Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

• lunch: scraps left over from the salad or whatever you were making

• dinner: those scraps and ends from vegetables, all of the ends from broccoli stems, all the ends from any onions chopped up or any vegetable, the brownish outer leaves, the wilted part of anything

I collect all that stuff in a big bowl as I cook and take it outside to the pail. Then, once a day, I empty that bucket into the next container, which is my large compost container. These come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. It can be a compost bin. I have a large bin that’s 50 gallons or more. But it could also be a com-post drum that you turn with a handle, or even just a pile in your backyard.

I love turning kitchen scraps—trash—into rich, nutritious compost for my garden.

The important note: If you do decide to start a compost pile in your back-yard and you don’t have a lid on your compost, you must cover it with dirt regularly. You can’t have raw melon rinds out there and different scraps in plain view, uncovered, or you will attract lots of pests that you don’t want, including cockroaches, raccoons, maybe even rats.

What you do want to invite into your compost are beneficial critters: earthworms, grub worms, friendly bacteria, and fungi. They’re going to break down the matter that you put out there in your compost pile or bin or drum.

And you do that by getting the right combination of nitrogen and carbon. Fortunately for me and everybody else, you don’t need to know the exact ratio of nitrogen to carbon. The way to achieve that ratio without remembering the number is simply to have your compost be half green and half brown, and to keep it wet. Just put in layers, half green and half brown.

What do I mean by green? By green I mean:

• green grass clippings

• green plant matter from the garden, things you trim off while doing your gardening activities

• green weeds you’ve pulled

• green table scraps, like the ends of broccoli and lettuce

• seaweed and pond algae count as green materials too, if you have a pond

By brown I mean:

• grass that has wilted or gone brown

• plants that have gone brown and wilted and died

• brown leaves

• pine needles

• shredded twigs

• straw or sawdust (though you’ll need to avoid sawdust from wood that has been treated with chemicals)

• shredded paper—it can be good to add some shredded newspaper to your compost from time to time

Keep your compost moist, but not soaking wet, and turn it occasionally. If your composter is a drum, you just turn the handle. If it’s a bin or a pile, get out the shovel and turn over the materials manually.

Over time, by some miracle of nature, you will have roughly the right ratio of nitrogen to carbon, and you’ll have great compost.

Remember that when we’re talking about kitchen scraps, you can’t compost meat or any bones. You also can’t compost most animal waste, at least not from carnivores, because it contains pathogens and stuff you don’t want around your food.

On the other hand, if you have herbivores, like bunnies, you can add their waste to your compost pile. In fact, animal waste from herbivores can be a great way to get your compost really hot right away—in other words, to get that matter decomposing quickly. It’s like starting a yogurt with a specific culture. To start compost, to get it really hot right away, go to a pony ride and get some horse manure and put that in. Boom! Your compost gets fired up right away. Cow manure and chicken manure work, too.

The funny thing is, there won’t be any smell from this stuff, because you’ll cover the animal waste right away. It’ll be in the center—at the core—of your compost pile, making everything start decomposing really quickly. And you’ll have usable compost for your garden in as little as a month.

Eat Organic

If you follow all the steps and suggestions in this chapter, and don’t use any chemical fertilizers or other products on your plants, you’ll be an organic gardener. But what about the food you buy? As I said earlier, I grow only about 25 percent of the food I eat, so when I’m out shopping for that other 75 percent, I buy organic whenever it’s available.

At one time, the term organic was quite loosey-goosey. Organic could be just a marketing phrase that a company decided to put on its packaging. That ended when the USDA introduced a stricter definition of the term and regulations for its use.

In 1990, the Farm Bill made it possible for the USDA to develop a national set of standards and certification criteria, and it also allowed the agency to come up with some labeling directives for organic foods. Those standards were released in April 2001, so now the USDA essentially has control over what is or is not called organic, and it can enforce those standards.

There are many, many reasons to opt for organic foods, but perhaps the most compelling one is that organic food naturally tastes better. That’s because flavor is the result of lots of different and complex molecules. Healthy, living soil provides a constant and more complex mixture of these molecules, which results in more flavor. It’s like how wine-makers are always talking about the importance of terroir, about the soil and the climate and the general environment in which the grapes are grown. Well, it doesn’t only matter with grapes. It matters with all food.

Clearly, over time, organically grown food is best for us, the environment, and future generations. And it’s big business now, too.

So I buy organic. The other thing I seek out are non-GMO foods, foods that have not been genetically modified. I think that that’s a very dangerous experiment. The possibility of allergic