[ Lost in the Landscape ]

my new composter

I often get the impres­sion that to get your ticket punched as a real, seri­ous gar­dener you have to take up com­post­ing. Still, I gave up on pol­ish­ing my halo a dozen years ago. The old-fashioned com­post pile I had took way more main­te­nance than I was inter­ested in…all the has­sles, espe­cially keep­ing the beast stirred and watered.

Since those days tum­bling com­posters have really come into their own as an alter­na­tive to the piles that just sit there like Uncle Ervin on his Barca-Lounger in front of the TV. The promise of a com­post device that sim­pli­fies keep­ing the mix stirred and aer­ated sounded almost too god to be true, but I’ve been tempted to give them a twirl.

The oppor­tu­nity came up as I headed to the back aisles at Costco to pick up some cheese and bread. On my way to the back of the store a big tum­bling com­poster tried to reel me in with its dark trac­tor beam.

The thing with this store is that you usu­ally have your choice of the one item they offer for sale, which in this case was the 80-gallon Life­time model 60021 tum­bling com­poster. (Costco offers sev­eral other mod­els online.) Even with a price tag less than $100 I resisted at first. But I went home and did a lit­tle research online. Judg­ing by the cus­tomer reviews peo­ple gen­er­ally seemed to like this model, with the main com­plaint being being about an inter­nal aer­at­ing tube that kept get­ting bent because it was made out of PVC. It seemed like a valid but rel­a­tively minor con­cern, so I decided to give the com­poster a try.

The com­poster in its box, as it looks when you bring it home.

When you buy this model, you’re really buy­ing a com­poster kit, not an assem­bled com­poster. I doc­u­mented the time I started, before I opened the box, before I assem­bled the nec­es­sary tools (which ended up requiring–among other things–an elec­tric drill and socket wrenches), before I read the instruc­tions that rec­om­mended that it would take two adults to assem­ble it. John is still hob­bling around on crutches right now, so I decided to go it alone.

The time when I com­pleted assem­bling it.

The time right before I began to open the box.

From the doc­u­mented end time you can see that it took me about an hour and fifty min­utes to put it together. That includes time spent tak­ing a few pieces apart after I’d installed them incor­rectly, as well as a few min­utes when John came out to super­vise my work and ogle the new toy. I’m gen­er­ally pretty handy with mechan­i­cal things, if a lit­tle impa­tient to read all the way through instruc­tions. I also did okay heft­ing the big 65 pound box the kit came in, and had the added ben­e­fit of a power screw­driver. Adjust your expec­ta­tions for assem­bly time and effort accordingly.

The inau­gural kitchen scraps.

The assem­bled composter.

Things fit together eas­ily and made for a sturdy, double-walled, insu­lat­ing com­post­ing cham­ber. Appar­ently the com­pany read the cus­tomer com­plaints about the PVC aer­at­ing tube, because by the time they made my ver­sion of the model, the flimsy inter­nal part had been replaced with a rigid piece of per­fo­rated metal pipe.

I couldn’t resist doing a lit­tle trim­ming of plants around the gar­den. On even its first day, the com­poster is well on its way to being filled. The cut­tings and kitchen scraps will cook down over time, mak­ing room for more waste.

The com­poster now lives out­side the kitchen, along­side the trash­cans and recy­cle bar­rels. It shouldn’t be hard to keep the com­post bar­rel fed and tum­bled. Once the bar­rel is filled it’ll need a few weeks for the com­post to cook to per­fec­tion, a time when you shouldn’t be feed­ing it more clip­pings and scraps. To do things right, hav­ing a sec­ond bar­rel at the ready for those times would be the way to go. Within a few weeks I should have a bet­ter idea whether this model of com­poster lives up to my expec­ta­tions and war­rants my buy­ing a sec­ond one.

So, will I become a real, seri­ous, com­post­ing gar­dener? I’d say it’s off to a good start.

May 05 2010 | Categories: gardening | Tags: compost bins • composting • recycling • rotary composters | 13 Comments »

vinyl resting place

I real­ize that I’m dat­ing myself when I reveal this, a long shelf of vinyl LPs, one of sev­eral in the house. I never lis­ten to them, but I don’t know what to do with them. There’s a lot of com­mon trash in the collection–Does the world need to pre­serve the bil­lionth press­ing of an indif­fer­ent ren­di­tion of the Pachel­bel Canon? Then there’s music so bad that you can’t bear to part with it. Case in point: The Lib­er­ace Christ­mas album, in which Lee recites “The Night Before Christ­mas.” So badly done it’s a camp classic.

