Chicken wire compost bin set up with minimal injury!

Because the worms just can't keep up, I have set up a normal compost bin, too. I was hoping to buy a nice rotating one. Then I checked out prices. Wow! It just seems nutty to spend >$100 on a composting bin. That's hardly crunchy, right? And the only compost bin Home Depot had in stock was a $300 cedar number. Ugh!

However, Home Depot did have chicken wire -- and lots of it. They must have had a dozen different varieties! I scratched myself pretty badly checking them out. I guess I should have remembered that chicken wire is in essence mildly barbed wire. In any case, I found what I was looking for in a 3' by 10' affair. It came tied up in wire that I reused as wire ties.

So I have finished building my own bin using these materials. I found about six sets of directions online, all of them remarkably similar. Here is an example: http://www.urbanfoodgarden.org/main/composting/composting---wire-compost-bins.htm.

And here is a picture of the finished product! I am quite pleased with it. I put some dirt at the bottom (including a nice fat earthworm), some food scraps, and some of the grass that has overgrown my front beds.

The ongoing mystery of local milk

I've been making yogurt with a Donvier yogurt maker for about six months. Yes, I learned about this yogurt maker from "French Women Don't Get Fat." I am unashamed -- it is the first "diet book" I have ever read, and I consider it far better than its category. In any case I love the yogurt maker. The yogurt is so much tastier than anything I can buy at the store. Sometimes I strain it to make Greek yogurt and eat it with honey. Lately I leave it unstrained and eat it with just a smidge of preserves on top.

I've used the machine (if it can be called that: It does nothing but keep the yogurt at the right temperature for a set period of time) dozens and dozens of times. I have goofed up a few times. Once I forgot to press start. Once I forgot to add the yogurt starter. And once I forgot to put it into the fridge when it was finished (but my neighbor came to the rescue and did it for me).

In two instances I have been unable to identify any goof-up on my part but I have nonetheless gotten bad product. In both instances I have used 100% local milk from glass bottles rather than the usual Garrelick farm milk. See the results from today's batch.



What a mess! The yogurt separated and it never got properly thick in the first place. In this case I had used milk from McNamara dairy in Plainsfield, NH. I get it at the Upper Valley Food Coop. My neighbor used to live near the dairy and she says that it is a wonderful facility, so I love buying this milk. It's also very tasty -- though apparently not in yogurt. I have also used milk from Crescent Ridge Dairy, with similar results.



What is it about local milk that prevents my yogurt from turning out right? You would think it would turn out better. Kerry Bodine, who writes about local food in her Wicked Flavory blog, had the same response. I can't believe they are ultrapasteurizing their milk... I need to get to the bottom of this. Any suggestions welcome!

The results

The tangible ingredients
Four chairs: $10, $10, $8, and $5.
Four sheets of sandpaper and a sanding block: $7
One can of primer: Free (was in the basement when I purchased the house)
Four quarts of Behr paint: ~$11 each

The intangible ingredients
15 mins to sand each chair (1h total)
30 mins to prime each chair (2h total)
1.5h to paint each chair 2-3 coats (4.5h)
Approx 1.5h driving around looking for and picking up supplies

Total cost: $87 and 9h of time

The results:

Two new chairs!

I found two more chairs to add to my collection of chairs to refinish for the dining room! They were even more of a steal: $5 for the darker one and $8 for the lighter one.



As you can see, there is a bit of a wrinkle in purchasing used furniture: Cats are not sure what to make of all the smells you are bringing into the house. I think this is mainly upside, but if you brought smells they didn't like it could be a downside. Imagine them marking the chairs (not that my cats do that, but I hear that many some late- or not-fixed tomcats do.)

These chairs fit in pretty well with the ones I bought earlier for $10 each, even though they weren't really supposed to.




And I have some Behr paint swatches to compare, too. I'm a little perplexed by paint, though. Even if it's still cost effective for me to buy a separate quart of paint to use on each chair, it is certainly wasteful to do so. There's no way it's going to take a quart to cover a single chair. What am I going to do with the leftovers? Aren't they hazardous waste?

Vermicompost harvesting lessons learned

Things I wish I'd known when I started:

• Leave the worm poop in a pile for at least 20 minutes -- no being impatient -- so that the worms all have a chance to flee to the center of the pile.
• Separate the poop from the worm, not the worm from the poop (poop is a lot less wiggly).
• If there's undigested stuff, just throw it back in so that you can focus on the black gold.
  
• Most importantly, ditch the utensils and just use your hands. It's worth it for the gain in efficiency.
  
• The worms are far more scared than you are.

That's it! A nice couple came to pick up some worms today. They have six kids! The boys are going to be excited. If I like worms, I am sure little boys like worms.

