Arte De Timo

Tag: Food

  • Compost – Part 1

    Compost is a great topic with all sorts of room for discussion and investigation, so I am going to take on the topic in parts.

    It is also a BIG topic. Understanding compost requires a few layers of biology, a layer of agriculture, a layer of physics, and some thrown in construction, environmentalism, gardening, and spirituality. Well OK, its not that complicated of an idea, but it touches on a lot of important issues.

    First and foremost, composting is the rotting of organic material (Not the little green label on food, but things made of molecules that contain carbon) into humus (Not the yummy tan colored food, that’s hummus. Humus is the part of the soil that is organic). Composting happens pretty much everywhere that organic materials occur; forests, oceans, gardens, the dump, behind your refrigerator. You might say that composting is the biological version of entropy; if there is something that can be broken down in nature, it will.

    Once the maintaining properties of life leave an object, the doors are opened to a range of organisms that want to recapture any stored energy from that object. In nature, things just keep on rolling, so any creatures whose biological defenses fail become, quite literally, dirt; and that is a good thing. It can happen fast or slow, and through a whole range of processes. Sometimes there are feathered or furry creatures involved, but at a certain point, almost assuredly, some ants come into play. If there is enough chemical energy left in the object for it to become food, then some ants will find it, and eat it. This goes for a piece chocolate you drop, to a damaged flower seed. Eventually though, in all the dark quiet places of the world the more important processes take over .

    Fungi and bacteria are the heart of the composting process. They are always in a battle to find food, so living things develop strategies to defend against their onslaught. We, humans shed our skin and hair, we have kamikaze immune white blood cells, acidic stomachs, oils, saliva, you name it, all in an attempt to keep fungi and bacteria away from our energy, i.e. cells and tissues. When those things fail, I think we know of some of the things that can happen; infections, stomach problems, and disease. It’s pretty ugly stuff.

    Finally, once things settle down and a little moisture is mixed in, the real work begins; active microbial decomposition. All those brilliant fiber structures, cell membranes, complex molecules, and energetic chemical bonds that make up our beautiful living world are cracked open, broken down over and over again, and become raw materials and energy for a host of microbes.

    In the garden, it is the compost’s job to take advantage of this process and turn all the left over organic material back into something that can be used in the garden. It can be as simple as piling up leaves in the Fall, to carefully layering “brown” material with “green” material to build a hot “heap.” Striking a balance can be tough sometimes, when things like, speed, space, smell, and output are considered.

    When I first started composting, I was living in a townhouse with a small patio, and I didn’t get the balance right in many ways. Space was limited, I didn’t have access to enough “brown” material, and my inputs were too high. I’ll confess, the outcome was not pleasant for anyone within nose-shot. Not only that, I had good humus mixed in with fresh food material, making deployment of the compost impossible. Here’s some pics of the experiment:

    The ideas were sound, but my execution was not so great. The most important thing was that I learned about how a biological composting system functions, and how that sort of composter might work. When building something from scratch, its always good to have some hands-on knowledge to go along with the ideas. I did go on building fortunately, and I now have a good functional 2 yer old system up.

    In Compost – Part 2, I will post about the composter I have now, along with my techniques, and what I gain from the activity. Part 3 will be about the ramifications of composting on several levels, and why I do it. Oh, and I have a video to stick in somewhere, too!

  • The Urban Orchard


    The urban orchard isn’t one of my ideas of course, but it is one of those secret little treasures that people discover when they have a bit of land, and have an interest growing food. Besides the fact that I inherited the beginning (or maybe the end) of an orchard with our house, I have read about it in the different organic gardening books I have. I have also come across the concept in various ways, and under different names when talking to people about their “gardens” and watching videos, or movies about urban sustainability.

    An urban orchard is a group of fruit trees that are crammed into a space that is typically considered too small for even just one tree. If you do an investigation of fruit tree culture, invariably the bulk of info you will find is about trees out in the field with ample space. What most urban gardeners don’t realize is all that info is about optimal growing and harvesting (i.e. farming) conditions. It comes from industrial growing interests, whose job it is to grow lots of fruit for commercial harvest.

    The reality is many older heirloom tree varieties have a wide range of characteristics allowing them to grow in highly variable conditions. Not only that, contemporary trees are grafted onto a choice of rootstocks, which not only are pest hardy, but can be dwarfed. If you stay away from the commercial supermarket varieties, usually you can cram fruit trees into every nook and cranny of a yard and they will be OK. They will produce small amounts of fruit, and maintain a slow and steady growth pattern, which is perfect for the family garden.

