DIY Diva: My Grossest Project Yet
Gross garbage... uh... compost.
Heyo – the DIY Diva here with my grossest, most disgusting project yet. Today I’m going to talk today about building my very own composting bin.
I just moved to an apartment in Oakland which has a huge backyard. My housemates and I have discussed starting a sort-of urban farm back there. Right now we just have dirt, two fig trees and a lemon tree. Maybe some dog poop. After reading Chloe’s post about FREE gardening in Berkeley, I decided to get online and find out if Oakland had FREE gardening resources so we could start our own.
I found City Slicker Farms, which indeed offers FREE seed and tool sharing, in addition to providing a place where you can come to off-load some of the excess produce you produce in your backyard farm. (You can even trade it for other peoples’ excess produce of what you may not grow, but want, for FREE!)
This excited me very much. I went right out to the local hardware store in the Laurel District (where I live) and spent about $20 on potting soil, seeds and little peet moss planters I could start some herbs in and just directly plant into the ground once they started. I also bought a trowel.
I know, I know – broke asses don’t buy shit – but, I won $20 on a scratcher and I figured it was either that or a bottle of wine and some cigarettes. The gardening supplies seemed a healthier choice. And, I wanted to start right then, not wait until I had a chance to go into the City Slickers Urban Farm center. I figured that I would make up for it by producing beautiful produce by the bushel.
When I got home I planted four little pots of basil seeds (that’s my favorite legal herb) and put them into the window. They sprouted two days ago. I also started collecting seeds from the produce we were buying like a mad woman. I have started sprouting avocados in glasses of water like a school kid, I dried out some watermelon and honeydew seeds and packaged them away for spring planting. I started drawing up diagrams of how I wanted our garden to look on notebook paper and generally began acting rather like a flipping stinking hippy.
At the same time, I started a composting bucket on our front balcony, thinking I would create my own mulch for the garden. My housemates and I have been diligently dumping our compostable waste into the bucket, stirring it in and all that. Which is gross. And, makes me retch every time it is my turn to do it. I just get through it by envisioning the beautiful, home grown, delicious tomatoes I will grow next summer because of our compost bucket.
Here’s the thing: even though the compost bucket is sealed shut… it STINKS. Especially since it’s been so f-ing hot in Oakland the past couple of weeks. And, it is getting rather full. Both of my housemates said “One, two, three – NOT IT” to the task of building a permanent composting box in our backyard.
Hurumph. Alright you bastards, I’ll build the mother-flipping compost box.
I figured if I had to do it, I might as well milk a column or two out of it:
I found great instructions on HOW to compost in your back yard on Instructables. They did not – sadly – provide blueprints to BUILD the box pictured. I did not know that I would need worms or a pitchfork for this project, so I skipped back down to the hardware store and picked up both. The pitchfork is sitting outside my back door, just waiting to be used and I put the worms into my existing compost bucket so they wouldn’t die. This cost me an additional $40. I decided that I wanted to make an 8X8 and four foot deep compost box. I could see how it was assembled via the photograph and realized that I would need wood, a post diggger-thingie, a saw (yikes!), nails and a hammer.
I then remembered that I had been criticized for making an expensive soup as a project for this column, so I figured to take the heat off myself, I should figure out how to build the damn thing on the cheap or for FREE! I had already spent $60 and didn’t want to spend anymore.
-I went on Craigslist and found ads for free wood. I found a nice guy in Rockridge who had ten slatted pine pallets of varying sizes that I could pull apart to build my compost bin from. I told him that he could have as many figs and lemons as he’d like to pick if he’d deliver the pallets to my apartment. He’s bringing them over Sunday.
-I found the Temscal Tool Lending Library. Here’s the thing: the tool lending library isn’t FREE. But, it’s damn-skippy cheap. For around $10 I can borrow all the tools I need to build my box. I was really happy about this and made reservations to get a saw, two saw horses and a post digging-thingie from them. I already have a hammer.
-I then realized they don’t lend nails and that I needed a tape measurer, too, to complete the project. I skipped back down to the hardware store. Add in another $15.
-So far the project has cost me $85. That’s still cheaper than all the compost box projects I’ve seen outlined online on home improvement blogs. One guy ‘s instructions were to go buy bricks and mortar to build what looked like an addition to a house to compost in. Crazy. I might catch flack for spending $85 on this project, but you have to remember: I didn’t own any tools other than a hammer when I started this. Now I have a trowel, pitchfork, tape measurer, hammer,nails and hingy thingies. Plus peet moss pots for planting, some potting soil and four adorable basil plants. If you already have these items you’ll not spend nearly as much money on the project. You’ll just buy worms, nails, hingy thingies and spend a bit of cash at the tool lending library (aprox $10). I suppose you could always stir the pot of compost stew with a stick instead of a pitchfork… hm, maybe I’ll take that back to the hardware store, then. We have lots of sticks in the backyard.
I’ll be assembling the compost box over the weekend. I will return next week to show you my results, provided I don’t cut any digits off with the borrowed saw. And, I’ll give you some tips and tricks to make your compost box building experience much easier than mine.
The really gross part is going to be starting the compost IN the box. Blech. We’ll get to that next week, too.
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