Every warm sunny day of summer I think to myself, “please never end, ever.” And then it starts to feel like fall, I’m so glad. September in Portland, is the best month, in fact, we got married in September on a clear 80-degree-day three years ago. It’s usually warm, dahlias are blooming, apples and peaches are plentiful and the garden is usually overflowing with veggies to harvest.
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Composting 101: How to Build and Use a Compost Bin
Composting at home is a great way to prepare your own soil and manage organic matter from your yard. It is a chore, so if you decide to do it, know that it’s not something you can just pile up and hope will come out perfect. The first step, of course, is having a good place to store your compost. There are tons of solutions out there that you can buy. And some of them I’d definitely recommend, especially if you’re composting food waste, I’ll list my favorites at the end. Most of these are too small to accommodate the organic matter our yard produces and we have a small yard. We have hundreds of rotten apples and pears, leaves and end of year veggie garden material, and this year we have tons and tons of grass. We’re remove a significant portion of our grass and replacing it with wood chips and mulch, and it’s too heavy to put in the city compost collection. This week, we were graced with a load of wood chips from my husband’s company (he’s an arborist and one of the crews had taken down some incense cedars), so we ended up, unexpectedly, with about 10 cubic yards of wood chips. Eek! So, Kyle started the work of removing grass much earlier than we expected and now we need a place to put the old grass and get it to decompose so it doesn’t grow somewhere else!
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