Easy Composting Method The Best Time To Start Is Now!

Every year I see people burning and bagging leaves, are you one of those people? If so check out this easy and basic process for composting that we have found to work very well.

We stopped giving away our free fertilizer a few years ago and we will never turn back. We now do not throw away any organic material from our yard or kitchen unless it is somehow toxic or gone really, really bad. All of our leaves, sticks, sawdust, chicken manure, food scraps, cardboard, compostable paper products, and much more all end up being processed right back into our garden beds. Is there any other way? I cant imagine going out to the store and buying fertilizers and compost that some company is selling back to the same people that left their yard waste at the curb, doesnt that seem silly?



There are many resources out there on what you should compost and how much of each type of item to put in the pile or bin or whatever you have setup. I go with a simple and very general rule of thumb. We add about 75% carbon material (leaves, saw dust, cardboard, paper, wood chips, etc.). This is the base to any good compost and handily this also makes up the majority of most peoples yard waste (remember that giant pile of leaves you had to rack up last year?). The next ingredient is nitrogen materials (chicken manure, vegetables, plant materials, last years jack-o-lanterns, and all of our kitchen waste). Just to be clear you cannot add any leftovers or meat products to your compost, only things that at one time grew from the ground in some way.

Now that you have all those goodies mixed together the only thing left to do is to wait and turn it over as much as you can remember. I mix mine up about once per week. This allows air to get into the pile and for the bacteria to get to work doing their thing. Many people suggest watering the pile as well but up here in Michigan I would not do that unless it was a drought. I might pour a bucket of nitrogen rich aquaponics water on it if that was needed.

We have found the best way to get started and make sure that our lazy genes dont take over is to keep a small container on the counter in your kitchen for scraps and one just outside your door to move them into every day or two. We use an old mixing bowl inside and an old trash can outside. Once per week or so I take the trash can back to the "pile" and dump it and stir it up with a pitchfork.

If things go well and the pile gets cooking you should be cooked down to useable soil in about 60 days or so depending on your weather. This soil has everything that your plants, flowers, vegetables, or anything else needs to grow. If you do this right you should not need to buy soil, compost, manure, or fertilizers for your garden.

I hope this encourages someone to get started and save some food scraps from ending up in a landfill for goodness sakes!


~The SSL Family Dad

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Nica Impact is Here!

This is the present site for Nica Impact, Inc.

This site is under construction. Please return later for updates. You can find ongoing stories relating to Nica Impact at: www.dougeffinger.com

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Backyard Chickens Is it Really Worth it

In this video, I discuss some of the benefits of having backyard chickens. About six months ago, we decided that we were ready to buy some chickens and dive into animal husbandry in our backyard. While my wife and I had discussed this idea in the past, we had always dismissed it since we live in a small suburban community.

Although we are not in a big city, we do have enough room, but it just didnt seem like something that would fit with our lifestyle or living environment. After all, what would the neighbors say? Dont chickens smell? How much time would be invested in cleaning and feeding the chickens? How much does it cost to feed them, heat the coop, and provide overall care? These were many of the questions that my wife and I had that made us reluctant to get into owning chickens.

After having these chickens for about six months now my views and opinions have changed quite a bit, and we feel many of our questions have been answered. In this video, I share some of my opinions about how the chickens have become a perfect fit into our family. If you have been thinking about owning chickens, I hope you find this encouraging!

Have a good one!
SSL Family Dad

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What is Square Foot Gardening A Brief Overview

Our little homestead is located in a suburban subdivision in southeastern Michigan.  That basically means we have a short growing season and barely anywhere ideal to plant a conventional garden.  Most of our backyard is taken up by our pool and the septic field.  Sooooooo, raised beds it is.  But even better than that, square foot raised garden beds.  Why, you ask?  Here is some information that caught our attention and sold us on the idea to be square foot farmers.


Square Foot Gardening is very intensive.  You can plant more veggies in a smaller space than in a conventional garden.  There is also little weeding (yay!) and because the special soil mixure retains water extremely well, we have less of a chance of killing our plants (we need all the help we can get).


Here are the key elements to square foot gardening:


1.  Raised Beds:  Garden box frames should be no wider than 4 feet x any length, and 6 to 8 inches deep.  We opted for 3 x 6 raised beds.  Todd built ours using free pallet wood, click here to learn more about that process. 

2.  Special Soil Mixture (Mels Mix): 

1/3 coarse vermiculite
1/3 peat moss
1/3 blended compost  (your backyard compost pile is the best option for blended compost, otherwise, you have to obtain several different forms of compost)


3.  The Grid

1 foot by 1 foot grid and must be permanent.  On top of each frame place a permanent grid that divides the box into one foot squares. The grid is the unique feature that makes the whole system work so well.

4:  Plant Spacing:  Depending on the mature size of the plant, grow 1, 4, 9, or 16 equally spaced plants per square foot. Choose fruits and veggies that make sense for your family and for the intensive planting style of the Square Foot Garden.

