Category Archives: Compost and Manures

Do you like curry? If so you’re invited to lunch…

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Next Saturday, 24th November a delicious vegetable curry that’s totally organic, containing no processed foods will be cooked and served up – are you interested?

It would be great to see you, it’s free, during the day and easy to get to… am I tempting you yet?

Feeding 5 ThousandIt will be a jolly, friendly and very social affair as another 4,900 guests have been invited too.

That’s a lot of friends for lunch! How can it be possible?

To give you some background, the curry will be made from vegetables that would otherwise have been thrown away because of aesthetics, blemishes, damaged packaged or short expiration dates that would otherwise go to waste.

I wont be trying to fit you into my garden, and to be honest I’m not even organising it, merely letting you know that this exciting food event will be taking place at Wolf Tone Park in Dublin next week from 12 noon until 4.00 pm and is being organised to drive awareness around the problem of waste food in Ireland. There are many positive solutions to the food waste problem that sees 30% of what we buy in the bin and the Feeding 5000 Campaign aims to highlight this.

Supported by four partners: VOICE – Voice of Irish Concern for the Environment, Stop Food Waste, Bia Foodbank and Food Glorious Food and organised by Tristram Stuart (author of Food Waste, Uncovering the Global Food Scandal), this type of event has successfully been run in Paris, Bristol and London and highlights how easy it is to reduce the unimaginable levels of food waste.

So what ingredients will be added to your vegetable curry?

150kg potatoes
300kg rice
120kg cauliflowers
150kg carrots
100kg peas
80kg courgettes
15kg coriander
80kg daal/lentils
80kg butter
7kg salt

Are you as secretly relieved as I am that I’m not one of the volunteers who will be peeling and slicing that mountain of veg! That’s a lot of potential compost too! It’s all in a good cause though so fair play to all of those who are involved in the organisation of this event and I’m sure there will be great camaraderie amongst everyone involved. If you’re available and would like to volunteer to help you can email foodgloriousfoodsife@gmail.com)

As part of the afternoon a few initiatives will be highlighted including:

VOICE will be launching its food waste campaign and advocating that the government adopt the Good Samaritan Food Act which relieves the liability from sharing leftover food whilst encouraging the government to offer tax deductions around food donations.

Stop Food Waste aims to highlight the problem of food waste and how reducing food waste removes the cost associated with disposal.

Food Glorious Food is launching an App to match businesses with surplus food to charities requiring food.

Bia Foodbank highlighting the Foodbank’s need for premises in Dublin to further develop its services.

Take a look at this brilliant TED video where Tristram Stuart talks about his passion for using and raising awareness around food waste and how it began with his pigs.

For further information check out:

www.voiceireland.org
www.stopfoodwaste.ie
www.feeding5k.org

Will you be going? Hope to see you there!! You can sign up and register your interest on the Feeding5K Facebook Page and please, spread the word!

International Compost Awareness Week

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International Compost Awareness Week begins today!

(source unknown)

I only became aware of this on the ICAW Facebook page yesterday when I read that:

“across the United States U.K., Australia, and Canada, composting advocates will be encouraging everyone to use Compost! Those who believe in the Compost Message will be planning events in their community to promote the value of compost. All types of composting events — from “do it yourself” composting in your backyard to large-scale community-wide composting — can be promoted during the week.”

Lovely bins courtesy of www.organiccentre.ie

We may be a little late to get into the action this year but we could all do our bit by starting a compost heap or encouraging friends and neighbours to begin building one if they’re not currently doing so.

Local council environmental offices can point you in the direction of subsidised compost bins and are always delighted to help groups or communities with talks on composting, or you can make your own out of pallets. I wrote a post about The Stop Food Waste Campaign a while back where we were told we could save up to €1,000 a year by composting our kitchen scraps and not sending them off to the overfull landfill sites.

Compost: From this ..............................................to this

Home composting is one of the easiest and cheapest way of providing organic matter to your gardens – you can add anything from uncooked food, hair, newspaper and cardboard to grass clippings, wood ash and non meat-eating animal bedding (hamsters, rabbits etc). The trick is to get the mix right, just like baking a cake. Layering “browns” or carbon ingredients such as straw, newspaper etc with “greens” or nitrogen ingredients like grass, plant matter and vegetable scraps. I wont go on about the detail now however. Over on the articles page on the website there’s a free downloadable pdf HERE explaining the best way to compost.

So what do you reckon – are you composting yet or as it’s International Compost Awareness Week will this be the year you start?

 

Compost – How each household could save up to €1,000 a year

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If you’re not already composting, the start of a new year is a good time to start afresh and plan to do so. Last year I attended a very interesting seminar at the Carlow County Council chambers given by Nuala on behalf of the Stop Food Waste Campaign which, apart from giving us a free source of organic matter, explained why composting is so important. 

The campaign is a great initiative primarily aimed at reducing the amount of waste that goes into landfill each year, and encouraging us to think more carefully about how we shop, cook and eat.

