Last year, when my wife and I bought our first house. We talked about setting up a compost pile, but didn’t get around to in the first few months. When the leaves started coming down in Fall, we found out it was going to cost at least thirty dollars to have them hauled away. So last October I set up our compost pile as a solution to our leaves. My design consists of pvc pipes driven into the ground with plastic deck lattice as a fence on three sides. This was not necessary, but the fence gave the pile a nicer look than a big pile of trash, and help keeps it contained. Underneath the pile is a plastic sheet to keep nutrients from leeching into the soil. One side effect of this plastic is that water settles near the bottom of the pile and the material starts to rot if it sits more than a few days. To counter this, as well as speed up the process, I use a garden fork to turn the pile really well about once a week, with a few smaller ‘stirrings’ in between when I take out kitchen scraps. Because the initial biomass of our pile was leaves, it’s been slow to break down and only now are we beginning to see soil like matter. We keep a container in the kitchen for food scraps, and they get emptied into the pile every few days. I was very excited to discover last week that our compost pile is filled with a healthy population of worms. These guys help aerate the pile as well as chew through the organic matter and return nutrients to the soil in their casings. One change I intend to make next year is to not use straight leaves. Last year we raked the leaves into piles and dumped those into the compost bin. They’ve taken forever to break down. This year I’m going to use a hand-held blower/mulcher to grind up the leaves first. This should take far less space and hopefully break down faster.

Read the rest of this entry »

As previously mentioned, I have a general disdain for lawn care. On principle, I absolutely refuse to use a gas powered lawnmower. When I bought my house, I bought a reel lawnmower. But my lawn is just too big and grows too fast for that. In order to keep up, I had to cut the lawn twice a week, and it was taking upwards of an hour and half each time, and still not getting the job done thoroughly. The lawn never looked good and I was always miserable when I was done. I was considering buying and electric lawnmower, but I though I could do one better.

I ended up buying a RoboMow RM400. The set up pretty much consists of laying a perimeter wire. The package comes with 500 feet of wire and 150 stakes (like small tent pegs). I started staking the wire down with about ten feet between pegs, so I wouldn’t run out. About halfway through, I started doing a better job, and went down to about four feet between pegs. At this point I was carefully laying down four feet, pulling it taunt, using a peg to rake the grass around the wire (so it was at root level instead of sitting on top of the grass) and then pounding in the next peg. After a half hour of that I got really tired, and went back to one peg every ten feet, and eventually, I stopped pounding them in and would line one up with my hands and then just step on it to push it into the ground. I ran out of wire about 100ft short and called it a night. That was Thursday and I was out of town over the weekend. The next Monday, I went to Home Depot and picked up some 14 gauge solid core wire (which cost less than half of what official RoboMow perimeter wire costs) and finished laying the wire. When I was done, I went back around to the spots where I had been in a hurry and put in a few more pegs and made sure the wire was pulled taunt. I got the wire hooked up to the base station and got the robot running. It had to follow the perimeter wire, and identified a few places where the wire wasn’t staked down. When the robot was satisfied with the perimeter, it parked itself in the base station (so cool!) to charge overnight. I could do the first run the next day.

Read the rest of this entry »