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Reduce Waste: How To Make The Most Of Your Autumn Leaves

May 25, 2022

Reduce Waste: How To Make The Most Of Your Autumn Leaves

The end of the summer garden is always bittersweet for me. I miss my daily fresh cut lettuce but I also love the falling leaves and bright reds and oranges of autumn. Luckily, those fallen leaves are more than just pleasing to look at. In this helpful guide, we’ll walk you through a few easy ways to use your fallen autumn leaves as a zero waste and cheaper options around your place.

This is a great way to make use all of those gorgeous fall leaves laying around. Let's get sustainable!

The end of the summer garden is always bittersweet for me.  I miss my daily fresh cut lettuce but I also love the falling leaves and bright reds and oranges of autumn. Luckily, those fallen leaves are more than just pleasing to look at.  In this helpful guide, we’ll walk you through a few easy ways to use your fallen autumn leaves as zero waste and cheaper options around your place.

One of the best sustainable and organic ways to help prepare your garden is to add a mulch, and the beautiful fallen leaves of autumn are a great way to this.  According to Ready Nutrition, in the gardening community, leaves are huge.  When they are composted they become known as “black gold,” a nutrient-rich material that can be used in a multitude of ways in the garden.

The life cycle of a leaf begins when a tree makes its leaves in the spring. The tree concentrates all of its energy and nutrients into making the leaves because the more leaves there are, the more photosynthesis can occur.  When the leaves drop in autumn, they create a ground cover for the trees to conserve moisture.  As the leaves decompose, they provide the tree with nutrients and resupply the depleted soil with microbes…

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Common Composting Problems and Solutions for the Beginning Composter

April 18, 2018

COMMON COMPOSTING PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS FOR THE BEGINNING COMPOSTER

Composting is standard practice on any permaculture site. This is the case for several reasons. It creates a closed waste cycle between vegetable scraps and vegetable production, often with the added bonus (an in-between stop) of animal fodder. It helps to rebuild or maintain healthy, balanced soil by feeding the soil life and creating a steady replenishment of nutrients, and nutrient-rich soil makes for nutrient-rich food. In simple terms, composting is a most useful natural process that any human-supporting, sustainable system needs.

While it is standard practice to compost, that isn’t to say that doing so is always foolproof or works out exactly the way folks are aiming. There are many methods to make compost. Some sped up the process into 18-day creations. Others, such as with composting toilets, go through a year-plus of maturation before they are considered user-friendly. There are even composting systems that gurgle and burp out methane gas that can be used for cooking. In all these incarnations, at some point, something is bound to go wrong.

However, what most people do with compost bins is somewhat in between, something in which the peels of potatoes or bananas, the remnants of breakfast or garden pruning, are meant to decompose into rich earth with minimum effort. That’s a perfectly legitimate way to make compost as well, but it’s also the one from which people are often turned off with composting altogether. These bins turn into sludgy messes or stagnant piles of organic garbage, causing would-be composters to throw up their hands and call it quits.

But, the solution might be something really simple.

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Vermicomposting–A Great Way to Turn the Burdens Into Resources

March 24, 2016

Vermicomposting 01

VERMICOMPOSTING – A GREAT WAY TO TURN THE BURDENS INTO RESOURCES

Thousands of tons of foods are being wasted everyday throughout the world and due to their improper management, they are creating further trouble polluting the environment. Though wasting food is not a matter to be happy with; but if it cannot be stopped at least the wastes can be managed in some beneficial ways. Vermicomposting is the process which will protect the environment from the pollution of food scraps, kitchen wastes and other organic wastes in one hand and will give you a great organic fertilizer and healthy crop production on the other.

VERMICOMPOSTING AND VERMICOMPOST

Latin word ‘Vermi’ means worm; thus ‘Vermicomposting’ refers to composting with worms. In vermicomposting, various organic waste materials are broken down by using worms, bacteria, and fungi. These organisms are nature’s vitally useful tools to decompose organic materials. So, vermicomposting is a process that boosts up nature’s process of decomposing organic waste materials and produces a very useful end product.

