New Addition to Family

We have a new addtion to our family. I have been saving for a year and a half for a composter. I finally was able to order it a couple of weeks ago. It is called the Earthmaker. It is a new design out of New Zealand. It is 3 chambered, and uses gravity. It is the first continual compost maker on the market. You put your stuff in the top, and after about a month you move it down to the middle section and start filling the top again. As it finishes decomposing and becomes black gold it falls down to the bottom chamber where you can access it. It will be 2-3 months before we will get anything, but after that we will be able to use it year round. Our yard and garden are going to love it!

We will be able to save money making our own compost. Every year we buy more to replace what is lost in the boxes. We also will know what is going into it. The best advantage of all is that we will be able to use all the yard waste, most of the kitchen waste, and most of our paper/cardboard waste. Our garbage output is going to dramatically decrease. We are going green! The Earthmaker holds 123 gallons. It is big.

It came in the mail Monday, I put it together Tuesday night, put it in the yard last night and started filling it tonight. For compost you need 1 part "green" (nitrogen), ie: grass clippings, manure, food scraps, green leaves, etc and 3 parts "brown" (carbon), ie: dry fall leaves, straw, hay, cardboard, newspapers etc.

I found a bale of "two stringer" hay for $4. It is 75lbs. I came home and raked leaves for a couple of hours. Here is my pile. Hopefully it will last a little while. It is going to be sooo good to have a use for the 50 bags of leaves that we get from the trees around the house this next fall instead of sending them to the dump. Maybe I will start a pile of just compost leaves in the corner of the yard...Chris moved our garden boxes closer to the house this year. Last year the garden was doing fantastic. I had 4 ft corn and my tomatoes were starting to produce. My melons were loaded. It warmed up 20 degrees in one weekend and I lost everything to the heat. We could have cried. We decided that we would put them under the trees and hopefully the shade will help this summer. We will still have the heat, but hopefully things won't burn up again.

I planted the cold weather stuff last Monday. It has rained several times and so I should be seeing green in the next couple of days. I planted two kinds of peas. Regular and Snow, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, brussel sprouts, spinach and a mixed lettuce.

I love this time of year. I don't know why I feel so prompted to be learning all of this stuff. Some will probably tell you that I go overboard sometimes. I really think that I need the knowledge of how to garden, compost etc. I guess time will tell