consider the wealth of your worms

Tis' the season for taking your yard apart. Here is a post from my old blog that seems relevant now.Queen Midge, guarding the beloved compost cage

In my itty bitty yard, I feared a pile of decomposing food matter stinking up my little bit of heaven and avoided a compost pile, until this year. My motivation was three -fold. I was tired of paying big bucks for bagged compost for my flower beds and garden, I realized the amount of food scrap waste I was sending off to the landfill was unnecessary, and I read Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew.Doesn't he look happy about his geometrically arranged flower bed? He is a real do-it-yourselfer when it comes to gardening and has some strong opinions, so naturally I liked his book.

About compost, Mel says: "No home should be without a compost pile--even those without gardens. In fact, I feel that if every family had a mulch pile and used it to recycle their kitchen scraps (except meat and bones) and all their leaves and grass clippings, local taxes would be reduced, the price of oil would drop because we wouldn't use so much, and the balance of nature would be greatly restored."

Well, I'm not going to test Mel's economic theories, but being too cheap to spend more than ten bucks on a compost container I tested one of Mel's great d.i.y. ideas with a few feet of chicken wire and three metal stakes (all of which I pilfered off of my mom's farm. Thanks mom!). Jared and I made a cylinder of the fencing and secured it with wire then hammered the stakes in the ground to form a triangle within the new compost cage to support it. It took us about ten minutes.
So, in goes all my kitchen scraps except meat, bones, citrus and seeds. In goes extra dirt, a little hose water to keep it moist and any other worm food that we produce around here. For the first couple months we transfered any worms, centipedes, potato bugs and other dirt dwellers we would find elsewhere in our yard to the compost cage. Since then, they have upped their numbers all on their own and I am on my way to some delicious "hummus" for my garden, come fall!
Does it stink? NO! Is is a pain in the butt? NO! Do I forget to add to it for weeks at a time and still it continues on? YES! This is my kind of do-good project.
Check out the following link to Mel's page for more tips on how to build and care for a compost heap:
http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

consider eating seasonally, while the getting is still good

Bare with me through this one.
The end of summer is near; I feel it on the air. Two emotions kick in for me: squirrel instincts and dread of winter. I begin to build my nest up for the cold: freezer jam, canning tomatoes, apple pie filling, grape juice, and, later, cleaning house and garden from front to back--it's autumn fever for me, not spring.
When the dread of five p.m. darkness lurks into my thoughts, I remind myself that we are not so distant from our bear cousins. Winter is a good time for turning the furniture toward the fireplace, baking that stored-up apple pie filling, and consuming all the seasons of Northern Exposure (or whatever your fix may be). It's also okay to lay around for four months and gain ten pounds, as long as I come out of my cave running next spring.
ANYWAY, I want to make a huge plug here for canning, freezing, drying, or whatever method you can use to take year-round advantage of home or nearby grown produce. (Check out the ever-helpful and resourceful Utah State Extension for instruction on how to can/dry/freeze/store any foods). Eating in season is one of the greatest dietary decisions we can make to lessen our carbon footprint on the earth. Living in Utah and eating in season can mean a hell-of-a-lot of winter squash, beans and potatoes unless you have:

• done a little (or a lot) of preparation in the fall, and/or,
  
• purchased the greatest cookbook for eating seasonally and really liking it--Simply In Season
  

It is available online (click the title) or at Ten Thousand Villages in Sugar House. Not only does it have the most sure-fire delicious recipes for all the seasonal foods, but it has the best (I'm not exaggerating) brownie recipe ever. The cookbook comes from the Mennonite Central Community.

"Through stories and simple “whole foods” recipes, Simply in Season...explores how the food we put on our tables impacts our local and global neighbors. It shows the importance of eating local, seasonal food — and fairly traded food — inviting readers to make choices that offer security and health for our communities, for the land, for body and spirit."