A few hol­i­days ago I decided on a few truly trash­able discs and recy­cled them into flow­er­pots. It’s one of those craft projects that you can find lots of instruc­tions for out on the web. While vis­it­ing John’s aunt last month I saw one of the exam­ples of my hand­i­work, with a small pot­ted poin­set­tia set inside the craft project from hell.

Here’s one of the pro­to­types here at home, hold­ing a pot­ted plant. The hole in the disc for the spin­dle makes a great lit­tle drainage open­ing. This is more of a tray than pot, but I finally worked out a way to make some­thing that had a nice pot shape to it.

I ended up using two ceramic pots as forms, a small 4-incher and a larger one, around 6 inches. I’d place the disc and smaller pot on a cookie sheet in the oven, with the hole of the disc cen­tered on the hole of the pot. The tem­per­a­ture was set at a low but vinyl-melting tem­per­a­ture, some­thing in the high 200s if I remem­ber cor­rectly. When the disc reached the melt­ing point and began to just sag, I pulled every­thing out of the oven, placed the larger pot on top of the disc, and these pressed down gen­tly. The disc would assume a nice pot shape and form some attrac­tive crin­kles in the space between the two pots. Just let the disc cool a minute and you’re ready for the next one. The fumes from melt­ing vinyl can be pretty intense, unpleas­ant, and prob­a­bly not good for you, so this isn’t a project I’d tackle in an unven­ti­lated house dur­ing the dead of win­ter. Also, remem­ber that plas­tic is flam­ma­ble! Be careful.

Last month John gifted me this USB turntable for trans­fer­ring vinyl into sound files that I might actu­ally lis­ten to. Now all I need to do in my copi­ous spare time is sort through sev­eral hun­dred discs and decide which few I want to keep, which ones I want to con­vert and recy­cle, and those that can be turned into flow­er­pots right away.

So…

• Orig­i­nal Sargeant Pep­per first release: keep…
• Lib­er­ace Christ­mas album: con­vert but keep (was there any ques­tion on that?)…
• Alter­na­tive TV (a British avant-garde rock duo’s album that I bought after read­ing a glow­ing review): flow­er­pot…
• Pierre Boulez con­duct­ing Debussy’s La Mer: con­vert and recy­cle…
• Any­thing Barry Manilow: flow­er­pot (what was I thinking?)…

A sim­i­lar tech­nique can be used on 45s as well as 12-inchers. Here’s a lit­tle Rolling Stones candy dish, for example…

January 30 2010 | Categories: gardening | Tags: craft projects from hell • LPs • pots • recycling | 7 Comments »

from shower to flower

Earth Day is com­ing up on Wednes­day. What environment-friendly changes will you be try­ing to make?

Last year we installed a tan­k­less water heater, a move that has saved us at least 30% on our gas bill. But it still takes a while for the heated water to make it to the bath­room. In the past, we let the cold water in the pipes go down the drain until the water got to a proper shower tem­per­a­ture. But now the water is going into a bucket that we’ll use to water the gar­den. (A prettier–or at least cleaner–bucket not for­merly used for pulling weeds and mix­ing pot­ting soil is next on the agenda…)

The next log­i­cal step for water con­ser­va­tion would be to install a gray water sys­tem to reuse wash­wa­ter. Reg­u­la­tions in Cal­i­for­nia have been com­plex enough so that only 41 house­holds have done it legally in San Diego County, and only 200 state-wide. State sen­a­tor Alan Lowen­thal from Long Beach has intro­duced a new bill, SB 1258, that would man­date a review of exist­ing codes to make it eas­ier to design and install legal gray water sys­tems, a piece of leg­is­la­tion that is being called the “shower to flower” bill.

It’s a good start, and one worth supporting.

Related read­ing:
San Diego Union Tribue: New water­ing source is sur­fac­ing (March 23, 2009 arti­cle)
Los Ange­les Times: A solu­tion to California’s water short­age goes down the drain (April 19, 2009 opin­ion piece)
The text of SB 1258, marked up with com­ments and sug­ges­tions for fur­ther improve­ments by Oasis Design.

