Conservation of Mass

One of the most profound things I learned in school was during my 8th grade Physical Science class and it has remained with me over the years. The Law of Conservation of Mass states (very roughly) that in a closed system, the mass of that system will remain constant over time.  The implication of this law is that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. It is simply reordered through a series of chemical reactions.

At a practical level this has huge implications. In the natural world, trees lose their leaves every year and those leaves enrich the soil for other plants. Plants turn energy and nutrients into plants, small animals eat the plants and turn them into energy, waste (which enriches the soil) and animal. Predators eat the small animals and turn them into energy, waste (again, enriching the soil) and predator. When the predators die, bacteria decompose the body and turn it back into free energy and its component parts again making it available for the plants. It's a brutal, yet elegant system. There is no waste. Everything is recycled and becomes nutrients for something else.

Consider this... If I bag all my grass clippings and take them to the dump, I am removing matter from my property and placing it in a landfill where it will eventually decompose, creating waste greenhouse gasses and leftovers. If I rake up and burn my leaves every fall I am using a chemical reaction to oxidize the leaves. The components of those leaves are not gone. The ashes represent what remains of the leaves on my property but the bulk of them were changed into hot gasses that were released into the atmosphere. In both cases, I am removing potentially useful matter from my property and creating waste rather than using it for my benefit. Likewise, when I drive my car to take the grass clippings to the dump, I am using the gasoline to produce energy to move my car by burning it. The gasoline is not gone, though. It is simply changed into heat and energy with the by products released into the atmosphere though the tail pipe in the form of waste gasses and water vapor.

Barry Commoner, a prominent biologist, ecologist author and former presidential candidate who passed away in 2012, wrote the book, The Closing Circle. In this book he draws on the Law of Conservation of Mass when he set forth his four laws of ecology. They are:

1. Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all. 

2. Everything must go somewhere. There is no "waste" in nature and there is no "away" to which things can be thrown.

3. Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system"

4. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.

Commoner's four laws are so obvious, yet so easy to overlook that it's scary. We are all interconnected - in so many ways. This is not just a World of nations, We are a planet of people and other species with a shared future. Landfill space is becoming scarce and nobody wants one in their back yard. We have developed farming methods that deplete and poison the soil for the microorganisms that live in it while the run off is polluting our rivers and oceans.

Finally, Law #4 is probably the most profound to me. We continue to use our resources faster than they can be replenished. We burn them, use them, break them down into their component parts, mix them together so their not recyclable and then throw them into the landfill where they sit forever, never to be seen again. One day those resources will be gone.

One of the best things we can do for our planet and everyone/thing on it is work to eliminate waste and/or harness it to our benefit. That's where the three R's come into play.

Reduce - Cut back on the stuff we use. Reduce trash, reduce stuff, reduce size, cut waste, or find more efficient ways of doing things.

Reuse - Find other purposes for things that are no longer needed or wanted OR find someone who wants it when you're done rather than sending it to the landfill

Recycle - Cut the amount of resources that go into a dump never to be seen again. Recycle waste food into useable food for other things and compost. Maximize your recycling program at home and work.

These are some of the things that drive our thinking here at Red Clay Farm. We try to find ways of keeping our organic material here on the farm and using it to our benefit rather than sending it to decompose in the landfill. We also work to reduce our waste as much as possible. Here are some of the ways we do that.

Animal Manure - This is composed of grass from our pastures, hay and feed that we have brought in to our farm. It is gathered routinely and composed with straw, leaves or grass clippings. We use it to spread back on the fields to enrich our soils. This way, we get more benefit from the money we spend on hay and feed. Not only does it go to keep the animals alive, but what is not useful to the animals is useful to the grass, and the microorganisms living in the soil.

Left-over human food - We make every effort to not send food scraps to the dump as well. vegetable matter gets put in the compost pile. Meats, fats and other non-compostable items get fed to our Black Soldier Fly Larvae (more on these in a later post). These guys make short work of any table scraps and, in turn, provide a tasty supplement to our chickens and, eventually, our aquaponics fish (our vegetarian tilapia don't like them). In this way we are turning our food scraps into chickens and eggs.

