About compost

It is this time of the year again, fallen leaves everywhere. We have few birches, one maple tree and one larch, the kind that drops its needles before winter. Not to mention some willows and other bushes. So there are more than enough leaves to rake! I thought it would be good idea to give you a glimpse to our backyard - by showing our compost system.

First I have to say that even though I like to upcycle and recycle as much as I can, I'm not a saint. I buy plastic bags way too often, we eat meat, we have a car, we have electric heating system etc. Overall usual family with usual things, even though I dare say we produce much less trash than some families. Anyway, there is one thing that is taken care of almost all the time and that is the compost.

That is also because we actually use the soil that comes out of it on our vegetable patch. It is so good for the vegetables that there is no sense in NOT using it. And of course, it's fully organic. Doesn't got a penny either. Our garden has some flowers but very few and that's only because the previous owner had planted them. We have moved some, removed some but left few that are easiest to take care of. Instead our small garden is full with vegetable patch, berry bushes and apple trees. When I say full, it means that there isn't really space for more plants but there is of course space for other things you need the garden for. Trampoline for the kids, barbeque etc. Just so that you don't think of some fully grown garden where you walk only under the apple trees or something. :D

The vegetable patches are more of a hobby of my husband, he likes to take care of it. Build new things, try new vegetables, things like that. We had some chili growing outside too this year, mad to do it here without greenhouse really and we didn't get really any. Maybe next year?

He also works with plants, sort of. He works for Naturvention (new Finnish company making active green walls that clean the indoor air, check it, it's really new and interesting innovation) and he sometimes brings soil home from work.

It is good combined with the compost. Naturvention buys the plants in pots with soil but the green walls don't have any soil so even the roots clean the air instead of producing "allergifying" microbes. Very clean, very fresh. The soil is washed out of the plants and is of course taken to be composted. Of course, if someone needs it, they can bring it home. That only makes sense, why take good soil to be composted and packed to plastic bags (again!) if you can use it right away? With this and our compost we hardly need to buy any soil.

Back to our compost. The process has three steps.

1. warm compost

Also known as "food compost" where all the leftover food goes. Potato and onion peels, leftover fruit parts etc. Also the leftover food goes here. If it has to be thrown away, it is at least doing good job here!

This compost stays warm also during cold weather. It is just a ball of plastic but the process of composting keeps it warm. It only freezes when it is actually winter -15-20 degrees Celsius but starts working again when the weather gets warmer.

When the warm compost is full it is emptied and becomes step 2.

2. Leaf compost/step 2 compost

As you can see, there are leaves, grass and branches. This is the place where all the organic garden waste goes. It doesn't smell or attract rats or birds so it can be composted just like this. It also composts pretty fast, faster than food waste anyway. The compost is like enormous lasagne; garden waste and stuff from food compost are in layers. Doesn't smell as the garden waste keeps it quite dry and the garden waste composts faster when the food compost moisturizes it.

Now it is best left alone, just let the nature do its job. Takes year or two before it is fully composted.

3. Fully composted soil

Like this:

This was before a pile like that in the previous photo but is now pure soil that can be used in the garden just as it is. When this pile is used, we can empty the food compost here and the circle starts again from the beginning.


How about you, do you own a compost, have thought of getting one, don't have a place for one or just have never gotten around getting one?

Harvest time - nearfood from own garden?

Yes, if we were lucky. Due to rainy and cold summer we aren't that lucky though but at least we got something!

This post is going to be rather long and only about the harvest. If you came here to look for craft tutorials and upcycling tips feel free to check the categories and come back on Sunday evening, I will have new tutorial for you then.

With this and the last post I have also started new publishing schedule. The idea is to publish tutorial or something DIY/crafty on Sundays and something else upcycling/ecologic or frugal related on Wednesdays. Now that I have written it here, I have to stick to it. :D

Now to our garden. We live in our own house with smallish yard and have a vegetable patch, apple trees and some berry bushes. The yard could be bigger though as there is so much other things that would be nice to grow but won't have space for them. And what is more ecological than growing your own food?

The summer started out promising; tomatoes, paprikas and chilis started growing nicely.