Their website is a mine of information and well worth a look but a couple of points that were highlighted include:

  • The average person throws out the equivalent of three grown men of waste each year (300kgs), 30% of which is made up of food and 7% of garden and landscaping materials.
  • One third of food that Irish households buy is wasted – the equivalent of a third of our groceries being stolen out of our shopping trolleys.
  • The average household could save up to €1,000 a year by avoiding this waste by composting!

From our own perspective I’m so glad we have chickens and dogs for the cooked food leftovers. We also keep our waste to a minimum by writing weekly shopping lists and compost as much as we can, just using a few old pallets to make a couple of containers to contain it. Those practices combined with recycling, means that our family of five produces on average one black bin bag of refuse destined for the landfill every two weeks.

Nuala highlighted a few different composting systems and I was particularly interested in the ones for smaller gardens, as I’m often asked about them.

One was a Bokashi which seems like a really handy way of composting if you don’t have a big garden but use an allotment.

Wormeries are another great alternative to compost bins and heaps, especially if you don’t currently compost because you’re worried about vermin.  I was hugely impressed by a community composting (wormery) scheme that a group in Temple Bar, Dublin have set up. Their log of how they went about it is well worth a read for anybody interested in community composting, particularly in an urban area.


It’s worth keeping an eye on the catalogues or in your garden centres as different products become available, such as this Earthmaker Aerobic Composter where research has shown that it will make twice as much compost as traditional bins over the same period.

If you have a few minutes, do take a couple of minutes to check out the Stop Food Waste website above.

For anybody who isn’t already composting and doesn’t have the Brown bin option for their  ’green’ waste, it was suggested that they get a small bucket with a lid and throw all their food waste into it for a week or two to see how much is thrown away. 


Would you be willing to give that challenge a go?

If you’d like to know more about composting, there’s a free downloadable pdf file on my website giving full details on how to compost.

Hairy Bittercress ~ if you don’t plan to eat it, compost it!

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As weeds go you can do a lot worse than Hairy Bittercress, which is just as well as it’s currently taking over one of my uncovered vegetable beds (it’s giving my soil protection from the winter weather).

This is an annual to biennial weed – seedlings can withstand the severest frost, making it a very hardy weed. It carries hundreds of explosive seed pods that when ripe, can explode suddenly in all directions up to a metre around you (so weed in glasses!).  The seeds generally germinate between April to December.

Hairy Bittercress is easy to remove from the soil with a hoe or by hand and it’s important to do so as it can quickly smother beds containing your small vegetable seedlings, competing with them for space and light. Once removed the weeds can then be added to the compost heap.

If you don’t mind eating *weeds however, Hairy Bittercress is edible, apparently tasting of watercress. I promise to give it a go when it stops raining ;) … Have you tried eating it?

Hairy Bittercress

The following is an audio clip of my tasting session. Apologies for the slight mad excitement of being out in the fresh air again, am new to audio!

Hairy Bittercress – tastes surprisingly good! (mp3)

* A weed is just a plant that’s growing somewhere that it’s unwanted.

Fresh Farmyard Manure & E.Coli

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I managed to tear myself away from workshop planning the other night and switched on the TV for an episode of CSI Miami. I was immediately reminded about an article I’d read in the February edition of Gardeners World a few weeks ago about E.coli. (Just can’t get away from work sometimes - just as well I love my subject!)



It particularly rang alarm bells in my head as I’d mistakenly thought that because we don’t spray our vegetables with insecticides, they were safe to eat straight from the garden (the children have always picked or pulled veg straight from the plants, brushed off the dirt and eaten them).

Escherichia coli (E. coli) is the name given to a large family of bacteria commonly found in the gut of humans and animals. Whilst the majority of E. coli are harmless, some types can cause illness. The E. coli O157:H7 strain causes serious illness in humans ranging from diarrhoea to kidney failure, and even death.



Cattle are the principal source of this strain. It’s also present in the intestines of other animals including sheep, goats, deer, horses, dogs and cats. Seagulls, pigeons and geese are also known to carry the organism.



Whilst most people get E. coli from contaminated food (such as undercooked minced beef), it also can be passed in the manure of cattle. Animals do not have to be ill to transmit E. coli O157 to humans.


For those of us who use cattle manure as a means of incorporating organic matter into our vegetable gardens, Bunny Guinness, commenting in the Gardeners World magazine recommended the following:

“Fresh farmyard manure should never be used directly on vegetable gardens. It should always be left to compost for at least a year, turned regularly to encourage high temperatures and left to ‘cure’ for two to four months. This should allow the beneficial bacteria to kill the disease-causing ones. You must then leave at least 120 days between applying the composted manure and harvesting the crop – 90 days if the crop is protected by a husk, shell or pod.



Always wash hands well after handling manure, and maybe even your tools, boots & clothes. Wash the vegetables thoroughly before eating. With hard-to-clean- crops like lettuces, especially if they’ll be eaten by vulnerable people (pregnant women, the young or elderly), consider using one to three teaspoons of chlorine bleach per gallon of water, then rinse well.”



We’ve been warned.