Paper, cardboard, etc - These items are shredded and used for various things such as worm bedding, chicken coop bedding and composting. We use broken-down cardboard boxes for sheet composting in the garden.

Recyclables - Our county recycles plastics, aluminum and glass so we make sure we support these programs.

Water - We live on a gentle slope that starts at the top of the property and runs towards the back of the property toward a creek. The contour of the property naturally channels rain water down the middle of the property. We are now developing a plan to try to stem the flow of water off of our property and keep as much of it as we can. Additionally, we are installing rain barrels at the gutter down spouts to keep that water as well.

Usable stuff - Items that we no longer want or need are donated to the local Habitat for Humanity Re-Store and to Goodwill.

We still have a long way to go, but we've started. Anything that we can use to enhance or enrich our farm stays on the farm. Anything that can be recycled in some way or another is. In this way we have greatly reduced the amount of trash we send to the land fill.

Hopefully this is not too long and manifesto-sounding. The long and the short of it is we can't just throw things away because there really isn't an "away" these days. All we need are a basic understanding of the natural laws of the world, some integrated solutions based on that understanding, and a willingness to make the changes in our lifestyle to implement those solutions and we can begin to make huge changes in the way we affect the Earth.

The Bokashi Experiment

Our new composter and bokashi bran

Let me start by explaining that we don’t have trash service where we live. We take our trash to the recycling and trash drop station every few weeks. Food scraps don’t go in the trash cans at our house. Otherwise, the they would be so stinky by the time we got to the transfer station that nobody would want to take it. Further compounding our food scrap problem, we don’t have a garbage disposal because we’re on a septic system.  

All of our vegetable matter goes to the compost pile where it eventually turns into a nice, dark compost. That leaves all the rest of the food scraps; meat, fish, non-veggie matter, etc, that we have to do something with. We can’t put them in the compost pile because they will draw unwelcome visitors, bugs and will smell bad, we don’t have any animals that would eat them (besides Buddy the Farm Dog, but he has a temperamental  stomach), we have no garbage disposal and we can’t leave it in the trash.

So… what is a family to do? Previously, we saved all the scraps in a plastic bag and froze them until the next trash run. While we have a large freezer with lots of space, this really isn’t a good option either. Food rotting in the landfill produces methane gas and methane is an even worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Enter the Bokashi Experiment…

Bokashi is a Japanese method of fermenting waste using a specific combination an anaerobic microorganisms. Anything can be Bokashi’d; meat, fish, dairy. Supposedly, the microbes complete the fermentation process in as little as two to three weeks. The finished product smells a little sweet and sour and can be buried in the yard, garden or compost pile. It can even be fed to worms (that may be a later experiment).

How does it work? All we really need to bokashi is a bucket with an air-tight lid on it, although I purchased a bokashi bucket with a spigot and a food masher. Food is placed in the bucket and sprinkled with a bokashi growing medium. My bucket came with a bag of bokashi bran. To properly inoculate the food scraps, start with a thin layer of bran on the bottom of the bucket then place about a 1" layer of scraps in small pieces (the smaller the better - this increases surface area), topped with a dusting of bokashi bran. Continue this layering until the bucket is full.

The inside of the bucket with the food masher

Bokashi bran in the bag. It smells a little like
sweet feed with a touch of sour.

The first addition to the bucket.

I started the bokashi experiment on 23 Jan with the remains of the New Year's Eve Party sausage and cheese dip and some leftover dumplings from Tuesday night's dinner. The bin is supposed to stay warm so the fermenting microbes can do their work. Melanie begrudgingly gave me permission to store the bin in the laundry room, which is adjacent to kitchen. That approval is only valid as long as there are no bugs or smells. I'll keep you updated on the progress as we go along. 

Free Straw!

