That’s right. As I sit here typing, there is a light dusting of snow on the ground and the flakes are steadily falling. I’m into snow and all, but this is a bit ridiculous.
Bit I digress. Back to the topic at hand…
I took a trip to Ballantyne Gardens last week and met Tim and Lisa Ballantyne. Tim was busy getting ready for the season - there were boxes everywhere - but he took twenty minutes to learn more about what I’m trying to do. I even got a personal tour of their garden out back. They carry a great range of organic seeds, and Tim has already helped me decide on a basic layout for the garden.
Since we don’t have any space limitations, the maximum size of the garden is dictated by the fact that I don’t want to get too ambitious right out of the starting gate. I’m going to build a fenced-in 10ft x 10ft raised bed (our yard is VERY rocky) and divide it into four quadrants with a 2ft-wide “cross” in the middle as a walkway. That’ll give me 64 square feet of planting area and plenty of fence to grow stuff that needs something to grab onto.
Tim and I talked for a while about companion planting, and he said he’d be willing to help me with that, too.
With that matter settled, I attended a “Master Composting” class at Northern Onondaga Public Library offered by the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency. I learned a lot about OCRRA that I didn’t know and met a lot of folks with a lot of different reasons for wanting to compost. We had newbies who wanted to learn the basics & old hats who wanted to learn the latest trends, unmarried apartment-dwellers & ranch-owning couples, veggie gardeners & flower gardeners - you name the demographic and it was probably represented.
The class was organized by the head of OCRRA’s “industrial-strength” composting program. What he’s doing is amazing. They build rows of compostable material hundreds of feet long and 20 feet high and aerate the pile using a small fan attached to a perforated PVC pipe running down the length. The cost of running the pipe eliminated the need to turn the pile with a front-loader, saving $ and energy. It works so well that he measured temperatures near 170 degrees in the dead of Syracuse winter (after punching through the frozen outer layer).
A few students from SUNY ESF talked about browns and greens, aerobic vs. non-aerobic composting, and a little about the interesting critters we’ll find crawling about in our compost while it’s stewing. A new employee at OCRRA - and their resident vermicomposting expert - also gave a brief presentation on how to get the worms to work for you. My friend Holly is making progress in this wormy area, so I now have two resources should I decide to go this route one day.
At the end of the class we all received a free recycling Blue Bin and a free composting bin. Mine is a model called the Yardwaste Eliminator. It consists of interlocking rectangular plates made of recycled plastic that you can build into any shape you want. I’m going to set it up this weekend.
As soon as it stops snowing.