Holy smokes!

Actually, it's steam, and what's steaming is the compost pile I wrote about yesterday. Now, I've often seen steam when I've dug into a compost heap, but I've never seen an undisturbed pile steaming away like a small volcano.

Hot compost, anyone?

Should you drop by to visit, some bitterly cold night, and find my house locked, and should you be so lacking in good sense or hard cash that you don’t just head for a hotel on Main Street a mile away, I invite you to climb into my latest compost pile. Granted, it’s both damp and dirty, but it’s several cuts above Luke Skywalker’s accommodations, the night he spent in the belly of the beast. And it’s guaranteed to keep you warm. In fact, you might get burnt: the temperature is over 140°F.

Blow by blow: compost tumbler assembly

(Update: If you want to know how to do this quickly, stop reading and check out the Assembly Video at Organic Compost Tumbler. You'll find it in the menu at the bottom of the page.)

Vegetable oil at the ready, I’m poised to assemble my new composter, the one all the folderol was about a couple of weeks back. It's mine courtesy of  Chris of Organic Compost Tumbler in exchange for a review, which won't happen until I've had a chance to put it through its paces.

This Urban Tumbler started its tumbling career early, before it even got out of the box. Boxes, to be precise, as there were two. The wheelbarrow being otherwise engaged, I had to get them into the backyard without the benefit of wheels. I could just get my arms around the smaller one, so off we went together, traveling sideways so I could see approximately where we were going. The bigger one, which contains the tumbler itself, its two halves nested, isn’t outrageously heavy, but it’s so bulky I had to roll it. Of course, I could have put the pieces together and rolled the tumbler itself, but my eagerness  didn’t allow for such rational steps. The back yard is the designated assembly center, and all assembly shall occur there, dang it.

Non-compost-mentis

So here’s the question for the day, people: can I turn a compost tumbler that’s a great fit for someone who’s almost two feet taller than I am? Let me explain.

Just yesterday afternoon I closed a deal with Chris of Backyard Gardening Blog to review what he modestly calls the World's Greatest Organic Compost Tumbler. Now, my first reaction to most offers is to say no, absolutely not, but, well, Chris made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: he’d give me a tumbler in exchange for an honest review, a promise not to sue him if it turns out that I can’t rotate the thing, and my next child. This decision required careful consideration, but after about three seconds I went with the tumbler. (Please don’t tell him I’m 55 and past all that childbearing business.)

Compost Challenge: What’s wrong with this article?

Talk about going out on a limb. On Tuesday, I rashly announced that prizes would be presented to those who could suggest things missing from my extremely long article on compost. I haven't even put up the official rules yet, and already I've been presented with a composting question I didn't cover. (Thanks, Heather.) The question, a quite reasonable one about manure, can be viewed, by those of you who are eager to witness my come-uppance, in the comment section of Tuesday’s post.

But of course, you don't have to merely witness my humiliation; you can participate! You can contribute! And all under the guise of helping me improve the article!

(You know that expression "Rue the day?" I suspect that my own passing acquaintance with it will shortly deepen to intimacy.)

The owner of PN, Eric Vinge, who commissioned this article and who put it up on his Composter Connection site in record time, has agreed to sponsor the contest referred to a couple of days ago. So here's what you do: Think of something that should have been included in  “Compost: in the Bin, in the Garden, and in the Environment” but isn’t, or locate what seems to you the most trivial fact in the wole article, or devise an argument for including a highly un-compost-like item, and win a $25 gift-certificate at Planet Natural.

To those of you who have been breathlessly awaiting the official contest rules, I can now say, Breathe!

Tuesday's post mentioned only one category (“What’s Missing”), but three days on bread and water while being allowed to listen only to Herman’s Hermits convinced the judges to add several others. Here, then, are the official rules, as agreed upon by the board of international judges:

What’s Missing?

Point out a compost issue not covered by this article, or ask a question about composting that’s not answered or at least addressed anywhere in the Composter Connection site, and win a $25 gift certificate from Planet Natural.