I got a call this week from a guy cleaning out a barn. He asked me if I wanted the old straw he found in the loft. I made a trip (actually a couple of trips) to pick it up today.

What does one do with 84 bales of free wheat straw? Hmmm..... Let me count the ways:

1. Straw bale gardening in the spring.

2. Sheet composting for the garden.

3. Adding organic matter to the lawn and pastures.

4. Erosion control.

5. Sell it.

Items 1-4 are very possible. I don't know if there will be any left for #5.

More on what we do with it later...

5 Things to do with Shredded Paper

In an effort to combat identity theft and reduce the waste we produce in our house, we shred all of our papers with personal identifying information, most of the junk mail and many of the light cardboard food boxes and toilet paper/paper towel rolls that would otherwise end up in the trash can. This makes for quite a supply of shredded paper for which we have to find a use. Here are five ways we use our seemingly never ending supply of shredded paper:

1. Use as a compost additive. Paper has a high carbon content and us usually somewhat absorbtive so it lends itself well to mixing with high nitrogen content compost items such as grass clippings and food scraps.

2. Use as chicken coop bedding. Once every couple of weeks I add a thin layer of shredded paper to the chicken coop. Again, it's high carbon content mixes well with the high nitrogen chicken waste to produce a fairly nice compost once it is cleaned out and stacked for a while. Rather than adding it directly to the garden, we put it in the compost bin and mix it in with the other compost to make sure it cooks for a little while to kill any pathogens.

3. Use as worm bedding. Worms love paper. When starting a worm bed, I will add damp shredded paper to the bed first to give the worms a good start. I also occasionally add the shredded paper to an established worm bed to provide some additional food.

4. Use as a packing material. Cross cut shredded paper makes great packing material. It's free and it's much better for the environment than styrofoam peanuts.

5. Use it as kindling for starting a fire. Shredded paper ignites quickly and burns well, making it an excellent kindling. We use it to start our annual New Years Eve bon fire with great success.

Happy Earth Day!

Today is Earth Day! Take a little time to do something good for this wonderful, beautiful planet that supports and sustains us!

- Plant a tree
- Plant a garden
- Ride a bike
- Walk
- Drive less
- Reduce, Reuse and/or Recycle
- Compost
- Start a worm bin
- Find a way to reduce your energy consumption
- Sit outside and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine
- Think of ways to incorporate some of these things into your day, every day

Happy Earth Day, but lets not limit it to once a year!

Worm Bin Expansion

New worm bins in place. 

Today we expanded our worm family by adding this new set of worm bins. This setup was very simple to make. All that is needed to make this is a clean barrel (that didn't hold toxic chemicals in its past life), one 8' 2x4, a jig saw, a drill with 1/4" drill bit and a straight edge and Sharpie marker for marking the barrel.

I simply cut the barrel in half with a jig saw using a multi-purpose blade following the lines we marked on the barrel. Then, to make the cradle, I cut the 2x4 in half to make 2 each 4' sections. Using the barrel as a guide. I marked the 2x4's with the curved profile of the barrel, placed the 2x4s together and gang-cut the barrel profile. For this I used my band saw, but a jig saw will work, too. Finally, I put two 1/4" holes in the low end of each barrel half to allow the barrels to drain.

I added this to show the profile I cut into the 2x4's

That's all there is to it. To set it all up, I placed the 2x4's parallel on an old pallet and put the half barrels on top. After creating the bins, I added shredded paper on one end of the barrel for bedding and wet it down to the consistency of a wet sponge.

We filled the half-barrels with a wheelbarrow load of pre-composted worm food each, leaving the shredded paper uncovered. I dumped a half-tray of worm castings and worms from my Worm Factory 360 into each of the barrel halves on top of the shredded paper, and voila.... a couple of new worm bins are born!

The worms loving their home and food

Completed and filled worm bins

Now we just sit back and let the worms do the work. To help keep the temperature somewhat cool and to maintain moisture, I placed the barrels under a shed and put a waxed cardboard box over top of them.

