Posts Tagged compost
Making Good Coffee On The Cheap
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on December 5th, 2009
Making good coffee is easy. Get good beans, the definition of “good” depending entirely on your tastes. Grind the beans immediately before brewing, for maximum freshness. Steep the beans in water between 190 and 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Steep the beans for about 4-5 minutes, so as to avoid extracting bitter flavors from them. Done.
Coffee purists will note about a million little quirks of the brewing process that I have omitted, each one they consider essential. More power to them. Perhaps they’re extracting an additional 5% of pure deliciousness from their coffee, but they’re doing five times as much work and spending twenty times as much money in order to get it, so I’ll just pass. I’ve found that the basic steps listed above give me an excellent cup of coffee with very little investment in time and money.
Drip-style coffee makers are the most popular ones in America, by far. The problem with these devices is that they typically do not get the water hot enough to fully extract the good flavors in the oils. The acids in coffee beans are extracted at lower temperatures than the other flavor compounds, which means that cool water produces a sour-tasting cup.
The two simplest and cheapest ways of making a great cup of coffee are the French press and the manual drip method. With the French press, you pour the ground coffee and the hot water into a container, stir it, let it steep, and then separate the grounds from the brew by means of a metal plunger with a mesh screen on it. French press is my favorite way of making several cups of coffee at once. Once the coffee is brewed, you can leave it in the press or, if you have a thermos or thermal carafe, you can pour it into that to keep it hot and fresh. Some people claim that leaving the coffee in the press with the grounds makes it bitter, but that hasn’t been my experience.
One thing I don’t like about the French press is the cleanup. Because I compost, I can’t just swirl the grounds in water and dump them out. That would make the compost too wet. Getting the grounds out is a bit of a pain. And sometimes, I just want a single cup of coffee. They do make single-cup presses, but I don’t have one.
The manual drip coffee method works just like an automatic drip machine, except you manually boil the water and pour it over the grounds. Because you’ve boiled the water before-hand, you know it’s above 190. Technically, you should not brew with water above 200, but I just take the pot off the heat and pour it on. I’ve found that the room-temperature grounds immediately bring the water down below 200, and I don’t taste a difference with water that has cooled to 200 and water that is just off the boil.
If you are a fancy-schmancy-pants, you can buy a Chemex Drip Coffee Carafe
May I point out that glass containers are actually not so great for storing coffee, because they don’t hold the heat well. A thermos or thermal carafe is a better choice for storing coffee you don’t intend to drink immediately.
If the price of the Chemex puts you off, you can spend about $12 to get a manual drip pot
But I’m a cheapskate. If, like me, you have perfectly good funnels sitting around your kitchen, you might consider my method, documented here for all posterity.
And if there is anything to those high-falutin’ Chemex coffee filters, I bet they still work just as good in a $2 plastic funnel as a $40 glass pot. I think that Alton Brown would be proud.
Quickie: Hay, Foam, Small Engine Repair
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Homesteading on October 28th, 2009
A quick update on the undertakings at the Wallow.
After changing the blades and topping off the oil on my riding mower, the engine refuses to start. It’ll crank, but not turn over. I’m taking this as a learning opportunity. Changing the spark plug is pretty easy. I figured out how to change the oil, which was also pretty easy once I found the drain plug. I also figured out how to disassemble and clean the carburetor, but forgot the step where you have to drain the gas tank and disconnect the fuel line. When fuel started leaking out of the carb, I remembered the guy in the video saying that the carb held a small amount of fuel and it would just drain out. But the fuel kept on coming! The carb in this mower is gravity-fed; there’s no fuel pump. This means that I was just draining the fuel tank out onto the ground through the carb. Oops. I quickly re-tightened the bolt.
I climbed our 30′ extension ladder to spray wasp killer into and around the woodpecker holes, so as to kill off the wasps that the woodpeckers are likely going after. Woodpeckers or no, there are too many damn wasps in that vicinity. Must go! Then I sprayed expanding urethane foam into the holes. Tomorrow, I’ll go back up there and cut away the excess foam so it doesn’t look like our house has cancer. I’m getting more familiar with the 30′ extension ladder, but it still scares the shit out of me.
We raked up much of the hay that had been drying in the yard today. It kept getting re-rained on and then left out to dry and then re-rained on again, and I just got tired of looking at it. It was mostly dry, but still some wet, and anyway, now it’s in a big pile and covered with a tarp. The ultimate destination is to be mixed in with pig manure and turned into compost, so it won’t matter much if it’s a little bit pre-composted. It’s exciting to think that lawn clippings, which I would previously have considered to be waste, will turn into compost that will feed the garden instead.
A guy with a tractor is coming tomorrow to bush-hog the field. After that, he’s going to turn the top layer of soil for us and Issa is going to plant a pasture seed mix called, “Laugh and Grow Fat Hog Pasture Mix.” It’s a winter seed mix that contains four plants that hogs like to graze on. We were planning to put a winter grass like rye in the field anyway, just to give the weeds a little competition and to enrich the soil, but Issa found livestock-specific mixtures, and we liked that option better. If we’re going to grow something, we might as well grow something the animals can eat.
How Much Manure Does A Pig Make
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on September 25th, 2009
In my previous post on composting pig manure, I discussed the type of composting system Issa and I plan to use. A fundamental question for us in choosing a system was how much manure we could expect our forthcoming pigs to make. A system based on 55 gallon drums would be a hassle if the pigs could fill them in too short a time.
