside the kitchen door and then into a compost pile mixed with grass clippings and mulched leaves. Since it's been a
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us. ~Henrik Tikkanen
As part of our ongoing environmental strategy, we are supporting National Compost Awareness Week. We have a Swedish made hot composter for disposing of our food and biodegradable consumables waste, which seems be working well. However we have now decided to expand upon this idea by installing a hot composter, along with its supporting ancilliaries, into one of our prime mover (heavy transport vehicles). This will be ideal for events that last more than one day, meaning food and other degradable waste can be disposed of immediately, instead of either being stored for transport back to our base, or disposed of into landfill.
More details can be found at National Compost Awareness Week.
We hav
Our friend Randall Farrar said that gardening compost is food for your soil. Using many different ingredients in your compost will supply and replenish all the important nutrients that your soil needs for healthy crop growth and increase insect pest resistance.To get the free organic gardening compost ebook, just click here. Thanks to him.
Composting has become a popular means of recycling organic materials so that they can be used in beneficial ways instead of adding them to a landfill. In addition to being a great way to participate in recycling efforts, composting is also a great way to generate rich organic materials that can be added to soil [...]
In questo periodo di emergenza rifiuti ecco una proposta interessante da realizzare in casa per smaltire autonomamente una parte di questi. Si tratta del compostaggio domestico.In natura, come sappiamo, tutte le sostanze organiche di scarto (foglie, rami, animali morti ecc.) non vanno perse ma vengono trasformate, grazie ad organismi viventi, diventando materiale fertile per il terreno. Questo processo, detto compostaggio, può essere controllato e accelerato dall'uomo ottenendo diversi vantaggi. Infatti, creando il compost si diminuisce la quantità di rifiuti da smaltire e quindi di sostanze inquinanti (come il percolato) e si garantisce la fertilità del suolo in modo naturale, senza ricorrere a concimi chimici.Naturalmente non si può utilizzare qualsiasi tipo di rifiuto per fare il co
If you have been gardening for very long, and especially if you are an organic gardener, you know one of the best mulches or soil amendments that you can add to your garden is natural compost. One particularly good kind of compost is created in worm bin where red worms are added to a [...]
One of the major costs when delving into the fun filled hobby or profession of organic gardening is the cost of maintaining the proper levels of nutrients in your soil each year that you grow your food. Healthy organic vegetables are a mainstay with many people and those obsessed with good health will often [...]
Everyone is talking about environmentally friendly methods of fighting weeds. It would seem as in many other fields, prevention is the best medicine. Established stands of turf that are thin or reedy are ripe for infestation by windblown weed seed and spore. Improved turf density and soil quality are the lawn’s best defense against encroachers.So as I hear it step one is to aerate. Well, we can do that. We have a number of options for aeration from the manual aerator called the Coring Type Hand Aerator for very small areas to the motorized Lesco Split Drive Drum Type Aerator.The next step is to over seed or top dress; mixing light soil, seed and fertilizer and spreading it over the lawn. Again we have a number of options available for this procedure. We have the people powered, push unit
My garden maintenance area is finally well under way. After years of moving temporary compost bins around as each section of the garden was landscaped they have now taken up their final residence behind the kid's cubby house.
This is one of only two sections left that still need to landscaped. This area will eventually cater for our vegetables and aquaponics setup but will most likely be the last area completed. We're still researching the whole backyard aquaponics deal and are noticing many others are starting to take it up - so we can learn from their successes and mistakes.
This maintenance area will be kept out of view by the kid's cubby and I plan to use the roof from their play house as a water catchment zone for some rain barrels. These barrels will hopefully store enough water to keep the compost moist enough to breakdown quickly. And, to save space they will sit just above the compost heaps on a specially-made platform.
The other area left to be landscaped is this o
A home composting appliance that recycles food and paper waste into rich, organic compost fertilizer without any smell or mess. This computer-controlled machine is fully automatic and can be used right where waste is generated. NatureMill, which was developed by Russ Cohn, from San Francisco CA, is small enough to sit in the corner of a kitchen, utility room, garage or shed.