Waxed cardboard will help keep them from drying out too fast
and help to provide the dark environment the worms love.

Pre-Composting Worm Food

I love my experiments!

We've been throwing old produce into the compost bin and layering it with alpaca manure for the past week. The intent is to pre-compost it just enough and feed it to the worms. As you can see by the thermometer (even if it is kind of hard to see), we've started to see an increase in the temperature. It hit 120° today. I expect that it will reach 130° - 140° sometime this week and then start to drop off. When the temps start to drop, I'll mix it up and let it cook again. In about two more weeks, it will be perfect worm food - soft, mushy, rotting and loaded with bacteria and fungus. Yum, Yum!

Isn't science cool?

Grape Pruning Time

February is grape vine pruning time, or so I've heard. I don't think the grapes on our trellis have ever been pruned and the trellis is a little worse for wear as the posts rot from the top down and the cross beams are dry rotting as well.

Back in early January, I got motivated to cut out all the wisteria vines that had wrapped themselves around the trellis and interwoven themselves among the grape vines. That was quite a chore. Once I chopped out all the vine pieces, I shredded them in the chipper and mixed them with a pile of horse manure to do a little bit of composting. Later in the spring, I will spread the piles out on the pasture.

This week, I pruned back the grape vines in accordance with the guidance I found in the Ison's Nursery and Vineyard website here. They provide a variety of guidance on how to care for grape vines, fruit tress and more. I also ordered my strawberry plugs from them and was very pleased with the plants I got.

Anyway, here are the before and after shots. Hopefully I didn't cut they back too much. I am looking forward to a good grape harvest this year!

Here's what the trellis and vines looked like before I pruned them. This fall, there was more wisteria than grape vine.

Here's how it looks now. I replaced a few cross boards and straightened the trellis. That big pile in the middle is grape vine trimmings.

A New Worm Bin

I had some free time today and some scrap plywood left over from a previous project so I decided to expand my worms a little.

What I made was a very simple box, about 3'x1.5'x1.5'. To increase aeration in the wormery, I cut a piece of 1" PVC pipe about 4" longer than the box and drilled holes along its length. To hold it in place and prevent worm escape (or anything else climbing in), I placed some old window screen over the end of the PVC and added a 1" coupling on each side.

Once it was done, I added some pre-composted grass and kitchen scraps from our compost bin As I cleaned out the bottom bin of my Worm Factory 360, I moved the lazy worms who had not made the pilgrimage upward to the newer bins over to my new box. I topped it all off with a large layer of dead leaves for a little bit of insulation and protection.

Our First Compost

This is not our compost but looks very similar

Almost a year after I made our big compost corral, we finally got some good compost from it. I dug out about a cubic yard of deep, dark compost and put it in our garden today.

It was a mix of manure from our horses, our kitchen scraps and a whole bunch of bad fruits and veggies from our local grocery store (Last fall I made a deal to make a daily pick-up of the store's bad produce for about a month). The result was a deep dark compost that looked like black dirt. It had hundreds of volunteer worms in it and a few very juicy grubs. I picked all the grubs I saw out of the compost and let the worms make the short trip to the garden where I hope they'll stay.

We got enough compost out of the bin to put a 3" layer across a 4'x12' area. I didn't mix it in to the dirt, but just left in sitting on top, and planted our fall lettuce/spinach crop right in the compost.  As I think about it, that may not have been a good call. I probably should have mixed the compost into the soil a little, but now the seeds are down and I hate to waste them. We'll see what happens...

Weekend Project - Build a Composter

Our Landscaping timber composter at work.

Supplies:
27 - 8 ft landscaping timbers
6 - 4ft long x 1/2 inch rebar
1 Roll landscaping fabric and galvanized roofing nails (optional)
Total price in Oct 11 - $97.00

Tools:
Drill
5/8 spade drill bit
Hammer
Tape Measure
Saw (to cut timbers in half)

1. Cut 11 of the landscaping timbers in half, making 22 - 4 ft long pieces.

2. Measure 2" from the end of each of these timbers and mare in the center of the timber's width.

3. Using a 5/8" wood spade drill bit, drill half-way through the timber. Do this for three half-length timbers. These will be the base of the composter. Set them to the side.

