I just discovered for the first time (thanks to craigslist and my girlfriend) Walkscore! Which as can be imagined, gives you a score for your location’s walkability! Pretty damn cool.
Gives nearest grocery stores, coffee shops, movie theatres, restaurants etc… How well do you score for being able to do everything you want without hopping in your car? Find o
The following is from BalconyCompost fan Alex of Toronto. She is new to the composting scene and made her own custom features to the Simple Style Composter. An early spring in Toronto means some cold compost, here’s what she had to say:
“There has been a bit of a stall due to cold weather the last week or so. I went to add green material yesterday and change buckets, but everything was frozen. Good thing I haven’t bought the worms yet. For brown material I used the shredded paper from my document shredder after doing some research into whether or not it was a good source. Turns out that it is, and I have an abundance of paper shreddings. To turn the bucket once a week, I just dump one into the other. I’ve been doing it after carrying a batch of green material out in the small plastic ice cream bucket I keep on the kitchen counter for food scraps. It serves as a scoop to help transfer material from one bucket to the other.
The buckets are white, but I just painted them black to help them absorb the sun’s heat the compost and cause it to break down more quickly. Sadly, I am running out of room already! I hope the warm weather we are getting now will cause the process to move faster. I would hate to have to dump my green material back into the garbage bin.”
I let her know that running out of room is one of the number one concerns of the Simple Style Composter. Once you fill up one of the buckets you are down to just one bucket without being able to turn it unless of course you go with a third bucket. Time to become friends with a gardener and share your bounty for barter! Also it is a good time to start looking at worms a secondary output for your kitchen scraps. It’s always good to have your buckets for easy drop off access and any composting experimentation you can think of. Not to mention how nice they are to keep your worms safe over the winter!
PLU Stickers! (short for Price Look Up stickers) You know those glossy tiny stickers with the 4 to 5 digits on them describing in a standardized way the type of produce they are stickened upon. Before getting into their compostability let’s learn! (since I just learned myself)
paraphrased from: earthfriendly.com
When it’s just 4 digits they are conventionally grown. When it’s 5 digits and starts with a 9 they are organically grown. When it has a 5 digit code and starts with an 8 – genetically modified.
So they’re on every piece of produce, and those happen to be some super compostable household items. I know I’ve thrown countless stickers into my compost bin, but I’ve also seen those countless stickers in what would be brown composted material. Why aren’t they breaking down?
Half of the PLU stickers in the US come from the same company. When asked about the material components of those stickers they are a “water-resistant polyethylene” aka, not compostable.
My suggestion, peel ‘em off and throw ‘em away. Or else you’ll be picking them out of your compost so you can have pretty garden soil. Worms won’t touch them too, but they won’t hurt them either. So it comes down to an appeal question, do you care about little red yellow glossy stickers in your garden?
