Makerr... Monday: Tin Can Planter

Photo from Apartment Therapy

[Charles] So I'm a day behind on Maker Monday. The good news is I found a super cool repurposed planter on Apartment Therapy that fit the bill today. They took an oversized vegetable oil can from a restaurant and fit a little tree in it. They had to do a little metal work to get the top off and roll the edges down, but all in all it's a pretty quick little project. Seems like the perfect thing for a miniature lemon or olive tree... Here's the link for the how to

Maker Monday: Compost Bin with Style

Photo from Tiny Meat

[Charles} Saw this one last week on Re-Nest and knew it was gonna make the list. I have two - half -hearted composters for my leaves which are marginally ugly but also not totally functional. I built a three sided box for one that makes it easier to turn over the leaves but also they spill out and look pretty bad most of the time. The other one is a round piece of fencing that is chock full of leaves. It's prettier but also near impossible to turn the compost when it gets too full. So anyway, I like this idea. Way prettier and it should get a little more air circulating. The front boards are slats that can pulled out to access the compost. I wonder how to keep it from getting too dry? Maybe a solid bottom? Most of all, if I can make one like this, I should get a lot less weird looks from visitors about my strange composting attempts... Sounds like they got the plans for it here.

Maker Monday: Cinder Block Wall Planters

Photo from Annette Gutierrez
[Charles] Here we go folks. I may have finally figured out how to pretty up the end of our ugly driveway... I've been thinking about this for a while but I haven't seen anybody ready (crazy enough) to try it until now... Take a bunch of cinder blocks which are cheaper than most pots and stack em and plant them to make a living planter wall. Super cheap. This one used landscape super adhesive which is really strong stuff - we used it on our $5 block seats a few years ago. They also used wire cloth and rocks to keep the soil from leaving in a hurry. We've recently started up a nice batch of succulents and I agree that would be the way to go on something like this... Thanks Treehugger!

Can I Avoid BPA While Canning?

Photo from Treehugger
[Charles] I've never canned anything before. Heck, I am just now getting good at growing things in the garden. We recently got one of those free mags that the big box stores ship out to inspire you to come in and buy some stuff and "change your life". This one had an "article" (read - wordy advertisement) about canning your own vegetables and fruit from the garden. Well actually this is something that was on my mind lately because the discussion around the garden often centers on what is available each season. Canning allows you to take things like those awesome tomatoes from summer and bring them out in winter for tomato soup. So anyway, basically all of the traditionally canned stuff in the store has BPA lining the can, yep even the green beans that we eat almost every week!

So canning avoids that with the glass jar right? But wait... what's on that metal lid ? You guessed it! Friggin BPA again! Until our government and all of its corporate arms get rid of this stuff, we are going to have to be dilligent to avoid it. So here you go. I found some lids that don't have them so you can avoid the nasty stuff when you finally get around to storing those awesome strawberries that will make the most amazing pie for Thanksgiving.

One place is called Lehmann's which doesn't come out and say it's BPA free but according some they might be - I'm not convinced yet. The option that most people seem to agree on is called Tattler which is very vocal about its lack of BPA. There are also some jars called Weck that are apparently more expensive but might be found at yard sales. So good luck folks on all that canning (here's the how-to), it sounds like a lot of work but just like gardening the rewards are well worth it.

Do Florida politicians understand waste at all?

Photo from Robin Milcowitz of SHCG

[Charles] I've received a couple of emails and faxed a few protest letters this week against a bone-headed bill called HB 569, as in "569 ways to waste mulch". Let me be clear, I'm not a very good gardener or protester, and my cop-out answer is the same for both, because I'm soooo busy! Right, I know, everybody's busy, and that's why this year I resolved on Earth Day to do more letter writing and email forwarding on environmental issues. (I decided that this year I would make an Earth Day resolution as my contribution to the celebration, but that's a different post)

So anyhow, these people, we'll call them "legislators" for lack of a better term, have decided that one of their very favorite ways to champion alternative energy is to use something we call waste to energy. I like to refer to it as "wasted energy" because honestly it's sort of like saying well, "I'm going to burn tires for heat this winter to cut down on all those nasty emissions from the coal plant." So "waste to energy" is the darling of waste management folks in many places including Florida because you can avoid making a new landfill and burn bad stuff and make energy, and who wouldn't like that? Well, what if the fuel in your fire was say... dollar bills? That's not something I'd want to make a log out of, but what do I know right? That's silly anyway, nobody advocates burning dollar bills for energy do they? Well... If you are one of the thousands of gardeners and landscapers and farmers that uses the mulch that is generated in our system right now that is exactly what you are talking about.

Wasted money - You see, in Tampa I can put out a separate can of yard waste - leaves, limbs, and grass clippings and those travel separately to a mulch maker like Mother's Organics out in Seffner that upcycles them into mulch and compost that they can sell back to customers like gardeners and farmers and me. This is apparently a waste of a perfectly good source of methane though. Yep, if we could just get this stuff into our landfills and let it ferment then we could make one of the most noxious greenhouse gases around. Wait, what?! Yep, that's right we can make good ole clean burning methane (except it's not so clean and pretty hard to capture). On top of that in Florida, they don't really want to tap methane, they just don't want to have to send two separate trucks and deal with two separate waste streams.

That means that all of that useful organic material that we work hard to harvest from our yards will go right in the pile of stuff to burn. How about this for a protest? How about let's all pile up our leaves and sticks and go right back to burning them in our yards like we did in the 50's? That way at least I don't have to buy back the energy from them after they burn it for me!

Okay, now that you are as annoyed as I am, please take sixty seconds and follow the link below and pass along how you feel about this bill to those folks in Tallahassee that know so much more about what's good for Florida than you or me...

Mulch not Methane...

or link here...

http://greenflorida.wufoo.com/forms/mulch-not-methane/

This easy link was setup by the amazing folks at Green Florida that have been instrumental in projects that we proudly support like our Seminole Heights Community Garden as well as all of the community gardens that they have helped grow. For additional info on Green Florida

For more information, the original letter from Green Florida is here:
http://green-florida.org/uploads/Veto_HB569.pdf

Also, to get involved with our Community Garden here: http://seminoleheightscg.ning.com/

Composting stinks!

So we started composting this last year in hopes of doing some real gardening. We do have a small garden (six plants so far) and a pile of compost. We started composting really naively with a pile of leaves in the yard a few years ago. Then I read to mix in compost and manure mix from the garden center. That seemed to help break down the leaves. This year we found a little book called, appropriately, The Little Book of Compost. This book has recipes for compost and lots of help on how to do it right, including what should and should not be composted. Veggies good. Cooked food - not good. Coffee grounds - good. Meat scraps - not good. So at first we just dumped this stuff on the pile. Then came the ants and then the flies. Not so good. I got the feeling we were doing something wrong. Then some veteran composters at the shop suggested I get a bucket to dump the stuff in first and let it break down a little first. So now we have a plastic lidded trash can outside for the compost. We also have a small plastic bin on the counter for scraps when cooking or changing the coffee. That's when it started to stink. The key is, I think, to not let that little bin on the counter sit too long. Dump it more than once a week. We also bought some Bio Bag Composter bins we are going to try. They say it helps evaporate the water and keep the compost from getting sludgy and too wet. We have some in the shop now so if you want to join the experiment, just stop by and pick one up.