Category Archives: Composting

Installing a Rain Water Collection Tank

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I brought my 1,000 liters (264 gallons) water tank with me from the old place thinking I would set it up again to collect water for the kitchen garden from a roof top. Fortunately a nice big roof is available here with rain gutter:

The ground has a heavy slope which means that the water tank is standing on the ground about half a meter (1.6 ft) below the floor of the carport.

I found out that I had a bit of cleaning to do of the gutter which had been neglected by the previous renters. It simply won’t work with all that organic material stuck in the gutter:

I managed to unhook the gutter to ease access:

And found this – the gutter was absolutely stuffed:

But I don’t mind – it’s actually very good material for composting, and almost entirely decomposed. I’m wondering how long it’s been in there ;-) A couple of years maybe?:

Yummy! The worms in the compost pile are going to love it (along with the kitchen scraps, tomatoes, cucumbers, kitchen paper rolls and what not):

I gave the rain gutter a thorough hosing to clean it up as I don’t want too much crap in my water tank:

And now on to the clever part of this project: A water “thief” (I don’t know the English word for this baby ;-) ):

This is a device you insert somewhere in the rain water drain pipe which will divert the water flow away from the main pipe and into a tank or whatever.

And this is an illustration showing what’s on the inside:

Only when the small pipe on the right side is full of water it will start to pour over the edge on the inside and down into the main pipe. Until then most of the water goes into the small pipe, but of course a small part of it will fall into the opening in the middle, but I don’t think it will be anything significant.

This next picture is showing the piece inserted in the main pipe:

Because of the sloping ground the small diverting pipe needs to be 4 m (13 ft) which makes the whole thing look like something from a cartoon ;-) :

but hey – it works®!:

I’m ready for the rain.

How to Build a Compost Using Chicken Wire

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As the lawn is beginning to look more and more like a real kitchen garden I’m collecting lots of material suitable for composting. I picked a spot next to my rain collector for my new compost pile:

Four pieces of round pressure treated poles are placed in each corner:

I’m using metal chicken wire to form a box. In the picture below you can get sense of the heavy sloping of the garden down towards the stream at the lower end. There’s a 10 cm (4 inch) gap in the right corner of the box due to the slope of the ground:

The lazy man’s guide to fixing chicken wire to a pole ;-) (I really have to cut down on my use of plastic cable binders – they don’t decompose well):

Finally I have room enough to store composting material separately before building the entire compost heap. Notice the open field in the background. It’s a pleasure to be this close to nature, instead of the bricks and concrete I was used to:

The reason for storing the different composting materials before building the heap is that the different materials will be more likely to get good contact with each other, because you’ll be able to spread out thin layers of each type:

In the past I used to throw in a very thick layer of grass cuttings each time I mowed the lawn (‘greens’), and much later I would throw in a lot of ‘browns’ and the materials would not get mixed and start to decompose. In small places a compost tumbler would be preferred as this would ensure that greens and browns would get properly mixed.

I watered my new compost heap after building so if everything goes well it will start to heat up and turn the waste materials into new compost to be used in the garden.

Food4Wealth Review

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Here is my review of Jonathan White’s product called Food4Wealth. Jonathan has over 20 years of experience as an environmental scientist and horticulturalist. He claims that if you follow his program in the form of an eBook and related videos you can save up to $5,000 per year, and that may indeed turn out to be Food4Wealth if it holds true.

The product consists of an 80 page eBook, a project plan, and videos with a total length of approx. 60 minutes:

  • Dimensions: 8:24
  • Creating a Frame: 3:07
  • What Goes in the Frame: 7:53
  • Putting up a climbing frame for peas and beans: 2:03
  • Adapting your existing vegetable garden: 2:12
  • Composting: 4:46
  • Planting out your Plot: 5:07
  • Planting a Seedling: 2:25
  • Self Seeding: 4:11
  • Maintenance: 5:10
  • Seasons: 6:52
  • Potato Beds: 3:16
  • Mini Food 4 Wealth Plot: 2:58
  • Food 4 Wealth Fruit Farm: 5:20

I paid $39.97 for the Food4Wealth product.

How does Food4Wealth work

It is truly unbelievably simple, which Jonathan points out himself, but he says it should not keep one from using the system. He says that there are probably many within the profession who would reject it compared to the traditional orthodox horticulture, which he says is about solving problems. Food4wealth is different in the way that you build a system from scratch, which is in a position to solve its own problems, like an untouched natural ecosystem does. He uses the example of a rainforest. In such a system there will always be great diversity unlike traditional monocultures. And it is exactly this diversity that protects the system, for example when he plants various plants close to one another. A single lettuce head next to a single tomato plant, etc. It reminds me of what I do in my raised beds where I plant a row of one type of vegetable, and the next row is then a second type of vegetable, but Jonathan then takes the idea further to the extreme where all vegetables are mixed together in one big mishmash. Another important aspect of the system is that it also takes care of the sowing itself, i.e. self-seeding. After some years there will be so many seeds dormant in the bed that every spot is filled by vegetable plants and weeds will not have a chance. As he says, nature does not allow empty niches. They will gradually be filled by the right plants in the right place at the right time. A bonus that comes with this diversity is that pests are totally confused because they cannot find their desired plant in this jumble. All of this makes sense and the claim is that it works and you can harvest something from the garden every day.