Vermicompost, the end product of vermicomposting process, is a heterogeneous mixture of decomposed organic wastes, bedding materials, worm castings, decomposed worms as well as other decomposer organisms, worm cocoons etc. The worm castings, one of the major components of vermicompost, contain lower levels of contaminants and higher levels of nutrients than the organic wastes do before vermicomposting. Vermicompost is rich in many water-soluble nutrients which makes it an excellent organic fertilizer.

PLANT NUTRITION WITH VERMICOMPOST

In optimum conditions worms consume huge amount of organic wastes in a day, as much as their own weight at least. After consumption, they take their nourishment from the micro-organisms residing in the wastes; and when they excrete their casts contain an increased number of micro-organisms.

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Humanure is No Laughter Matter, Part 2: The Easy-Does-It Instructions

November 13, 2015

Humanure is No Laughter Matter, Part 2: The Easy-Does-It Instructions

So, it would seem with one mountain of humanure now behind us—that, without a doubt, we should be composting human feces and urine (and, some would say, will eventually have no real choice in the matter)—it is now time to address exactly how this movement should begin. For those who missed last week’s article, please feel free to hit the pause button for a recap or simply press on knowing that we adequately explained that bathroom composting is a world must-do.

In urban settlements, the cities proper, where back gardens don’t exist and life is more or less walled-in, there are ready-made composting toilets suitable for the run-of-the-mill, high-rise apartment. These are stand alone, often electrically run, designs that deal with excrement right away, typically drying it out and leaving behind but of miniscule fraction of what originally exited. This, of course, works fine and is a viable solution for urban, suburban and even rural situations.

However, this article is meant for those of us who are in less urban circumstances. We are talking the ¼ acre or more crew with compost bins of our own, a penchant for growing edible landscapes, and a realized pursuit, at least in part, of the agricultural side of self-sufficiency. For those folks, missing out on humanure compost is something that can (and should) be remedied ASAP and easily.

Suburban Vegetable Garden Run Off Humanure (Courtesy of SuSanA Secretariat)
Suburban Vegetable Garden Run Off Humanure (Courtesy of SuSanA Secretariat)

THE ONE-PARAGRAPH REVISION OF WHY IT’S THE TIME FOR CHANGE

Human feces and urine are valuable cycles within the natural system. By taking them out of it via flush toilets, we are leaving the land depleted of useful nutrients, essentially taking out the soil-replenishing part of the garden to mouth to soil back to the garden circle. We are also wasting a massive amount of fresh water and seriously polluting our landscapes and water sources, including lakes, rivers, oceans, and underground springs.

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Canadians piling up more garbage than ever before as disposables rule

September 30, 2015

Canadians piling up more garbage than ever before as disposables rule

There’s a high price to pay for our love affair with products of convenience

We like to think we’re behaving like model citizens, hauling our recycling to the curb and composting our banana peels. But the sad truth is, Canadians are piling up more household garbage than ever before. It appears that even in an era of environmental awareness, we just can’t quit our love affair with convenient, disposable products.

Unfortunately, all that convenience is costing us both environmentally and financially.

According to Statistics Canada’s latest data, the total amount of trash that Canadian households tossed increased by almost seven per cent since 2004 to 9.6 million tonnes in 2012. Although the population rose at a slightly faster rate over that period, the growing trash output is still startling considering the significant ramping up of the country’s many recycling and composting programs over those years.

“I’m not totally surprised but I am disappointed,” says Emily Alfred, waste campaigner with Toronto Environmental Alliance. She says a big culprit is the rapid pace of disposable products piling up in the marketplace.

“The rate of product design and new things being put on the market is faster than most municipalities’ [recycling systems] can keep up with,” she says.

Can’t get enough of convenience

recycling frozen vegetables

Frozen vegetables in stand-up plastic bags on display in a store freezer. The City of Toronto cannot recycle these bags. (CBC)

One good example — those convenient resealable plastic bags often containing frozen fruit or vegetables that stand upright in a grocery store’s freezer. “It’s great for advertisers because you can now see their products,” says Alfred.

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