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Back in the fall last year I took pictures of my new shredder, a Bosch AXT 2500HP. I was a bit reluctant to go out and buy a shredder in this higher price range but my previous experiences with cheaper shredders was driving me.

The old one I used to have had a flywheel with blades mounted on it, but the problem was the blades wore down really quick, and on top of that you would have to force the material into the shredder, because it simply couldn’t get hold of it any other way.

This new shredder uses a different principle and there are absolutely no problems with getting the machine to ‘eat’ the organic material. It chops everything into 3 cm (1 inch) pieces and have a very strong motor (this version runs on 16 amps at 230 volts AC). The third picture shows the grinder; a good way to keep ‘the suits’ out of your garden pretty scary for someone wearing a tie:

But I’m glad the suits put this on the market, because it’s a wonderful machine. I’m really looking forward to see the quality of the final compost.

Here’s a video showing some action. I’m chopping up shoots from apple trees with the leaves still on:

And the result (I’m closing down this raised bed, or else then material would go onto the compost heap instead.):

The shredder even took care of the Christmas tree during winter :

In about two weeks a new garden adventure will begin for me, as I’ll be moving to a new property together with my girlfriend and our two small kids. What’s new for me is that this time it’s a rented place compared to our current house, which I own myself. We had a brief talk with the landlord, and it turns out that the former renters were allowed to put up a greenhouse,  and we’re free to do what we want in the garden as long as it “appears cultivated” as he put it. I’m still a bit unsure about what I can and what I can’t do, but maybe it’s better to ask for forgiveness instead of permission in this case Of course I’ll leave any old trees alone, but I’m certainly planning on converting part of the lawn into vegetable beds. Whether I’m bringing in a truckload of concrete slabs to be used as paths between beds I’m not sure, but I guess most of what I would like to do in the garden can be cleaned up and removed in a matter of weeks. The ultimate garden dream is still to have my own land to play on. I’m looking forward to that.
I’m leaving five old wonderful apple trees behind, but luckily there are two old ones on the new property and according to the owner they produce loads of apples and they are free for us to use. I’m glad we bought a high quality juicer last year, perfect for apples too. The apple trees provide shade in the garden, but it also has an open space with lots of sun. To the south west there’s even a small stream running by, and across the stream there’s a field with grazing horses. Very nice scenery.
Unfortunately I’ll have to leave my 30 sq m (320 sq ft) garage behind and cram most of my stuff into a much smaller, unheated shed, in like only one fifth of the area. I’ll have to sell or give away some of it, but that’s okay, this was never meant to be a high tech operation anyway. I’m keeping the shredder though – that is just an awesome piece of equipment, a Bosch AXT 2500HP. I’ll post some pictures and videos of that beast later on. It has helped me produce great composting ready material, so I’m seriously considering moving my three compost heaps with me to the new location, if the content is not too gross. Gotta feed the soil, right?
Speaking of feeding the soil – sometimes I get carried away and just go on and on, talking about  soil and manure and homesteading, and somewhere along the road my girlfriend somehow convinced herself that rabbits running freely around the garden is a total win-win situation. When will I learn to shut the hell up? I’m not sure I agree entirely with that But at least neither one of us talks about chopping them up for meat like good old John Seymour did. That’s just too old school for us vegetarians. I’m sure the kids would love to play with them though. We just need to convince them that it’s NOT candy that’s scattered all over the lawn

This is a 43 pages eBook about making compost written by Rod Turner in 2005 titled “The Worlds Best Compost – The How & Why“. My own attempts at making compost have been a bit disappointing. Of course there’s some kind of break-down of organic material into humus, but I can ensure you it’s not world class. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that this is actually a book about biodynamics, which was not mentioned in the sales pitch. I paid $34.77 to download the eBook.