There were rather many paprikas, only two plants but each of them held 3-4 paprikas! As you can see from the picture they were quite big too. But... they never turned yellow or red but instead fell to the ground raw and rotten. From the tomatoes we were able to eat some as you can see in the pic above, they are yellow just as they were supposed to be. But there would have been so much more... Then this happened:

Storm. The tomatoes were growing in the buckets and they were on a table when the storm arrived here. The other plant (on right) survived and continued growing. But before actually being able to harvest anything they looked like this:

The temperature dropped below zero during the night before last. The tomatoes didn't like it very much...

With cucumbers we had more luck! Even though they had a rough start. My husband pre-grew four plants inside in pots and move them outside when it was warm enough. They were covered with some kind of veil but still the sun light was too harsh for them. Only one plant survived and three new cucumber seeds were planted on the vegetable patch. That one plant that survived went crazy after a while and all alone produced half kilograms of cucumbers!

By that time also the three others that were planted straight outside without pre-growing had started to bloom and grow new cucumbers:

Last week we harvested rest of the cucumbers with a happy result:

Almost two kilos! We thought that the cucumbers wouldn't make it this far so we bought some from the shop and made pickled cucumbers already in August:

So what to do with two kilos more? Our cellar isn't reachable at the moment and the fridge is quite full. Luckily my husband's father stopped by and he took the cucumbers and is going to pickle them, good use for them!

Then we also had peas:

None of these were preserved though,they were all eaten right from the vegetable patch by our kids.

Beans have usually had a good harvest too and last year I froze some of them. The beans aren't that picky and usually grow rather well but this year they refused to start climbing and instead grew more or less horizontally even I tried to help them up.

The harvest wasn't that big, enough for couple meals. I like to boil the beans in salty water, pour the water away, crunch garlic on top of them, some salt if needed and butter. Then I stir it a minute or two so that the butter melts and the garlic starts to smell. Goes well with a good steak!

Like I said, we have some berry bushes; raspberries, red wineberries, black wineberries and few strawberries. The strawberries got cold in the beginning of the summer and never even bloomed. Raspberries were good this year, I think I picked something like 4 liters and that's above all that was eaten right from the bush by our daughter!

I used some for my birthday cake but almost all of them I used for jam. I made bought blueberry/raspberry jam and just raspberry jam. Much better than anything you can buy from the shop!

The red wineberries is another sad story. The bush was full of raw berries when we went for a holiday trip and when we came back this was what we saw:

Nothing. Only couple berries here and there, no raw ones, no ripe ones, nothing. I have no idea what happened to that. Must have been quite a flock of birds to do that! Not to mention that the ones on our neighbor's yard were untouched. I even thought if someone had come and picked them but who would do that? I'm not worried about the berries that much, we have couple places were there are more than enough and we could pick all that we need but it would still be nice to know what happened to them.

Black wineberries:

We use wine berries just for making juice with steaming method. The steamed juice could be kept just in a fridge but not all of that fits in so we froze it. We made a lot of juice this year, must be tens of liters and it is concentrated so it will easily last over the winter without any need to buy juice from the shop.

Then there were of course some potatoes and carrots:

Garlics are still growing:

Pumpkin on the making:

This pumpkin is supposed to grow huge but I strongly suspect it will make it.

Couple brave chilis too:

That was from our garden but then there is the forest full of berries and mushrooms! We have picked some blueberries, even more lingonberries and found quite an amount of chanterelles:

All in all. Not that bad! We also bought strawberries so there are some liters of those in the freezer and I already made apple jam out of the apples that were blown away from the trees due to the storm mentioned above, also frozen now. Here is a small list:

- berry juice, tens of liters (frozen)
- strawberries, bought but from nearby (frozen)
- blue berries (couple liters, frozen)
- apple jam (few liters, frozen)
- chanterelles (for few meals, frozen)
- lingonberries (crushed, preserved in their own juice in fridge, few liters)
- pickled cucumbers (one shelf in the fridge full of them)
- raspberry and blueberry jams (couple liters)

Potatoes, carrots, beans and peas eaten. Garlics still waiting.

When you look at it like that, it isn't that bad at all! Did you grow your own food this summer?

Reusable kitchen wipes and plarn basket

Spilled milk on the table. Spilled juice on the floor. Ketchup in fingers. Kethup on chair. Ketchup on hair. Food around the plate. Sounds familiar? If it does then you probable have kids and you know that to clean all that you need lots of kitchen paper. It seems that I have to replace empty kitchen paper roll with new one every other day.