An important part of the system is that the soil is disturbed as little as possible because digging dries out the soil, so one of his golden rules here says that the soil must never be left bare. Digging disrupts the system and the first plants that show up to restore balance are the weeds, which we do not want in our gardens. Weeds are the ultimate niche fillers. So it’s all about constantly covering bare soil with compost, which you produce yourself, if you follow the system. Many books have been written about composting, so that’s not something new here. But yes, it is clearly a natural thing to do to make it yourself out of kitchen scraps.

The less bare soil you have, the less it dries out and the less you will need to water. So – be generous with the compost at all times. And here is another thing which is somewhat new to me. He even recommends that compost contains the seeds of wilted plants. I have been accustomed to removing seeds from the things I put on the compost, but it’s logical when you think about it – but only the correct seeds, so they can sow themselves. Then you even save money on seeds. This system is very much about freedom.

The system is built entirely from scratch, for example on top of existing lawn. It doesn’t matter. You put these layers in a wooden frame or another kind of frame:

  1. Newspapers
  2. Hay
  3. Fertilizer
  4. Hay
  5. Compost

As the years go by you constantly fill empty spots with compost, and the small ecosystem takes care of itself and live its own life. If you take good care of it, it will take good care of you, in the form of fine vegetables.

He talks about summer crops and winter crops, and recommends a few kinds of vegetables as being more than enough to provide for you and your family:

  • Swiss Chard (Silverbeet)
  • Spring Onions
  • Carrots
  • Snow Peas
  • Lettuce
  • Celery
  • Zucchini
  • Tomatoes
  • Potatoes
  • Rhubarb
  • Parsnip
  • Cucumber
  • Corn
  • Pumpkin

He claims that the system can be maintained with only 8 hours of light work – per year! I actually believe him, and the project plan also shows why it could be true.

What I like about Food4Wealth

* Jonathan White has a great energy and enthusiasm and I cannot help but get moved by it. He’s like, “come on now, let’s change the world for the better, and here’s how we’re going to do it – you know it works, right?”, and he is convincing in his explanations. He has spent much of his childhood in the Australian bush, and it seems like he has either talent or intuition on how things fit together in the small ecosystems that he talks about in Food4Wealth. All of this also results in a convincing sales page, which probably sells a lot.

* The fact that he makes use of video as much as he does works quite well, rather than simply using an eBook. For me personally it’s easier to remember key points when I’ve seen a video. There’s more bandwidth, and more information coming through.

* I like that the system is so simple and I just sit back and nod, of course, of course; it seems very smooth, intuitively and sustainable. The fact that he provides plant lists and a project plan is quite good because you can quickly get started without knowing very much about how and why the system works. He is well structured and organized, and that he emphasizes on getting away from control and instead move toward freedom gets a big plus in my book.

What I DON’T like about Food4Wealth

* Sometimes he acts a bit over the edge because he’s so excited about this. It sometimes makes his videos a bit too ‘new-age, peace, hugs and love’ according to my taste. It’s okay, but I just know that I react to it and it interrupts my learning process.

* Another thing that is annoying is the sound volume in the videos, which are blown up when the jingles are played, and turned down when he speaks. And there are many jingles in the videos. It would be nice to get the volume normalized through an entire video, so you don’t have to turn the volume up and down all the time. His “studio” seems quite small and it would be nice to see more space around him. It seems crammed.

* He mentions that you can use railway sleepers to create frames for the beds, but it is certainly not something you would do in my area, as they are treated with some very toxic substances. It may be that it’s a different situation elsewhere in the world or that I have misunderstood what he says about this.

* He treats potatoes a bit different within the system, but still as part of the system. I don’t understand why he doesn’t let them take care of themselves with self-seeding instead of using the traditional method, where you save some of your harvest for next year, which will then be clones, and therefore not adapted to the ever changing conditions in the local area. Volunteer potatoes have new and different genes and are therefore hopefully more robust and adapted.

* A general issue related to the purchase of the product is that a relatively substantial tax sneaked into the purchase, which I could not see immediately. I should probably have dug in and read some of the fine print.

Who should buy Food4Wealth

I think it’s best to build the system from scratch, even though Jonathan also tells how to adapt your existing garden to the new system. I would start from scratch with a clean slate, if I decided to try it out. And when you start from scratch then everybody can actually do it, because the product describes the entire system, i.e. the design, construction and maintenance. And since it is quite detailed, I believe very little experience in horticulture is required to get started and succeed. I’m not new to the vegetable garden but I would allocate a piece of lawn for the project if I were to try it out, and then follow the instructions to the letter. The reason I will not begin such a project right away is that I have moved to a rented piece of land where I do not plan to stay for several years, and that is exactly what the system requires, that it will need some years to find a balance with high soil quality and sustainable self-seeding. But the idea of mixing the vegetables completely to confuse pests and the idea of self-seeding is something I might test in a dedicated raised bed.

You can buy Food4Wealth here.