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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.

Spinach is one of the first crops that can be harvested in my garden. This year I let my spinach rows bolt after picking fresh spinach leaves for weeks before that. The plants grew flowers and began producing seeds on the stems. When they started turning yellow I removed the plants from the beds to avoid spoiling the seeds due to rain. I’ve hung up the plants beneath the roof in the garage in order to dry:

Spinach seeds are clustered in small spots on the stems. I’ve counted up to 10 seeds in each cluster but some only have 2. The seeds are beginning to look like “pro” seeds :

I look forward to finding out if they’ll actually germinate and what the next generation of spinach plants will look like and taste like.

Here’s an interesting video from YouTube about back yard sustainability. Janaia Donaldson is interviewing Scott McGuire from Oregon about the project he’s running in the backyard of his rented property. The picture is lagging but that’s worst in the first 10 minutes when they talk face to face. After that they take a tour in Scott’s garden and the lagging becomes tolerable.

In the video you’ll find:

• Experimenting with growing wheat and amaranth
• Growing a medicine border
• Growing sun flower seeds
• Greenhouse for starting plants from seeds
• Drying herbs in greenhouse
• Dog kennel as chicken house
• Growing food for your animals
• Crimson clover as nitrogen fixer

and some other small but interesting things: