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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Food From Waste

I've been having trouble accessing my account and have not been posting.

I've been growing food in Melbourne simply from waste from the kitchen is easy and low cost and very satisfying.
 As I'm renting I don't want to go to the trouble of setting up garden beds.
I do it by picking up polystyrene boxes from the local grocer taking them home and gradually filling them with kitchen waste over a month I can easily fill a box summer speeds up the break down time. You can speed up the process further by adding green grass clippings this really heats it up adding much needed nitrogen for the bacteria to really multiply. Once it's broken down a bit I add soil from around the garden. The soil content needs to be a minimum of 20% to allow the transpiration pull mechanism the plant root uses to access water.


Adding at least 20% soil makes the area less porous enabling the plant to get a good suck or pull of moisture from the soil. If it were only compost it would be like you trying to suck juice from a cup of frozen orange juice some times it flows sometimes it doesn't, this would cause the plant to wilt.
(from previous blog)
What is soil anyway? Just rock dust and organic matter. Before life on earth the land was basically just rock like all the other planets, then plants started to colonize the surface 600 million years ago die decay their remain building up over time making soil.
The results are good green onion and mint do particularly well using this system even better than when I grew them in a large bed. Tomato's are fine but do better in a larger bed, next time I'll only put one tomato plant in each box as 2 may be too many.

Give it a go low cost and satisfying to grow from waste.

 Mint

 This green onion was originally bought at the grocer used and the roots planted here. It has been harveted 4 times and just keeps growing faster than grass!




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