How does my garden grow?

No major point to this post! Just wanted to share some pictures of the herbs and vegetables I've transported up here and how they're faring.


To start with, I have two window boxes filled (left to right) with chive, chard, chives, globe basil, Fordhook giant swiss chard, and star basil.

• These chives are my phoenix plant: They have made it through three winters now, each time dying with the frost and coming back in early spring when melting snow revives them. They grow fast, and they are a great herb to use in your cooking if, like me, you hate onions with a passion.
  
• The Fordhook giant chard just keeps on coming. I have harvested about a dozen leaves four or five times for my favorite "Cheesy Chard" dish from my mom's 70s edition of "Diet For A Small Planet." And it never punks out on me like wimpy lettuce has in the past.
  
• The globe basil has disappointed me. It has grown nicely, but the leaves are tiny. I like big basil leaves that I can roll up and then do a chiffonade cut on. It is fragrant and tasty, though.

In this next picture you can see a succession of pots. From left to right, they are: Tommy Toe tomato plant, orange tree, tomato plant, more chard, cilantro (gone to seed), pepper, triple-curled parsley, more parsley, and another tomato plant.

• I wish I'd planted cherry tomatoes instead of real tomatoes. These Tommy Toe tomatoes are taking way too long! And I love cherry tomatoes. They have a lot more flavor, and I've heard that they are more nutritious too. And it's easy to pick precisely the amount of tomato you want to use.
  
• The orange tree loves it up here. I had to keep it inside where I loved previously because my balcony was too windy for this poor tree. In the past year I only got two oranges to maturity as a result. They were hilarious oranges -- green on the outside, orange and delicious on the inside. I made orange juice from them. But now I have a whole bunch of baby oranges as well as new tree growth. Fingers crossed these guys don't fall off. The only downside to keeping it outside is that you don't get the amazing smell of orange blossoms in your home.
  
• It's my fault the cilantro went to seed. The flowers were pretty and I didn't cut them. :( Even worse, for a while I forgot that this WAS cilantro and I purchased the herb from the store instead of using what I had. A shame.
  
• The pepper plant is doing great. It has two baby peppers, about a dozen flowers-turning-into-peppers, and another dozen flowers. I can't remember what kind of pepper plant it is, though. Last year I had a Serrano pepper plant that produced some seriously spicy peppers.
  
• I have been using the triple-curled parsley very heavily, and it has managed to keep up nicely. I am very pleased with my parsley plants.
  

Other than the chives, which I have had for years, I grew all of these plants from heirloom seeds I purchased at www.seedsavers.org. I learned about this site from Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle. The only thing Seed Savers lacks is pictures of mature plants. I like to think that would have saved me from the globe basil.

Which is crunchier: new or repurposed?

I have a dining room for the first time ever, and I don't expect to have one again in the near future. As a result, I am furnishing my dining room on the cheap with pieces I won't mind parting with in two years. Of course, I also want pieces I'll love in the meantime. Such is life.

After much comparison shopping online and in person, I chose the IKEA Dockstra dining table and an IKEA Expedit 4x2 bookcase turned on its side for a buffet.



But as you can see the room is pretty bland right now. That's ok, because that's how I planned it. The color will come from the chairs, which I envision as IKEA competition. Why? Because instead of purchasing new on the cheap, I'm going to repurpose old (on the cheap, too, I hope).

I see this as a competition between IKEA, a responsible furniture manufacturer, and the combined forces of thrift stores, hardware stores, and sweat.

Today thanks to a tip from my neighbors I picked up two dining chairs for $10 each at a local thrift store. Score! Here's a picture.



My plan is to find 2-4 more chairs. There were some good candidates at the thrift store, but they all had plastic covered seats that I wasn't sure how to remove/swap out. The table seats 4 easily but can handle 6 in a pinch. I'm going to strip them down and I think paint each chair a different vibrant color: blue, green, red, orange, purple, etc.

To figure out how to do this I'm going to rely heavily on the clever folks at my local paint store, with some additional information from these links, courtesy of Google:

http://www.ronhazelton.com/howto/antique_chair_restoration.htm
http://www.curbly.com/celee/posts/152-Refinishing-wood-chairs

What prevents this experiment from being maximally crunchy? As I see it the variables are:

• Direct cost of materials, i.e. price
  
• External costs of materials, e.g. toxicity
  
• Cost of labor
  

I wonder if I'm forgetting anything?

The chairs I wanted to get at IKEA were Norvald dining chairs in red, for $69 each. Assuming I got only 4 that would be a total of $276 -- pricey!

I'll pick out paints for now, but I'll update on results later.