It's feeding time again for the garden. I had some older gardening books here and was reading up on fall activities for the garden. Without getting to far into numbers, there were a lot of suggestions for fertilizer with ratios. For example: 20-20-20. These numbers refer to the percentage by weight of the major nutrients that plants require. These nutrients are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium or N-P-K. The order is considered to be just that - nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. A 10-15-10 bag (if there is such a thing) would have 10 percent nitrogen, 15 percent phosphorus and 10 percent potassium by weight. The rest of the amount in the bag would be filler or other nutrients. The bag will list the other ingredients. Likely they are things like calcium, magnesium, and iron.It depends on your personality and your feeling about fertilizer. For flowers, you might feel that fertilizer will produce big healthy plants and you don't have to worry about eating them so whether they are org
By: James EllisonOrganic gardeners all know compost is fantastic stuff. But now, there's something even better and that's compost tea. If you start with a good compost you'll have a versatile elixir for all your garden needs. Compost tea helps prevent foliage diseases and at the same time increase the nutrients to the plant and shutdown the toxins hurting the plants. It will improve the taste/flavor of your vegetables. So why not give this tea a try either by buying it or brewing it yourself. You won't believe the results!Four ways that good bacteria work:Help compete for the nutrientsDine on the bad varmitsHelp produce antibiotics to use against the varmits.They shove the bad varmits out.Compost tea that is correctly brewed has a wealth of microorganisms that will benefit your plants' growth and health as well as the soil that they live in. Compost tea can be considered yogurt for the soil. The microorganisms living there are both good and bad. What the tea does is make sure the
'Mature' organic compost is a natural and simple choice for solving those problems. An application of 'mature' compost, along with periodic applications of compost tea, will improve the overall health & vigor of your landscape. It will also lower your overall maintenance & water requirements for the summer & thereafter. Compost is simply good for your family, lawn, & gardens.Why use compost?It's simply the most natural choice available. Mature compost is safe for you and your family. It contains nothing unnatural or poisonous. Your garden & lawn will be safe for you, your children and your pets to use during and immediately after application. Compost improves your lawn & gardens' drought tolerance and reduces watering requirements by improving the plant's root systems and the soils' ability to retain water. Mature compost can safely be applied around pools and applied directly into ponds, streams and rivers without risk to the environment. It also promot
Makes YOUR Place Into a Real Garden of Eden"What's the Ultimate Health Giving Secret of Plant Feeding?The One That Almost Every Professional Ag and Garden Advisor on The Planet Has About as Much Clue as.........A Lab Rat Has About Quantum Mechanics!"If you want to discover for the very first time how to feed your plants as Nature really intended. And do it without bins, tumblers, odor or TURNING ... then this is going to be the most exciting message you ever read. Here's why: As a child our family were almost self sufficient in fruit and vegetables and I was brought up growing and harvesting all kinds of stuff. I swore when I left home that I would never ever touch a spade or pick another bean for the rest of my life. I'm sure you've had similar feelings about
Once you've made all that beautiful compost, the next challenge is deciding what to do with it all.
You could dig some into an impoverished garden bed as soil improver, mulch your plants and even turn it back into potting mix or garden soil.
Yet, as the ultimate gardening resource compost isn't just limited to these options. In fact as a fertiliser it rates almost as high as worm castings. And depending on whose opinion you seek, it may even be better. So while most gardeners have come to appreciate 'worm wee' as a bona fide organic liquid fertiliser, there are still a few that need convincing that compost tea is just as good.
In fact, using your compost as a tea rather than applying it straight to your garden beds will actually make it far more efficient in boosting your plants growth. As a liquid, compost tea will cover nearly 3-4 times the area that normal compost alone could achieve and also prepare your plants to better source their own nutrients from the soil.
How do y
Air is one of the three essential requirements needed by the decomposer organisms in your compost pile.Because air penetrates only the first few inches of the pile, it needs help to reach the composting pile's center. Therefore if you suddenly get that nasty rotten egg smell around the compost, it means that anaerobic bacteria are moving in, and it's time to give your composting pile more air.In hot composting, plenty of air is essential to develop the high temperatures needed to kill harmful bacteria and speed the process of decomposition. Here are a few ways you can add air to your compost pile:1. Turning: The most effective method of introducing air is to turn the pile with a garden fork. Lift the material from the top and sides, toss it into the more active center of the new pile; then add the partially decomposed center to the outside. In other words, take the composting material from the outside and the top of your pile and exchange it with the composting material in the middle
Decomposer organisms work best with as varied a diet as you feed them. The ingredients are all around us - almost anything that once lived is a candidate for the compost, so try for lots of variety to get a good mix of textures and plant nutrients.In composting jargon, woody materials (such as autumn leaves, paper, peat moss, sawdust, cornstalks, hay and straw, etc)that are high in carbon are called "brown" ingredients.Materials (such as garden refuse, manure, tea and coffee grounds, feathers, hair, and food scraps) that are high in nitrogen are called "green" ingredients.Some materials can actually be both: for example, fresh grass clippings are "green"; however, dried grass is "brown".For successful results, you can use the simple rule that compost needs to be about half "brown" and half "green" by weight. Don't bother to weigh your ingredients, though -- an estimate is fine.Composting soon becomes a matter of instinct, like the cook who bakes without a recipe. If the pile doesn't
A track that seemingly never makes it's way far out of my bag today...From the mighty Compost Records 100th release comes a super slick breakbeat number from Fauna Flash, whom you may have heard of and Wei Chi, whom you may have not. But no matter. As a DJ, this is one of my "go to" tracks... as in go to that track because I'm getting all indecisive and I've got like 30 seconds to make up my damn mind before I trainwreck... because it just goes good mixed with anything. Kinda like vodka... mmmmmm, vodka.Fauna Flash vs. Wei Chi - Don't Know 2001If you like that, I highly recommend that you stop arsing about here and get you way over to Compost's site and check out their download section. About a dozen MP3's available, quality stuff from their latest releases... if you're a music whore like me, you don't wanna miss out on that...