(The “or at least addressed” is meant to cover stuff that’s unanswerable or information for which I refer people to other sources or sites.)

Oh—just to take all the fun out of it—Compost Tea doesn’t count. We’re doing a separate article on that. Sorry.

Entries in this category can range from standard-issue to glaring.

--standard-issue omission: The “duh,” category. This is the one that will make me smack my forehead and cry, “I can’t believe I left that out!” while everyone around says, “Well, duh.”

--most glaring omission: This one—oh, when I realize I left this one out, my numbed lips will shape no words save these: “The horror—the horror,” as everyone else at the cocktail party moves away from me, muttering to each other, “She wrote an article on composting and didn’t mention that?” —the mutters growing gradually to a dull roar until the crowd as one moves to toss their drinks in my direction, but just as they draw back their arms,

  “Wait!” a voice cries, and,

  “Saved!” I think; “a voice of kindness and reason at last—”

  “—why waste good liquor?”

  And to cries of “Right!” and “Right on!” they all turn their backs on me and drain their glasses, giving rise to the “anti-toast” and simultaneously proving once again that there actually is something worse than having an entire roomful of people toss their drinks in your face.

For the creatively inclined, we offer the following whimsical category:

The Kitchen Sink

--most tangential omission: What is the least relevant item that I “should” have included? Can you somehow make a case that the Empire State Building should have been in the article? Or pencil erasers? Why? Where?

This category presents contestants with the task of establishing a connection, however tenuous, between compost and—something.  Let us know where you think this item belongs.

ON THE OTHER HAND, some might think that the last thing this site needs is more—well, of anything. For those, we offer the following category:

Enough already!

Name what you consider to be either the least likely or the most trivial fact, story, graph, or photograph in the whole site.

--most trivial: Name what you consider the most trivial fact in the article, the one that made you clutch your hair and cry, “Why this? With wars raging, seas rising, the Dow in the negative numbers and Small Beetle still missing, she bothers with this?”

--least likely: This is the Kitchen Sink turned on its head—the item in the article that out of context, you’d be never think came out of an article on compost.

I’m hoping to get enough of these so that readers can vote for the winner.

Finally, there’s this:

Up for Grabs

This lets the judges grant an award to an entry that may not fit into any of the above categories but that clearly deserves recognition, if only because its author has taken the judges hostage and is once again threatening them with a diet of nothing but Barry Manilow.

JUST TO CLARIFY:

•    The contest refers to the composting article only, not to the items for sale. The article appears in the left side-bar in green type.

•    Multiple entries are encouraged. (The more the better.)

•    A prize will be awarded in each category.

•    We’re not sure what we’ll do for international winners, but we’ll work something out. (Some items can’t be shipped overseas, at least legally, and Eric prefers to remain on the right side of the law at present. His daughter is only seven.)

•    Entries will be accepted through May 17th. That's this year, 2009.

Post entries in the pages on the right sidebar; they're labeled by category, which should make things easier.

Have at it, people.

Contest on the way--try it if you dare

  

Having spent the morning in a mind-numbing fury while trying to print two pages of an IRS document necessary to report the income (ha-ha) from my business (hee-hee) over the past year, I have probably burnt out my two remaining brain cells, as well as ensuring that I will return to earth as a nematode, and probably not the beneficial sort. A quiet acceptance of the world's vagaries was not demonstrated by moi.

On the other hand, THE COMPOSTING ARTICLE IS UP, all hundred and fifty pages of it, looking quite well-behaved and tidy for something so sprawling, even voracious. Amazing, how Eric has reduced the monster that dominated my life for months to a meek little sidebar. (The mysteries of translating a Word document into a website are beyond me; I use “translate” here in its old theological meaning of “to transport to heaven without natural death.”)

Eric by the way is Eric Vinge, of Planet Natural who asked me to write an article on compost. So I did. (If I'd had any idea.... Then again, if he'd had any idea....)  Anyway, now it's got a name ("Compost: In the Bin, the Barden, and the Environment") and a home site (The Composter Connection) and one of those nifty pictures done by Eric's artist, whose name I cannot find, but I promise that when I do, I'll put it up.