    In our back yard, which is only about 2500sf, we have a 40 foot avocado tree that produced several HUNDRED pounds of avocados the year we moved in (they have multi-year cycles, so that was a peak year,) a 15 foot Nispero/Loquat tree, a 15 ft plum tree, orange tree, lemon tree, grapefruit, apple tree, and several hedge Avocados. To that I have added two pear trees, grapes and berries.

    Despite the small size of our yard and presence of all of these trees, we have plenty of space for a large garden, roses, flowers, and grass to run around. Our yard was a big part of why we bought this house, actually. With such a small interior, we wanted a space that could provide us with a wonderful outdoor lifestyle right away.

    Obviously, the yard wasn’t quite right in some ways, but the trees were spot on in their placement and size, and the layout was very good. The shade is great, and the temperature gradients they produce beat any heating/cooling system. Plus, using a phrase from dear relative, the fruit is out of this world.

    So far, the trees haven’t added much “work” to the yard care duties. The greatest effort each year is picking fruit, particularly from the 40 foot avocado tree. Collecting dropped fruit is also a chore, but nothing more than raking leaves, really. We have had issues that are on going, though. The main problem we have run into is pests. The apple tree gets wiped out each year by weevils and codling moths. and the avocado tree is a favorite of the squirrels. We also get opossums and racoons, but I think those are caused by neighborhood-wide fruit tree neglect, and are endemic. I am working on our fruit tree problems, and hopefully with the little bit of extra time I have being out of school I should come to some solutions. Inexpensive, safe and eco-healthy solutions are hard to come by, but I have some ideas.

    The only other expenses so far besides time and water (a complicated issue I’ll touch on as I go along), has been an arborist and fertilizer. The tree trimmer was pretty expensive, but that really is a cost of home ownership, with a little previous neglect thrown in. The bags of Dr. Earth fertilizer aren’t cheap either, but when purchased in bulk, they pay for themselves in added productivity. I think I’ve added 50-100% to the orange crop, just with the application of a few dollars worth of fertilizer.

    Urban fruit trees are fairly common in California, but taking them to that next orchard level is often overlooked, yet very doable. It was quite common in the years of old, and hearkens back to another era when people put a lot of time into food and home life. Now it provokes a lot of questions about maintenance and time requirements; priorities have shifted. So far, for us having an urban orchard is proving to be lost treasures we never knew about, and one we intend to add to.

  • The economics of a rain barrel

    My water company charges $2.99 for a unit of water, which is defined as 100 cubic feet, or 748.5 gallons. This breaks down to just under 4 tenths of one cent per gallon of water that comes through the pipes. So what do we get for that 0.4 cents? We get water from a local well, possibly mixed with some surface water from a nearby reservoir, some chlorine, some dissolved minerals, and a little bit of organic matter.

    A rain barrel is typically about 50-60 gallons, so every time it fills up you are accumulating about 20-23 cents worth of water at the water utility rate. What do you get?

    If a rain barrel costs about $80+ to make or buy you would have to fill it up and empty it 400 times to break even. And, if you get around 20-40 chances a year to fill it up, we are talking 10 to 20 years ROI for a rain barrel. Yikes! That is not a good investment!

    So why do it? Why spend the money and time? Is it that feeling of freedom and independence of “going off the grid?” Maybe a bit of nostalgia for how our farming forefathers and foremothers used to do things? I would say it is a little of all of this, and a little more.

    Setting up a rain barrel has a bit of that DIY feeling that gardening, canning, sewing, etc. have. There is no immediate need to do any of it, but there are enough little good reasons, and enough little pleasures in doing it, that it is worth it. A wine barrel just looks neat around the house, particularly one from France.

    A big part of this sort of project for most people is a sense of connection. Like growing a tomato out in the yard, there is something wonderful about being a part of the whole cycle of providing sustenance for one’s family. I would say the majority of people never get a chance (nor are interested) in seeing how their water gets to them. Turn on the faucet and water comes out. Harvesting some rain water lets us see and feel where our water is coming from. It is a reattachment to the seasons, and to the nature of rain. We are so sheltered from the atmosphere and weather, this sort of project is a way to get us thinking about how the seasons affect us again. Rain harvesting is a lesson on what the rainy season used to mean. Is it a green season, or a white season? Will it have an impact on you this year? How should I plan for the coming months?

    A rain barrel is a sort of slow motion alarm clock that is controlled by nature, and can’t be set by our hands. It will fill according to some other system that we have all too often forgotten and disconnected from. In that relationship, the ROI has already been met.

    I now have 50 gallons of murky water in this thing to use, and return to nature. It sits there to be used before the next rain. It sits there outside waiting for use. It is also waiting in my mind as a reminder that the Green season is approaching, and that the grasses are growing; that the natural cycle still affects us even if we often choose not to see it.