Daily Loaf

These are the 1st and 2nd things we can do to live smarter from  my list of 12 ways to start living greener and smarter.

Composting: a simple process that continuously occurs in nature, often without any assistance from us. Eliminate food and yard waste with compost piles and worm bins.

The average New York City household discards two pounds of organic waste each day—adding up to more than one million tons of organic material a year. When we discard this “waste,” we lose a potential resource that can help beautify our parks, gardens, and blocks, even our window boxes and houseplants. That’s why the NYC Department of Sanitation set up programs to recycle organic material through composting.

Start a compost pile easily with a chicken wire “U” against a fence or wall. Even if you just toss it into a pile in the corner of the yard and throw leaves on it every now and then, you will be reducing waste you have bagged, picked up and incinerated, while adding essential enzymes, nutrients and minerals back to our starving soil. You will notice seeds sprouting up all over, tomatoes, eggplant and squash from your compost. I plant and grow these “volunteer” seeds with good results. Some people have issues with “volunteers” from non-organic food because these seeds could be genetically modified to produce sterile plants and seeds.

Keep a container in your kitchen with a tight fitting lid and empty it everyday. We use a large yogurt container. You should compost everything (except red meat), including fruit and veggie scraps, pasta, coffee grounds, tea leaves, eggshells and yard waste. Do not use your animal’s excrement, grass clippings that have been sprayed with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, or newspaper (all of these have harsh chemicals which will leech into your food if used in compost). Create a different pile for those items to use on non-food items in your yard.

I first heard about worms in a movie called Go Further (starring Woody Harrelson) and have been hooked ever since. Start a worm bin with a used plastic container or something similar you have lying around. Search on youtube for a guide on starting your own. Worms eat our compost and turn it into the most nutrient rich soil in the world. Redworms can eat about 3 times their weight a week. Redworms reduce the volume of that waste by about two thirds. Worm, composting or vermiculture, is a method for recycling food waste (garbage) into a rich, dark, earth-smelling soil conditioner. The great advantage of worm composting is that this can be done indoors and outdoors, thus allowing year round composting. It also provides apartment dwellers with a means of composting. The state of California is actually encouraging employees of both public and private sector businesses to “keep worms in your office“. At the CA EPA offices in Sacramento, there’s a waiting list for the sixty worm farm bins that are available.

Look for my upcoming third tip in this series: water conservation.

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