Composting is easy and has great benefits for you and your community. First of all, by composting, I have almost no trash each week. I've switched down to a tiny trash bin which saves me upwards of a $120/yr, reduces the amount of waste pick up and transfer and lightens the load on our landfill.
I've been composting at home for a couple of years now but it wasn't til last year that I got a proper two cone setup to make it easier and more productive.
I used to use a stainless steel bin in the kitchen pictured at right, but it turned out to be easier just dropping my food waste into a plastic bag which I keep in the freezer. The freezer bag solution is waste free, has no smell and less mess.
Seattle has a great composting program. They will sell you inexpensive green bins and offer a composting guide for download. When one cone is 2/3 full, you switch to the other while the first one gradually turns into soil I can use in my organic garden. I use the larger bin pictured for yard waste.
I've had no problems at all with outdoor smell or pests. That may be because I'm a vegetarian. If you have meat scraps in your compost, you may need to secure your compost bins from rodents and raccoons.
I forgot to mention that composting is fun! It's great to finish cooking a great meal and then recycle all my scraps right into the compost bins, and eventually back into the garden.
While in Portland this past week, I got a brief night time tour of my friends' Dustin and Garret Moon's amazing green home, The Commons, currently under construction:
The Commons is designed to reach beyond today’s highest green building standards and become the first U.S. home to meet the Living Building Challenge. The Commons will generate all its own energy - without fossil fuels, reclaim all its water, be free of unhealthy materials and be a place of beauty and community.
The vision for the commons is inspiring and it's really amazing the progress they've made. They are making all of their design documents public at the end of the project. Hopefully, their work will provide a path for others in the future.
Starting a garden as an adult seemed intimidating. The more I gathered from friends, the more it seemed like rocket science. My worst fears were confirmed upon reading the opening sentence of The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide (a guide for beginners): "Well, it isn't rocket science - organic gardening is a lot more complex." How did they know what I was thinking?
I hadn't had a garden since I was a child. I remember planting a sunflower and having it grow bigger than my head. Similar success followed with my first Zucchini (will spare you the anatomical comparison). The California sun definitely had a lot to do with it but gardening seemed easy back then.
Why Garden?
I've been a vegetarian for nearly fifteen years. I stopped eating seafood about ten years ago. But, I never learned how to cook very well.
I enrolled in a wonderful series of courses at PCC called The Main Course, taught by Omid Roustaei and programmed by The Boulder School of Natural Cookery (Omid's cooking classes are one of the Northwest's best kept secrets - mention his name to a fellow student and an animated conversation is sure to follow). Through The Main Course, I learned the basics of cooking with oils, grains, vegetables, salts and herbs and spices.
Now, I knew how to shop for vegetables and turn them in to delicious meals. Gradually, I found myself wanting to start an herb garden and then grow more of my own ingredients at home.
My 2009 Garden Experiment
I decided to start small, building a single raised bed from concrete blocks and planting some lettuce starts from Swanson's nursery. I also planted some herbs and tomatoes in a couple of containers.
But soon, I decided to build two raised beds and place them on the front lawn where the sun shined brightest. I used How to build raised beds (Sunset Magazine) to help me construct them. Building the beds was easy but a good stretch of my weak construction skills. I used soybean oil to finish the wood. I bought organic soils from nearby nurseries and hardware stores. By the end of summer, I had built a third raised bed, started two compost bins (more on this later), planted a row of seven blueberry bushes, two fig trees (with my girlfriend's help and encouragement) and an indoor greenhouse of seed starts!
On the suggestion of friends and neighbors, I installed a timed, drip irrigation system. Installing it was also not very hard. Once it was set up, I no longer needed to be actively involved in daily watering.
Bird netting kept out the crows and my irrational fears of pilfering neighbors. In reality, the garden turned out to be a great way to meet dozens of neighbors who stopped to chat and comment on the garden. It also turned out to be quite satisfying to share the harvest with them!
The Harvest
The bountiful harvest I've had this summer has been quite amazing. You can see a bit from the slideshow above. This year's hot summer in Seattle definitely helped.
Here's a summary of what we harvested:
Vegetables: blonde cucumbers, golden cherry, green zebra, roma and two kinds of heirloom tomatoes, carrots, peas, green beans, shiso, kale, mustard greens, golden and purple beets, two different kinds of eggplant, a number of kinds of salad greens, onions, delicata squash, acorn squash, buttercup squash, cayenne and sweet orange peppers, chocolate and green bell peppers, chard and endless zucchini.
Fruits: Melons, alpine strawberries (yum!), standard strawberries and blueberries. Fig trees in the ground for next year!
Herbs:several kinds of basil, coriander, mint, several kinds of Sage, rosemary, lavendar
Cooking What You Grow
It was quite an experience gathering food in the early evening, then cooking meals made up primarily of items from the garden. Usually, salt, oil, garlic and tofu or field roast might be all that was added from the store.
In general, the home grown foods tasted better than what I could find at the store. Highlights were the salad greens, blonde cucumbers, heirloom tomatoes, sweet peas, green beans, alpine strawberries, beets and delicata squash.
You Can Do This!
I'm hooked and plan to garden year round. This weekend I harvested beets and prepared some of my beds for winter with coffee chafe picked up from my local coffee roaster (totally not telling). Gardening is fun and incredibly satisfying. You can start small and do more if you the urge gets you.
Growing your own food can be one part of building sustainable cities:
"Most produce in the US is picked 4 to 7 days before being placed on supermarket shelves, and is shipped for an average of 1500 miles before being sold. We can only afford to do this now because of the artificially low energy prices that we currently enjoy, and by externalizing the environmental costs of such a wasteful food system. We do this also to the detriment of small farmers by subsidizing large scale, agribusiness-oriented agriculture with government handouts and artificially cheap energy." via Local Harvest
Still Not Sure?
If starting a garden still seems intimidating to you, try taking a course from a local nursey. In Seattle, we're lucky to have Seattle Tilth (the rocket scientists).
Sign up for a CSA (community supported agriculture) box or hire Seattle MicroFarm to set up and manage your home garden.
. 
, 
or 
.
