Nicky and Dave Schauder are passionate about helping families grow their food, and medicine and find God in the garden. Learn how to build your own permaculture garden Get our Guild Guide when you sign up!
How to Compost Correctly
|
"If it has lived, it can live again." — Geoff Lawton, permaculturist Hello, Reader, How to Compost CorrectlyLast Sunday, right after liturgy, Dave and I taught a quick composting workshop for our church's volunteers ahead of our annual Middle Eastern Food Festival. I filmed it and put it on YouTube 👇, in case you'd like to sit in.
|
All the eating happens earlier, in the larval stage. In its larval state, it eats almost continuously and has even been the subject of research into breaking down styrofoam (though it's a very slow process and not its favorite food, so don't let that be an excuse to compost styro). The good fertilizer for your soil is its frass. But the real nutrition is packed into the larvae themselves, which makes them excellent food for livestock.
Why We Compost - dig deeper than just healthy soils.
Yes, we compost to produce fertile soil, but as I mention in the video above...
- Composting also reminds us that death is not the end. We believe our souls are eternal, and that from death comes new life, in the ground the same as it is in the Resurrection.
- It's also stewardship. We take good care of what we've been given, and we use it fully. Composting is the ultimate form of that: the last, best repurposing.
- And it's a kind of poverty, in the good sense. Composting keeps us honest about the limits of nature and the abundance of God. That word "humility" comes from the same root as humus, the soil itself. There's something fitting in that. The same humbling work that has you sorting scraps is the reason I get to eat vegetables out of our garden and think, how fortunate I am to be eating something this good.
If you're local to the DC-MD-VA area, come find us composting at the Middle Eastern Food Festival on Labor Day weekend. We'll be the ones arguing about whether a coffee filter counts (it does). Come share the food, the faith, and the fun with us.
Upcoming Events - Save the Date
Food Preservation Webinar with Registered Dietitian and Nutritionist Emily Jacobs on Tuesday, September 1st!
Make kimchi alongside her. Emily's workshops are soooo much fun and always full of good food!
Want Food From Our Garden?
Come buy our microgreens! If you are local to Leesburg, we have done a few farmers markets this summer and more to come soon. But you can also order them online. Unfortunately, we do not ship... yet. But we can deliver close to our home.
Order Microgreens Online (delivery within Northern VA only)
Grow abundantly!
Nicky & Dave
Dave & Nicky Schauder
Nicky and Dave Schauder are passionate about helping families grow their food, and medicine and find God in the garden. Learn how to build your own permaculture garden Get our Guild Guide when you sign up!
Dear Reader Why We Grow You may already know what first got us into growing food. Our first two children were born with food allergies. Ethan, our second, had eczema so severe we could see it on his face after every meal. 2 year old Ethan with eczema Dave and I started questioning everything. What was in the food we were buying? What were we actually feeding our children? We wanted to know where our food was coming from. And we wanted to be the ones growing it. We switched to organic. At the...
Dear Reader, Last February, one of the growers we mentor, Lindsey knocked her curtain rod loose in her kitchen. The rod that held her seedling trays in place. Every seedling she had started, lettuces, microgreens, pepper, went flying. Soil on the walls. Trays on the floor. An hour of cleanup. She could have cried. She almost did. But she didn't quit. By March she was filling raised beds with cardboard, straw, old leaves, and half-finished compost from a bin that had spent the winter getting —...
Hello, Reader, We are beyond grateful that right now on our farm, we're getting the following from our garden so far: 1 lb of beans/day 5 lbs of tomatoes/day cucumbers blackberries raspberries peppers corn small Japanese tiger melons and we're spoiled for herbs on top of it. Pro-tip: Harvest tomatoes at first blush. They tend to produce more that way. I was out weighing today's tomato harvest from our research beds, where we've been comparing compost tea, organic fertilizer, and an untreated...