April 19 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Earth Day • gray water • recycling • water conservation | 7 Comments »

talking trees

If a tree talks in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Tues­day morn­ing I had my choice of places to view the tele­vised inau­gu­ra­tion of Barack Obama or ways to hear the audio feed. Work­ing as I do on the UCSD cam­pus, there were rooms in libraries, radios at cof­fee stands and indi­vid­ual lap­tops that were all play­ing the cer­e­monies. The most unusual venue I could pick from was to hear the inau­gu­ra­tion broad­cast through the speak­ers of lead-plated euca­lyp­tus trees that were installed over twenty years ago as part of the campus’s Stu­art Col­lec­tion.

Left: The tree in the instal­la­tion that plays music.

The work is Trees by artist Terry Allen, and was con­structed from three euca­lyp­tus that either had died or had to be removed to make way for new con­struc­tion. The dead trees were cut into big chunks, dipped in wood preser­v­a­tive, reassem­bled, and then cov­ered with small sheets of lead attached nails. What was the artist’s intent? The Stu­art Collection’s descrip­tion offers this explanation:

One could walk through the grove sev­eral times before notic­ing Allen’s two unob­tru­sive trees.  Not only do these trees rein­vest a nat­ural site with a lit­eral sense of magic but they implic­itly make con­nec­tions between nature and death and the life of the spirit.  It is not sur­pris­ing that stu­dents have dubbed this area the “Enchanted Forest.”

At the entrance to the vast, geo­met­ric library the third tree of Allen’s instal­la­tion remains silent — per­haps another form of the tree of knowl­edge, per­haps a reminder that trees must be cut down to print books and build build­ings, per­haps a dance form, or per­haps not­ing that one can acquire knowl­edge both through obser­va­tion of nature and through research.

Right: The tree in the instal­la­tion that recites poetry.

On Tues­day, the tree that ordi­nar­ily recites poetry and the one that typ­i­cally offers songs and music were ded­i­cated to an audio feed of the Pres­i­den­tial inau­gu­ra­tion. The orga­niz­ers had high hopes, pre­dict­ing “hun­dreds of stu­dents” would show up for the event. But for the few min­utes I could spend there, I counted just about a dozen peo­ple and two dogs (well-behaved ones, attend­ing with their own­ers, not dogs doing their thing on the trees…).

Left: The “bark” on the mute tree, show­ing the nails hold­ing the lead plates, as well as the list of cred­its of the peo­ple who worked on the project.

Left: The mute tree, as seen from the library entrance.

The spe­cial pro­gram­ming wasn’t the eas­i­est sell that morn­ing. The inau­gu­ra­tion was already a huge event.

I’ll have to admit I had a hard time pay­ing atten­tion the the art event myself. You could feel change in the air. And even talk­ing trees in a for­est weren’t enough to get peo­ple to stop.

January 22 2009 | Categories: art | Tags: Barack Obama • eucalyptus • presidential inauguration • recycling • Stuart Collection • Terry Allen • trees • UCSD | 4 Comments »

greener gardening practices

I think that these days all of us are try­ing to go green in many aspects of our lives as we try to reduce our demands on the world’s resources. Gar­den­ing has the shiny green patina of com­muning with nature and being kind to plants and ani­mals that make up this green earth. But so many mod­ern gar­den­ing prac­tices con­sume big piles of the resources that we depend on, and oth­ers con­tributes sig­nif­i­cantly to envi­ron­men­tal pollution.

Since it’s early in the year, the time that we many of us make res­o­lu­tions, I’ve out­line some areas that I’ll be try­ing to work on in my own gar­den. I’ve gath­ered them together below and cat­e­go­rized them into the three big Rs of going green: reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Reduce