I got this brilliant Idea about making your own compost after checking out Gaiam. They had some cool Composting Bins and I thought I would give it a try. You can basically take your Vegetable Scraps, Eggshells, Coffee grounds, and mix it up with some grass clipping and paper and make nutrient rich soil for [...]
The picture shows the difference between having AACT sprayed on and not.If you've never heard of it then it's time to start checking it out.Here's a great testimonial I found on a Yahoo forum:"I came in from applying ACT to a wheat crop just before dark. My wife was out mowing the lawns. When she finishes up she walks over to where I was rinsing out the sprayer and asks "Why does my lawn look so green and healthy? Response "ACT, of course."We haven't done anything different this year than any other. We have had roughly the same amount of rain as average. I have been applying ACT to the lawn about every 10 days or so since the first part of May.It seems to have
It’s all over the blogs, but if you missed the news, Redfins real estate porn property review blog Sweet Digs finally gets the hammer blow for “advertising other brokerages listings”.
It was always going to happen. Greg, Kevin and Inman have covered it well enough, so I’ll skip the rehash.
Anyway… here’s my thought on a new potential danger area for agents reviewing homes on their blogs…
Unlike print advertising which turns into landfill within a couple of weeks of printing, your search engine optimized blog post is FOREVER. Simple dating of the blog post may not be regarded as enough of disclaimer for errors that will occur over time. Your blog is not to be confused with an archive at Town Hall, or the records room at a newspaper where by definition everyone understands “I’m looking at very old stuff”.
Blog posts stay indexed in the search engines forever. So what happens when a house sells and your p
Now this sure would look a lot better sitting on my counter than my ugly milk carton I use for collecting compost scraps! Great idea and unique design. Find this pottery compost crock at LakeBay Pottery.
Sure. Anyone can make compost. But, can they really make it?
Compost isn't the hardest thing in the world to create - it's just a matter of mixing a whole heap of dead organic matter and leaving it to its own devices. A few weeks to rest, then turning it over every few days and Voila! you have compost.
Six weeks ago I set out to journal the process of making my own compost. From the start, through each turn and then the final product. I didn't want to bore you with all the photos so I limited it to just the ones you needed to see.
Here's how I make compost and what I use it for...
After more than 1.700 songs released and 13 years in the business, German independent imprint Compost Records celebrates its 250th release with the second installment of "Freshly Composted" compilation.
Titled "Freshly Composted Vol. 2," the compilation showcases an extensive survey of the most important releases on Compost from the past year including an exclusive forecast to the new Ben Mono album which is going to be released in early spring. Besides Ben's sneak preview there are six more tracks which were previously only available on 12" vinyl, featuring remixes by Carl Craig, Moodymann, Todd Terje, Robag Wruhme, and others.
Just like the first Freshly Composted compilation, Vol. 2 leaves behind stylistic boundaries and offers a diversified mixture of disco, house, techno, soul, jazz, a little bit of pop and cosmic.Continue reading "Compost Records celebrates with Freshly Composted Vol. 2" >
Jesús E. Matheus L.11 Dpto. de Ciencias Agrarias, Núcleo Universitario Rafael Rangel. Universidad de Los Andes. Trujillo. Venezuela e-mail: jmatheusl@ula.ve Resumen Se evaluó agronómicamente un compost elaborado con desechos sólidos de la industria azucarera (biofertilizante La Pastora) como alternativa para restaurar la fertilidad de un suelo degradado y suplir los requerimientos nutricionales del cultivo de maíz (híbrido Himeca 2000). La experiencia se realizó...
- German downtempo emporium Compost Records will celebrate its 250th release with a special label compilation, Freshly Composted Vol. 2, which is set for release on February 16, 2007. The compilation...
[continued]
Perhaps you have heard the age old adage that you can’t get anything for free. This is true for most things in life with the exception of Irma composting or what many call worm composting. Basically, worms will take your organic garbage and transform it almost magically into a type of compost that [...]