This article has got everything, and if you think it doesn't, I dare you to prove it. Come on, put 'em up; let's see your footwork. All that talk don't mean nothin'. Meet me in the alley, and we'll see what you're really made of. Just be sure to bring whatever it is you think you know about composting.

Shake yo’ compost screen

As part of my almost criminally long article on composting (125 pages and counting) I have been looking at compost screens and sifters. Mine is something my husband knocked together in a few minutes—a wooden frame reinforced at the corners fitted with ½” hardware cloth (read: wire mesh). It’s big enough to set down on the big new wheelbarrow I got last summer. I just shovel finished compost onto it and shove it around with my hands; what doesn’t go through goes back into the bin.

It never occurred to me that some people shook theirs--it sounds like way too much work-- until I ran into that guy in the photograph above. But apparently he saw the error of his ways, and found the plans for a two-part sifter where the screen rides on top of a secure frame. Directions for building it are available here, on the Glendale, California website.

Readers’ Questions: Arsenic from pressure-treated wood, Part I

(My most recent absence can be attributed at least in part to the fact that I, along with most of Bozeman's Symphonic Choir, got up at an appallingly early hour on Saturday morning to catch the bus to Billings for a joint concert. We acquitted ourselves honorably (three standing ovations, though one being for Bach's 4th Brandenburg Concerto which features not a note for singers, it's hard to take credit for all three. I'll give it a try, though: we were eloquent even in silence? No? Anyway, after the reception some of us sang all the way home, arriving at those homes about nineteen hours after we'd left them. Such excursions require a day or two to catch one's breath.)

Last week Jen in Maryland left the following comment on my January post “Compost vs. Arsenic: And the winner is--compost!” about dealing with arsenic in garden soil:

As a gardening novice, I placed a small veggie garden next to an old telephone pole in my backyard. It then dawned on me that maybe the soil could be contaminated with whatever they treated the pole with. The house is 60 years old, so I don’t know, but now I’m tempted to give up, for fear of contaminating my family. Advice?

The stuff we are talking about here is the copper chromate arsenate (CCA) that was used as a wood preservative from the 1930s on. By the 70s it had became the outdoor wood-treatment of choice across the United States until concerns that matched Jen's led to its being banned by the EPA, save for a few rare exceptions, in 2003.

Compost, trucking, and other garbage

(Scroll to the bottom for today's bit on Black History Month.)

I find myself today at TruckFlix.com, a website for truck drivers. Interesting. Of course, it is compost that has led me here, albeit via a circuitous route. Here’s a sort of overview of the process: Compost, yard-waste, garbage, landfills, municipal solid waste, cities, New York City.

Put it all together and you get the question, What does New York City do with its garbage?

The answer is that it exports it by truck and rail to Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Virginia, besides sending a fair amount upstate.

Something I’ve learned while digging through the garbage recently: nothing is straightforward, and some of the stories are so ludicrous, so intricate and unlikely, that it’s hard to decide whether to laugh or cry. Toronto, for instance, has been sued by no fewer than three First Peoples (the Oneida, the Chippewa, and the Munsee) over its newly purchased Green Lane Landfill site. And that’s just the tip of that particular garbage pile.

Compost vs. Arsenic: And the winner is--compost!

Several posts back I mentioned in passing that compost can help fix arsenic in soil, and it seems reasonable to explain what the hell I was on about there. To "fix" arsenic is get it to bond with other, stable molecules so that it can neither leach from the soil into the water supply, nor migrate into your vegetables, and thence into you.

I got onto this originally because the news articles about the great Tennessee coal ash spill of '08 kept mentioning arsenic. Arsenic, I learned, occurs in several different forms, but the one that turns up most commonly in coal ash is arsenate(V), the same form that leaches into soil from telephone poles and fences treated with copper chromate arsenate (CCA).

And yes, at least one recent study conducted at the University of Florida found that when carrots and lettuce are grown in soil that's contaminated by CCA, both vegetables absorbed less arsenic when the soil received plentiful treatments of compost.