How to make the worlds best compost

According to Rod the best compost is a kind of material that resembles jelly. It contains fluid but the material feels dry when you touch it. Jelly also contains the good stuff too. This property must be the same in compost if you want it to be world class. Rod calls this type of compost colloidal humus compost, because it contains up to 75 % water plus all the nutrients. The high amount is needed by the plants in order to grow normally. The water provided to plants must be free of nutrients or it’ll mess up their system!

You need to build your compost pile in a single day. Therefore you have to collect the material in different piles throughout the months prior to building the pile. A key ingredient is fresh animal manure, in fact up 40% of the pile needs to be manure. Nitrogen rich materials, carbon rich materials and manure have to be really wet when you build your pile or else the composting process will not run properly. The three different types of materials need to be in close contact throughout the pile which is then covered with straw during its 3 to 6 months life. And it is literally life. All kinds of organisms and animals will come and go when needed to take part in the composting process. Add some biodynamic herbs and mojo and you got yourself world class compost.

What I LIKE about The Worlds Best Compost

* It uses a biodynamic approach to making compost. I’m fascinated by biodynamics because curiosity, respect and harmony are key aspects in this way of gardening.

* It’s easy to read although it contains a lot of information.

* It has lots of pictures and easy understandable illustrations (21 throughout the eBook).

* Straight to the point, no BS.

* Written by someone with 20 years of experience using the methods described (teaching it for 10 years).

* Interesting references to people and further reading.

* The reasons behind the different actions you need to take are explained too.

* Several bonus eBooks and videos included in the purchase: “Mysteries of Pruning Revealed”, “Professional Secrets to Stunning Azaleas” and “Wonder Plants and Plant Wonders”.

What I DON’T like about The Worlds Best Compost

* Not actually about the eBook, but the sales pitch page is just too much.

* The price is a bit high for a 43 pages eBook, but taking the bonuses into account it seems fair. They seem solid too.

* Some of the biodynamic mojo is included in the process without explanation. I would like to read a few critical thoughts about this whirling madness (you have to make some kind of soup if you want to be best in class).

Who should buy this eBook

You need more space to use the method described in this eBook than you would using traditional urban composting methods. You need space around the pile and space for storing the different materials before building the pile, so I think it’s best suited for people living in rural areas where you can raise your own cows and horses too. Of course you can transport the manure into your urban garden but it’s a lot more work. I think the book can be used by beginners as well as experienced gardeners. The only thing you need is a desire to provide the best growing conditions for you plants.

You can get the eBook here.

Photo by Squeezyboy.

Birds normally take cover during rain but not the blackbird. It’s running around out there in the garden getting wet, but it pays. A lot of earthworms are crawling to the surface as fast as they can, just to get eaten. Sad story. For the earthworm at least. But why on earth would they do that? It seems stupid.

Well is an earthworm stupid? At least it’s trying to survive. Earthworms have a problem with hard rain, which translates to water soaked soil. They have a soft moist skin through which they breathe oxygen from small air pockets in the surrounding soil. During rain these air pockets are filled with water and it gets hard for the worms to breathe. Therefore they are forced to take their chances and crawl to the surface in order to breathe.

Good news for the birds anyway.

The new potatoes are just about gone for the year and that leaves the soil bare. This is bad because rain will wash nutrients down into the ground, therefore it’s good to have something growing all the time. In the picture you’ll find six new rows of spinach ready to take over from the potatoes. This is known as successive planting, and spinach was something that would still grow according to my sowing calender. It doesn’t have to be edible plants, you can also plant something to be used as green manure. When your green manure dies later on you’ll have to compost it to enrich your soil making it possible to grower better vegetables later. By the way, raw spinach is very good with banana and water blended into a smoothie – yum!

Photo by mckaysavage.