With two kids around we run through 2-3 kitchen paper rolls per week, easily! They aren't free either, something like 50-60 cents / piece so if you make a rough calculation it makes 50-100 € in a year, depending on how much you use it, naturally. Might be less but as we are closer to 100 € with only two kids I don't want to know what the cost is in the families with more kids!

Something had to be done. To save money of course but also this is good for reducing one's carbon footprint.

I speak of course about reusable kitchen wipes or unpaper towel, reusable kitchen wipes, paperless towel, reusable paper or reusable cloth. All of these are names I found when searching for tips on Pinterest, I call them just rags or wipes. They aren't the ones you use for cleaning the kitchen surfaces but wipes that replace the kitchen paper roll that is used to clean up small things.

I saw some great tutorials about how to make them, it seems it is popular to make them as a roll with snaps and everything but the amount of work they need and all just so you can wipe out the ketchup from small fingers! They are also quite thick with two layers; one with pretty colour cotton fabric and one with towel. 

Those thick ones would be great to replace the kitchen cloth used for cleaning the surfaces and I might be doing those too but I already use some shop bought kitchen cloths that can be washed anyway several times before throwing away.

Let's cut down the paper consumption first!

These unpaper kitchen wipes are made out of old dish towels. They were just cut in small pieces and then I used overlocker to finish the edges. So simple and fast! I also cut these smaller than the usual kitchen paper as the dish towel is so much more absorbent than the paper. 

Then I needed something to store them in.

Where are all the cartoon boxes when you need one? Definitely not somewhere to be found, at least not the empty ones so I looked into the cupboards and found something that was just the right size! Only it was almost full of tea bags. I just looked a new box for them and had a cartoon box with nice colour inside and covered it with a fabric scrap on the outside. The idea is to have the box on the dining table and it doesn't even take that much more space than the new kitchen paper roll does.

I tried these kind of reusable kitchen wipes couple years back but then the problem was that they had to be taken into the laundry basket. I probably would do it but the rest of the family? Not likely to happen. I knew that to make this project to actually work they should be as easy to use and throw away as the kitchen paper.

How is it as easy then? Have something to throw them to that is at least as close as the trash bin! No excuses there anymore. I don't want anything more stuff on the tables than there already is so the only logical solution was to find a place for used wipes somewhere around the trash bin.

Of course I could have bought a plastic box and attach it with screws inside the the trash bin cupboard door. But there is enough stuff in our household without me buying new one for something like this. However, I didn't find anything suitable, mainly it was the size that made it difficult as it was supposed to be hanging inside the door. There aren't much space. Also it had to be easy to clean so no cartoon box would suit for that one.

Then I decided I would try out something I have been looking for a while now - crochet a basket with plarn! Easy to clean, easy to make the size I want.

Plarn (=plastic yarn) is very good example about upcycling something. You can cut your old plastic bags very easily into plarn and then crochet it with usual hook. I cut my plarn strips about 2cm wide and used hook of 7mm. Mind you, even for a project like this I chose the plastic bags that had some holes in them. The whole ones could still be used as trash bags!

Plarn can be cut in many ways but I think it is the best to cut one continuous stripe for two reasons; 1. it is very fast to cut and 2. it doesn't have any knots in middle. There is a how to here: https://plastiqrecreation.blogspot.fi/2009/04/continuous-single-strand-strip-cutting.html

The basked had to be oval rather than round because of the space I had decided for it. Again Pinterest is full of tutorials but they were for round baskets so I made it up while crocheting. Sorry, I don't have full tutorial for you as I didn't write it down (wasn't sure if it would even work) but if you would like to have a tutorial for oval plarn basket just ask and I will see what I can do! 

Of course the plarn basket stretches like any other crocheted work so I added some rope for two top layers:

I have no idea what the rope is, I got it from my father, might as well be something that is used when upholstering furniture. It is very stiff and definitely won't stretch! I just crocheted around it so it is hiding inside the top layers.

On the last layer I made two loops where I can hang it from:

Also the loops have rope inside.

The plarn basket will be hung inside the trash bin cupboard door, the clean reusable kitchen wipes stored in their own cartoon box on a table and all of the paper rolls hidden. There won't be any excuses not to use the reusable wipes instead of the papery ones or what do you think?