Here is a great resource for knowing how many plants to plant per square.  Numbers will vary slightly depending on which website you use.
http://plantandplate.com/p-downloads/PlantandPlate-SFG-planner.pdf


TIPS

Here are a few tips that really helped me when planning and planting our gardens:

1.  Plan out your garden first on paper.  I planned out our two beds on this piece of paper. 

This helped me determine how many seeds to buy and start indoors.  Which leads me to the next tip,

2.  Start your seeds indoors, especially if you have a short growing season.  We also got a great jump-start on our tomato plants by using the cloned clippings from the plants in our aquaponics beds.  We started out with plants almost two feet tall!  Learn all about that easy process here.  Best way to start tomatoes in my opinion!


3.  Plant the tallest plants on the north side of your square foot garden beds, especially the veggies that need trellises or supports to grow.  This helps the shorter plants get all the sun they can. 


4.  And here is the most important tip, the tip I read and forgot about, and did not follow.  So please dont be like me.  Water your soil BEFORE you plant your seeds!  I know thats a good idea in any garden, but this soil mixture is the thirstiest, spongiest soil you could ever hope for.  It took me FOREVER to water after I planted, especially since I didnt want to wash away the fragile plants I had just planted.


Learn more and meet the inventor of the Square Foot Gardening method: 
http://www.melbartholomew.com/what-is-square-foot-gardening/






This post has been shared at:  Homestead Barn Hop, Simple Saturdays Blog Hop, The Backyard Farming Connection Hop, Simple Lives Thursday, The HomeAcre Hop, Natural Living Monday, Wonderful Wednesday Blog Hop

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What is Aquaponics

Aquaponics is a system in which aquaculture (the raising of aquatic animals for food) and hydroponics (the growing of plants in water) are integrated to cultivate both plant and aquatic animal life in a controlled, sustainable environment. Although the specific species of plants and animals may differ depending on each system, all aquaponics systems center upon the symbiosis of aquaculture naturally providing plant life with vital nutrients, and hydroponics acting as a natural filter of toxins for aquatic animal life. 

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Presently there is this growing trend of eating only organic food

Presently there is this growing trend of eating only organic food. Yet, not all of the merchandise claiming to be organic are always this way. In addition, it is possible to spend much more on goods claiming to be organic and get lower high quality than the standard vegetables grown with pesticides. The only way you can be sure that the meals youre consuming is 100% organic would be to commence growing it oneself. Now it really is extremely effortless with aquaponics.This new kind of farming is really easy to place in practice, extremely practical and lucrative. There are quite couple of factors you may need in an effort to set it up, issues that are also very cost-effective, so you may not must invest a fortune on pricey equipment. As well as that, it is so easy to mount and start the aquaponic farm which you will need only couple of minutes to know the principles and an additional few to place them in practice. In a matter of days you may location your aquaponic method and start developing your fish. Their role is the fact that of making the bio-nutrients for the plants. When there are sufficient nourishing substances inside the water, youll be able to propagate the seeds then wait for them to grow. Meanwhile you will have to take good care in the fish, to ensure that they continue to make food for the plants. The excellent this can be that you wont have to clean the water for the fish yourself, as that is what the plants will do with their roots. Hence, it will be simpler not merely to develop plants, nevertheless it may also be less difficult to grow fish this way than should you have been setting only an aquaculture.

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Is the Easy To Clean Suburban Chicken Coop Really Easy to Clean

Check out this video to see how easy to clean the Easy-to-Clean Chicken coop really is! When I first had the idea (well my wife had the idea), about owning chickens one of the first concerns I had was about cleaning up the mess. I remembered days of my youth when we had to shovel out the chicken coop, what a mess! Dusty, dirty, smelly, hard work shoveling manure, shavings, and pure filth! I wanted to design a coop that made this job easy and I think that I have attained that goal, what do you think?


The cleanup tray is the heart of the idea with this coop. All of the chicken manure and bedding can be swept into the tray from the nesting boxes and around the edges of the coop in a matter of a few minutes. The tray is then pulled out and taken back to the compost pile to be quickly cleaned up while adding some needed nitrogen to the this falls pile of leaves. The tray can then be returned to the coop and new shavings added, and that is it!


If you have watched some of my other videos you may have noticed that I like to reuse all of our paper products that we use in our home. I use cardboard for landscaping, paper for compost, newspaper for the worm bin, paper towel rolls for trees, and everything else goes into making compressed briquettes for burning in the wood burner.  I am also saving some of the paper shredding that is safe for compost for use as bedding in the coop. It is not that the pine shavings are very expensive but just another way to reuse things that we would normally ship off to recycle, and dont get me started on recycling paper! I will just say this, it is not really good for the environment.

 

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The Winner of Our HomeScreen Two in One Router Is

Several weeks ago, I tested and reviewed a new wireless router that is on the market.  Because I liked it so much and was very impressed with how easy it was to setup, I wanted to give our viewers a chance to win one. 

So congratulations, Dan Giuntini!  You are the winner of our HomeScreen Two-in-One wireless router!  Thank you to everyone for entering and for following along.  If youre still interested in picking up one of these routers for yourself, a link to purchase is listed below. 

And if anyone has any questions on setting it up, please feel free to comment.  Id love to help you out if I can.

Thanks again!
SSL Family Dad

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