1. Write your own garden calender on when to do what and print it out and put it on the wall to be more effective at growing food
2. Write a garden journal to learn more effectively from your experiences
3. Purchase an extra 5 kg kitchen scale and a notebook to find out how much food you are actually able to grow per square meter
4. Make friends with local horse breeders or horse riding schools to get a stable supply of horse manure for your beds
5. Collect organic scraps in a small box in the kitchen and throw it on the compost heap to have something to feed back to your soil. It’s free nutrients for the soil.
6. Turn your compost regularly to speed up composting
7. Collect leaves in the fall and add them to your compost
8. Get an axe and a chopping block for chopping up branches in 5 cm (2 inch) pieces for your compost. Longer pieces than that will sabotage your compost production.
9. Build composting boxes with three compartments with front and top access to make it easy to produce compost
10. Hedge clippings goes into the compost. It’s free nutrients for the soil.
11. Seedlings need 17 hours of light each day to stay healthy
12. Plant fruit trees in your garden to provide shade in the middle of the day
13. Use wood chips on the lanes between your beds instead of spending time on cutting grass
14. Seed saving takes up a lot of area and many spare plants
15. Water the soil not the plants to avoid fungus
16. Grow winter vegetables for a higher yield per square meter
17. Increase diversity in your garden and be rewarded with healthy plants and more food
18. Take good care of the birds in your garden and they will help you debug your garden
19. Some butterflies are devils in disguises as their larvae will eat up your vegetables
20. It takes time to re-establish the small ecosystem in an area coming out of monoculture
21. Growing food is not a new idea. There are many helpful people out there who will help you if you dare to ask.
22. You’ll never be entirely self-sufficient. You’ll always be dependent on the sun. The goal is to have fun and be happy.

Add your best tip in the comments section below.

Throughout the winter I’ve been looking out the window watching the soil in my raised beds shrink more and more into the ground. Maybe it’s because a lot of horse manure and straw were mixed in last year and are now compacted, or maybe it’s because a big part of the soil has been converted into vegetables which then have been removed and carried inside to the kitchen table, thereby removing mass from the beds, I don’t know. But it looks rather silly with a raised bed missing all the soil above ground level. Only the wooden frame is left. It will soon be time for the frost to leave the soil and time for digging. I’ve already built two raised beds with wooden frames and I’m planning on building three more large ones this spring. I’m going to need soil for all of this, more specifically 6 cubic metres, but I’m a bit picky about what I put into my garden. Who knows what chemicals might be present in the soil you buy in big quantities from a gravel pit. Soil in these quantities are awfully expensive from nurseries. What I would really like to do is to make my own from compost. This way I know exactly what goes into my beds and vegetables.
I have already got three composting boxes each about 1 cubic meter with two of them full, but for this to work out I have realized that I need better boxes. At first I was very delighted with the ones I have now, since they have several advantages:

• Low weight
• Easy to assemble
• Low cost
• Looks great

That’s all very good – if you put in your organic garden waste and leave it alone for the next ten years, kinda like a local disposal site.
But that’s not what I want to do. I want to be able to begin taking some compost out from the bottom and see what’s going on. Maybe some of it is ready to be put into the raised beds or maybe it needs to take another round in one of the other boxes and wait another year. Maybe the whole heap needs to be turned and mixed with more highly reactive ingredients.
But this is not possible with this kind of construction. If you want to recycle your organic matter in the form of compost in your garden, you’ll need a more flexible construction, which you can open in the front in an easy way. The ones below are better suited for the process of using compost in the garden:

Photo by Collin Anderson.

The type of box you hammer together (in the first picture) is more static by design, which is fine if you just want to temporarily get rid of grass clippings and leaves, and then once every ten years or so drive the whole pile away and start all over. It sure is capable of eating a lot of waste but it’s hopeless if you want to work that waste into usable compost for your kitchen garden.

Are you making your own compost or would you like to try it? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts, questions or experiences.

Photo by net_efekt.

This is a guest post written by Emma Cooper. She’s a freelance writer and podcaster from the UK. Check out Emma’s gardening blog at http://coopette.com/blog.

“Making your own compost has lots of benefits for a garden. Adding homemade compost to the soil helps to improve the soil structure without digging – meaning that the soil will retain water for longer in dry weather and yet drain better in wet weather. It also encourages a healthier soil environment, which leads to healthier plants.