4. Mark the remaining timbers for drilling. Short timbers should be marked and drilled 2" inches from the end and centered from side to side. Long timbers should be marked and drilled similarly on the ends, but will also need a hole drilled in the middle for the dividing wall.

5. Lay out your three base timbers and place the rebar in the holes drilled half-way through. (not required, but consider placing on top of bricks or cinder blocks so you can get to the compost from the bottom of the composter. This will allow you room to shovel the compost from the bottom of the bin)

6. Place a long timber across the back, then one across the front. Use a hammer to knock the timbers down the rebar if necessary.

7. Check to make sure the base of the structure is square.

8. Continue to add pieces, log cabin-style, until complete.

9. (Optional) Cut lengths of landscaping cloth so they will reach from the top of the timbers to the bottom. Secure in place with galvanized roofing nails. (this is an after thought to my construction. The landscaping fabric will allow air to pass through, but will keep the compost from coming out from between the timbers.

Since you'll be drilling a lot of holes in the same place on each timber, consider making a jig that guide your drilling placement and keep it uniform. Here are some pictures of the simple jig I built for the project.

This is my end hole jig. I would slip this over the end of the timber and make sure the ends of both the timber and the jig were flush, then I'd drill.

This is the jig for the middle holes. I marked each long time at the 4' midway point, then placed the jig on the side of the timber to locate the hole.

Building a Composter

There are a few things to take into consideration when deciding what type of composter to build or buy.

- How much effort are you going to put into composting?
- What, and how much do you plan to compost?
- How much money do you want to spend?

There are composters for every style, compost volume and price range.

With two horses and a garden, as well as our kitchen vegetable scraps, we planned for a fairly large volume of compost - the horses being the biggest producers of waste. We really like to two-bay tumbler-style compost bins but the ones that are big enough are out of our price range. Instead, we opted to build our own. For less than the cost of a small tumbler composter, we built a two-bay, 8X4 composter out of landscaping timbers and rebar.

After doing some research, we settled on a composter in the style of the Compost Corral featured at this link (and in the picture above). We made just a few small alterations to the basic construction. First, we made it taller, using 4ft rebar instead of the 2 ft rebar recommended. Second, rather than making a huge, 8x8 compost pile, we cut some of the landscaping timbers in half and made it 4x8. Last, rather than one big 4x8 rectangle, we placed a dividing wall in the middle to make to 4x4 bins. This way, once one side is full, we can let it "cook" while we continue to add to the other pile.

Tune in to the next blog to see to details on how to build it and how it turned out.

The Red Clay Farmers

Which Composter?

We started composting sometime around 2000. Unfortunately, we usually didn't stay in one place long enough to take advantage of the finished compost. When we first started, our compost pile was just that - a pile of mostly grass clippings behind the back fence. Occasionally we would throw our vegetable kitchen scraps in the pile Later, in 2004, we graduated to a plastic bin-style composter. I was always amazed at how quickly the grass would decompose in a week's time!

Well, our plastic bin-style composter was on it's last legs after two moves and being hit a few times by the riding mower. It was held together with copper wire and duct tape and looked pretty sad out in the back yard. We have been looking for a replacement for a while but didn't want to break the bank.

There are many styles of composters. They come in many shapes and price levels. I had been coveting a Joraform JK400. The JK400 is a top-of the line, tumbler-style composter that sports insulated walls in order to maintain heat. Unfortunately, a top of the line composter comes with a top of the line price and at this point in our lives, it was neither practical, nor affordable, to buy one. I didn't like the plastic, flimsy bin composters we found at the local Lowes, and the tumbler-style composters we found were all too small for our purposes. Since nothing was really meeting our needs, we decided to make our own... I mean, it's only composting. How hard can it be?

We will keep you up to date on our construction.