6 2009-11-07T10:17:46+11:00 false My average first frost date is October 15. Here we are <i>22 days past that date</i>, and I still have not had a frost. I think my luck is over though, because there is a freeze warning in the forecast for tonight. I'm not going to cover anything. The most I did was lightly cultivate an area where a bunch of weeds are coming up. I hope this will kill them. Also, I recently got <i>The Complete Compost Gardening Guide</i>, by Barbara Pleasant & Deborah L. Martin, out of the library. It discusses various ways to compost and makes up annoying, cutesy names for them, but the book does have some nice ideas in it. Somewhere in among reading about Catch-and-Release Vermicomposting, Pretty Pits of Plenty, Comforter Composting, Bountiful Batches, Walking Compost Heaps and Grow Heaps <i>I had an idea</i>. A REALLY GOOD IDEA. What if I took my DIY compost bin (a trashcan with holes in it), cut the bottom off, partially buried it in one of my garden beds, filled it full of compostables and put the lid on and left it for the winter? The bin is a 25 gallon trash can with holes drilled in it for ventilation. My homeowners association doesn't allow compost piles, so I wanted to try a bin that didn't look like a composter. I've never produced actual compost in the bin though, but it seems like if it were in contact with the soil, it will probably work a lot like trench composting. And it might attract worms. And it will give me a place to dump any vermicompost over the winter, should my worm bin get full. I can insulate the outside of the bin by piling leaves around it (and thus also mulching the bed for the winter), and maybe keep a few worms alive or keep some bacteria working. I can even turn it occasionally by sticking my cobrahead weeder in it and pulling material up from the bottom. So that's what I did. Only I couldn't cut the whole bottom of the trash can, I could only cut a 6-inch wide hole in the bottom (due to the way the thickness of the plastic varied). I had a piece of wire mesh, so I stuck that in the bottom and then put two rocks on the mesh to hold it in place. It's not perfect, but I hope that it might keep some critters out. And it's only buried about 3 inches deep, because it's dark and cold and I didn't feel like getting the shovel out. Next weekend, I might bury it deeper, because deeper would be better. It's in a nice spot in my NE bed. I'm going to be out of town this weekend, but next weekend I will clean out the front garden bed and add those trimmings and some leaves to the bin, as well as anything the frost kills. Depending on how this works, I could see keeping it in continual use as a "planting" out in the garden, and rotating the spot it is in depending on the season (right now, it's sitting on a primo piece of winter garden real-estate, the sunniest spot in my yard, where some greens failed to come up). Since I mostly rely on trench composting to deal with yard waste, I sometimes have trouble finding a spot to bury stuff in the middle of summer when every inch of garden space is in use. Now, I'll be able to easily put it right in the bin. I'm really pleased with this solution -- it incorporates a lot of my thinking over the past year about how I want to compost. It builds on my success with trench composting, it gives me a place to put my vermicompost, and during periods that are not-too-hot and not-too-cold, it can be an outdoor worm bin (should eggs from the vermicompost hatch). Now let's just hope it works. 5 false 70572 false false false Entry 2009-11-06T16:00:00+11:00 DMY Public 2009-11-07T10:21:48+11:00 1713 Sunny 42 F