Homemade compost can also be used as free fertilizer or mulch, or as part of potting mixes, saving you money. And by reducing the amount of waste we send off to be buried or incinerated, we’re helping to reduce the strain we put on the Earth. Even the wildlife in your garden will be grateful if you compost – rotting organic matter is food for lots of beasties at the bottom of the food chain.

There are lots of different methods of composting, and some of them can be quite daunting. If you want to build a ‘hot’ heap then you have to collect the right sort of materials until you have enough to build the whole heap in one go, in alternating layers. Once you’ve built the heap, you have to keep turning it every two or three days to get enough air into the compost to keep the temperature up. If you have the time, space, and energy it’s a great way to make compost – but it’s not the only way.

A simple and easy way to make compost is to build a ‘cold’ heap. In cold composting, you add materials to the compost bin as and when you have them – and you don’t have to turn the heap. The end result is still compost that’s perfect for using around the garden.

The golden rule of any sort of composting is that you need a mixture of materials. ‘Green’ materials are rich in nitrogen and include grass cuttings, kitchen waste and fresh plant material. Not all ‘greens’ are green, though! Coffee grounds are rich in nitrogen, too, and are a great addition to the compost heap. ‘Brown’ materials are rich in carbon. They include woody material like twigs, and also cardboard and paper.

The composting process relies on bacteria, fungi and small animals breaking down the things you add to the heap – and they need a balanced diet. In most households, it’s easy to feed a mixture of materials to the compost. Kitchen waste and garden waste can be balanced out with scrunched up cardboard or shredded paper.

If you add too many ‘greens’ to your compost then it will go a bit slimy and smelly; too many ‘browns’ will make it very slow to rot down. Compost can also be too dry – it needs to be quite damp, and you can add some water if necessary.

With a cold compost heap you have to be careful not to add any waste that could attract rats, and weed seeds and plant diseases that won’t be killed during the cold composting process.

‘Greens’ you can add:

Vegetable and fruit peelings, any uncooked vegetable waste
Coffee grounds and filters
Tea and tea bags
Wilted cut flowers
Old bedding plants
Young annual weeds
Poo from vegetarian animals

‘Browns’ to add:

Torn up cardboard
Egg boxes
Scrunched up newspaper or shredded paper
Twigs
Some fallen leaves (although a lot of leaves are better turned into leaf mould)

Don’t add:

Cooked food
Meat, fish or dairy products
Poo from meat-eating pets
Perennial weeds
Seeding annual weeds
Diseased plant materials

A cold compost heap doesn’t heat up in the same way as a hot heap, but it does get warm (especially in summer) and if you add waste every few days then one day when you go out to the bin you will notice that the volume of your compost has shrunk – a lot! At this point it’s useful to have two bins – so you can let the first one rot down and start filling the second – but it’s also possible to keep filling one bin from the top and extract the finished compost from the bottom as a continuous process.

Cold composting takes several months to produce finished compost (longer in the winter), and the longer you can leave your compost to mature then the finer it will be. Even so, when you remove your compost from the bin you will probably need to pick or sieve out some larger items that haven’t completely rotted down. You can add those back into the bin to start the next batch of compost. Homemade compost doesn’t look like potting compost that you would buy, it’s usually rougher in texture, but that doesn’t mean you’ve done it wrong!

Compost made this way isn’t ideal for starting seeds – it isn’t sterile and is likely to be quite rough – but it has plenty of other uses. Homemade compost is great used as a mulch around the garden, to cover bare soil or to feed hungry plants like fruit bushes. Just spread your compost on top of the soil, and let the earthworms do the hard work of incorporating it into the soil for you. Or, if you’re digging over a bed anyway, add the compost in as you go.

You can also use your compost as part of a potting mix in containers, by adding garden soil, sand or leaf mould. Sieved compost, mixed with sand, makes an ideal top dressing to feed the lawn. In fact, homemade compost is perfect for improving the soil anywhere in the garden, and feeding plants without using fertiliser, and the only problem you’re likely to have is making enough of it!”