1. Fewer annu­als: The semi-twisted logic of plant­ing annu­als, nur­tur­ing them for six months, and then yank­ing them out when they’re all bloomed out to replace them with other sea­sonal annu­als to enjoy for maybe just a few more months is start­ing to bother me. It’s a cer­tain amount of work on my part, and the energy that must go into the pro­duc­tion of bed­ding plants adds to what guilt I feel. I doubt I’ll give up on annu­als entirely. But I’ll try to rely on them less, mostly as tem­po­rary fillers until some­thing with year-round inter­est can take over. Alter­nately, a lot of annu­als reseed, so that you can plant them one year, and they’ll return reli­ably in future years. Ally­sum, zin­nias, melam­podium, celosia, pop­pies and many orna­men­tal grasses are just a few of the plants that reseed reliably.
2. I’ll think twice before I pull out a plant. Is a plant really ill or dying? Or am I just bored with it?
3. When I do decide that a plant has to go, I’ll work on using more plants that are bet­ter adapted to my envi­ron­ment. Liv­ing in San Diego, this means using more Mediterranean-adapted plants and plants native to the area. This will reduce needs for sup­ple­men­tal water, plant food and insect control.
4. It’s more work, but I’m start­ing more plants from seed these days. Ship­ping a packet of seeds across the coun­try takes way less energy than ship­ping the bed-full of plants that many pack­ets will give you. Direct-sowing the seeds into the ground can save on trans­porta­tion costs for pot­ting mix and pots. Another bonus is that you can treat your­self to plenty more vari­eties than would be avail­able at the local nursery.
5. In addi­tion to buy­ing more seeds to grow, I’m sav­ing more seeds from the plants I already have. For species and open-pollenated heir­loom plants, the seed should come true to the orig­i­nal. For hybrid plants, the seedlings can be an adven­ture, some of them com­ing look­ing like their par­ents, oth­ers com­ing out to be inter­est­ing mon­grel mixes.
6. Grow more edi­ble plants. There’s the push to buy locally grown pro­duce, fruits and veg­gies that have been grown within a hun­dred miles of your house. Why not grow food your­self and drop the trans­porta­tion costs to zero? I’ve got var­i­ous herbs over­win­ter­ing in the gar­den, and seeds for var­i­ous plants are now in the ground or already ger­mi­nat­ing: kale, beets, ama­ranth, miner’s let­tuce, plus what­ever plants of romaine and New Zealand spinach will come back from seed. Sev­eral of these have ter­rific orna­men­tal value, so they’ll get to live with the more dec­o­ra­tive plantings.
7. I want to learn more about how to pre­pare the edi­ble plants I already have. For instance, the cat­tails grow­ing in the pond in the back yard are often listed as being one of the sta­ples of the native Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion in cen­turies past. Some of the local suc­cu­lent pop­u­la­tion of the genus Dud­leya also were used for food, and in fact one of the species is called edulis. (With a name like edulis, it’s gotta be good!) Maybe those and other plants in the gar­den could be relied on for occa­sional inter­est­ing meals. Even if some of them might be a lit­tle too weird for reg­u­lar con­sump­tion, eat­ing, like gar­den­ing, ought to be an adventure.

Reuse

1. It’s not per­fect hor­ti­cul­tural hygiene, but I try to reuse pots when­ever pos­si­ble. Unfor­tu­nately I usu­ally end up with more gal­lon pots than I’ll ever be able to use a sec­ond or third time. Many nurs­eries will take them to reuse. And then I found that our almost-local native plant out­fit, Las Pil­i­tas Nurs­ery, will also donate 10 cents to the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety for each pot that is returned for them to reuse. (That would explain the Lowes and Home Depot pots that I’ve seen at the nursery!)
2. For those sit­u­a­tions when I decide a plant isn’t right for one spot, I’ll try to see if there’s another loca­tion in the gar­den where it would work bet­ter. Or may I know some­one who’d be dying to do some plant rescue…
3. When I buy seeds, I some­times end up with more than I need. I’ll share them with inter­ested folks, and it could be an way to get more native or drought-tolerant plants into people’s gardens.