Okay, this blog is about to go in a slightly different direction. It will not be your usual gardening blog, but more about what will happen if you add some high tech to your garden. The reason I got myself into this whole grow-your-own-food thing was that I felt I had to. It was the pressure of the decreasing quality of the food available in supermarkets, where it’s all about profit. It was because of the rising prices on produce and because we’re running out of oil so that we will not be able to transport the food across these ludicrous distances. This is what I was supposed to do and it still is. But in reality it’s far from what I’m best at. Now I’ve been in the electronic industry for 7 years straight with an education in electronics engineering, and I’ve been playing with electronics since I was a child. My father and grandfather worked with electronics, my step dad is a computer geek (he’s in the closet, but he is. ) This is who I am. I have to accept that.

But this is not who I want to be. I want more than sitting indoor for the most of the day, without ever feeling the sun or the rain. I want more frequencies in my life, more bandwidth. But I think I’m being arrogant dropping such a big part of me in the dumpster, making a 180 degree turn and just walking naked into the forest and living of the land. I know I can provide value to a lot of people using the skills I’ve already got. Nobody knows what a post oil, post economy, post third world war world will be like if we ever come to that. I think we have to prepare, but going back to the stone age is not necessarily the most intelligent way to go. Why not use what we already know? Sure, electronics require electricity, but what’s wrong with steam power? Or wind power or water or sun power for that matter? What I’m getting at here is, that I want to go outside and create stuff. We need food on the table, and what I bring is the small scale automation.

My plan is to apply what I know about automation and electronics to the process of growing food. I have no idea where this is going to take us but I think it’s going to be interesting. I want to raise awareness about what is going on with the soil. What is the temperature, how is the moisture? Why not automate the watering so that it will provide the soil with the optimal conditions? What exactly is going on inside your composting box? Let’s find out. Nobody says it can’t be done post oil even if all our technology comes crushing down. Give me your old C64, I don’t care. Who says it’s going to be fancy million dollar systems. I’m talking low scale, for you, me, and our neighbors. And it’s going to be affordable. More better food in a smaller area in a sustainable way that you control.

So my first project is a small system, that makes graphs of my raised bed temperatures and moisture, plus the air temperature, with graphs for a year, a month, a week and a day. With this information available on a web page I’ll know exactly when to plant and when to go out and water my beds. The goal is still to grow the most food I can, but I’ll do it in my own wicked way. Later I’ll talk about automatic watering and where to get the electricity from, but it’s also still about farming. I hope I can convey this wisdom in an understandable way and please let me know if you want your own system and what problems you face installing one.

Imagine receiving an email from your garden telling you when to plant or add material to your compost based on the current temperature. Add some Rudolf Steiner theory to the system and I’ll bet you it’s going to produce food in abundance with no need to involve money hungry corporations.

But that’s all hot air coming from me now, I know, so I’m going back to work now to materialize this

The beans are growing like crazy now. There are beans to be harvested every three days, both runners and the smaller ones. The trellis is made from nine bamboo sticks held together with plastic ties (yes I know – it’s not a very sustainable lifestyle with all that plastic ). I have an earlier picture showing the bare trellis here.

I had to secure the trellis with two pieces of string since the winds are rather strong around here. We’re not that far away from the coast. It’s seems to be holding up, so I’ll definitely be growing beans next year too. The fridge is already well packed with beans for the winter.

In the middle of the picture we have the runners, Phaseolus Vulgaris Promotor, and to the right we have Phaseolus Vulgaris Maxi. On the left you can see white mustard but yet only as small plants. They are supposed to collect nutrients from the soil so they won’t go to waste during the fall and wash down with the rain. Then the plants will be harvested and put in the composting box.

There are some small bugs sitting on the short bean plants, but they don’t do any harm, they just sit there. The cats chased all the birds out of the garden, so I guess there are no enemies to eat them, so why not just sit and relax and enjoy the sun