Recy­cle

1. Stores often have last week’s bulbs on sale for not much money. If they’re bulbs adapted to the cli­mate, this is a great way to save some of these plants from the dump­sters. And if you’re into dumpster-diving or cruis­ing the back alleys of gar­den cen­ters, you might pick these up for free. Most of the nar­cis­sus in my yard came through these mark-downs.
2. I’ll have to admit that I’m a failed com­poster. I just don’t have the magic com­bi­na­tion of time, space and dis­ci­pline (in all hon­esty it’s mostly the dis­ci­pline where I’m lack­ing). But the city for­tu­nately has a greens recy­cling pro­gram for those of us who don’t have this down. Kitchen scraps are already mak­ing it into the bins, and I’ll try to be be even more fanat­i­cal with any­thing green in the gar­den that would compost.
3. If you’re not doing it already, recy­cle lawn lawn clip­pings into mulch. Last sum­mer I con­vinced John to put the onto the veg­gie gar­den instead of dump­ing them in the city greens recy­cling. This way they’re still get­ting recy­cled, only they don’t have to be trucked to the land­fill to be turned into mulch.
4. Even if you can’t find some­one to reuse your plas­tic pots, there are some emerg­ing uses for them that might become avail­able to more parts of the coun­try. I’ll keep my eyes open in case there are inter­est­ing local recy­cling oppor­tu­ni­ties, like the one where pots would be melted down for “land­scape tim­bers.” (The link goes to an great pro­gram in Missouri.)
5. Bro­ken clay pots make great cov­ers for drain holes in pots around the gar­den. They allow the water to drain out, but also reduce the amount of pot­ting soil that you lose.

Like many new year’s res­o­lu­tions, I know I won’t stick to them fanat­i­cally. One of the things that draws me to the plant world is the sheer vari­ety in all the cool plants that I can invite into my gar­den. I’m a col­lec­tor at heart, so say­ing no to a new and inter­est­ing spec­i­men is one of the hard­est things for me to do. I know that that’s going to be one of the hard­est goals to stick to. Hope­fully, putting it out in a pub­lic space like this post will pro­vide me a lit­tle gen­tle pres­sure and reminder of what I intended to do.

January 07 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: green gardening practices • recycling | 6 Comments »

recycling concrete

One of the eas­i­est ways to reuse bro­ken con­crete is to stack up the pieces to make a low gar­den wall.

My house came with an expanse of dan­ger­ously uneven, cracked con­crete that needed to be removed. One option would have been to haul it off to the land­fill. But turn­ing the scraps into this lit­tle wall for a raised veg­etable gar­den ended up being a greener solution.

The hard­est part was break­ing up the con­crete into man­age­able pieces. (We used a sledge­ham­mer). And lift­ing the twenty to sixty pound chunks into place made for some hard work. But it was basi­cally an “easy” job in that it wasn’t par­tic­u­larly tech­ni­cal and didn’t demand too many brain cells.

If your soil is espe­cially unsta­ble, the con­crete could be set on top of a foun­da­tion. But for almost all soils, and for a low wall like this one–about twenty inches tall–don’t bother. Try to stag­ger the joints between pieces from row to row to make the wall more sta­ble. Work to nest the pieces together as tightly as pos­si­ble to min­i­mize soil loss out the sides if you’ll be using the wall for a raised bed.

If you would like a softer look, you could also plant lit­tle suc­cu­lents or com­pact rock-garden plants into the crevices. Creep­ing sedums, alyssum, low vari­eties of thyme or trail­ing straw­ber­ries would be good, easy choices for a wall that has a sunny expo­sure. You could also plant low-growing bulbs or annu­als in front of the wall.

The result is def­i­nitely on the rus­tic end of the spec­trum, more “cot­tage” than glam or glitzy. But you’ll feel bet­ter about not fill­ing up the land­fill. And in the end the project could be eas­ier than load­ing the chunks into a truck to haul them away.

January 04 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: concrete • garden walls • hardscape • recycling • rock gardens | 7 Comments »

a mountain of plastic pots

I had a moun­tain of unwanted plas­tic pots, mostly in the 3–5 inch size, left­overs from when I was grow­ing more than just a few orchids around the house. The pots were used, a lit­tle old, but basi­cally func­tional. I couldn’t part with them–who knows when I’d need them? After a cou­ple years of goad­ing from John, a cou­ple hun­dred of them went to the land­fill last fall.

Then I heard about the Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Gar­den hav­ing a great idea. They’ve started up a pro­gram to recy­cle those unwanted left­over plas­tic pots into some­thing useful.

Gar­den pots and trays have been recy­cled into land­scape tim­bers, use­ful for build­ing retain­ing walls and land­scape bor­ders. Each tim­ber mea­sures 7-inches X 9-inches by 8.5 feet long, weighs 280 pounds, and lasts for up to 50 years.

Well, yeah, Mis­souri would be a lit­tle far to go next time I have a pile of pots I need to part with. But I’ll be a lit­tle more dili­gent in look­ing around for more sus­tain­able solu­tions than dump­ing them!

April 06 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: plastic • pots • recycling | No Comments »