Issa found one site that stated that a 200 lb pig would produce about 13 lbs of manure a day. That’s all well and good, but unless you know the density of pig manure, it doesn’t tell you the volume you’ll need to contain it.
I found a site that stated that pigs would produce between 0.5 and 0.75 cubic feet of manure a day, per 1000 lbs of pig. For a 200 lb pig (close to market weight), that’s 0.1 to 0.15 cubic feet of manure. That gives us a density of about 87 to 130 lbs per cubic foot, or an average density of about 108 lbs per cubic foot.
A 55 gallon drum is about 7.3 cubic feet. If a 200 lb pig produces 0.1 to 0.15 cubic feet of manure a day, it will fill a 55 gallon drum in between 73 and 49 days. We plan to keep two pigs, so cut those numbers in half: 36.5 and 24.5 days. Granted, those numbers are for full-weight pigs. The pigs will produce less manure when they are smaller.
A 4-H site I found said that a healthy pig will gain approximately 1.6 lbs per day. According to that site, 50 lbs is a typical starter weight. Market weight is between 200 and 250 lbs. Based on the previously-given numbers, here’s a graph of the estimated total manure production of a pig from 50 lbs to 250 lbs:
The red line is the high estimate, based on 0.75 cubic feet of manure per 1000 lbs of pig, while the blue line is the low estimate, based on 0.5 cubic feet of manure per 1000 lbs of pig. You can see we end up with approximately 9 to 14 cubic feet of manure produced per pig. (For perspective, again, a 55 gallon drum is about 7.3 cubic feet.) This is estimated to weigh approximately 972 to 1512 lbs.
Here’s where things get a bit fuzzy. That manure is going to shrink down when it composts. A typical ratio given for compost shrinkage is 50% volume. That means we can expect to end up with approximately 4.5 to 7 cubic feet of compost, solely from pig manure. Bulk finished compost is estimated to weigh in the ball park of 800 lbs per cubic yard, or 30 lbs per cubic foot. That means our final compost will weigh only 135 to 210 lbs! That’s a heck of a lot of matter that left the system!
Realistically, though, the pig manure will not be the only input to the system. Pig manure has a high nitrogen content relative to carbon. This means that an appropriate quantity of high-carbon material must be added out to balance out the ratio in the final compost. The actual amount of material depends on the type of material added, and a consideration of this factor is beyond the scope of this post. The bottom line is that there’s going to be a bit more compost than the pig manure alone would produce.
The final question, then, is whether the two pigs we plan to keep will provide enough compost to fertilize the garden plot we plan to keep. I have estimated that the garden will start out at about 350 square feet and will probably grow from there. A common guideline is to till 1″ of compost over your entire garden. Based on this, a 350 square foot plot will require just about exactly 1 cubic foot of compost. Yeah, looks like we’re good to go, with compost to spare!
I have some water jugs that are almost exactly 1 cubic square foot. It’s hard to imagine that small amount of compost going over 350 square feet! Maybe it’s more compost than it looks like, though. After all, it’s certainly more water than it looks like!
Actual results will, of course, vary, but it’s still a fun thought exercise.
Compost Bin Designs
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on September 25th, 2009
One of the projects that goes along with the new house is choosing and building a new composting system. Currently, we compost kitchen scraps in a large, outdoor trash can. Issa drilled holes in the side for aeration, and she knocks it over and rolls it around now and then for turning.
After about six months of this, we have approximately half-filled one of the cans. But we plan to raise a pig or two at the new place, and pigs generate a lot of manure. Manure makes great compost. Some folks say you shouldn’t put animal manure compost onto edible plants, but other folks do it, and all things considered, we’re going to go ahead and do it. After all, what the hell else are we going to do with that much manure? Seems a shame to waste it.
I figure any risk of contamination can be reduced if we make sure the stuff is fully composted and dig the material into the beds in the fall, giving any contaminants the entire winter to… well, I don’t know. But it seems like a better idea than, say, top-dressing the beds while the live plants are present. Which we may end up doing as well, depending on various factors. But it just doesn’t seem to make sense to keep kitchen scraps in a separate pile from the manure, especially when the smart thing to do is probably to feed the kitchen scraps to the pigs, and then compost the resulting manure, as opposed to throwing the scraps straight into the bin, denying the pigs any nutritional value that might be gained.
Anyway, we are considering our preferred way of composting all the manure, yard clippings, and so forth that the property is likely to produce.
Now a good old pile on the ground has simplicity and cheapness going for it, but we’d prefer something a bit more contained, both to clearly delineate one pile from another (when they’re at different stages of processing), and to keep it from attracting unwanted pests.
You can find plans on-line for multi-bin units like the one pictured above, and they’re not too difficult to build, but definitely a bit time-consuming and requires purchasing a few hundred dollars in lumber, or sourcing it scrap.
Isn’t it nice, then, that you can build pretty much the same damn thing using cheap-to-free shipping pallets? Doesn’t look quite as snazzy, but given that it’s designed to hold rotting trash, maybe that’s not actually such a big deal.
Ah, but you still have to turn the damn thing, right? This is typically done by shoveling the contents of one bin into the next, empty bin. One bin is kept empty for this purpose. Alternatively, you can turn the contents in-place, which is more work and less effective. Alternatively, you can not bother turning it, but this dramatically slows the composting process.
Commercial compost bins like the one pictured above often have a tumbling mechanism, to ease turning of the compost. These produce compost the fastest and with the least work, but they can be very expensive. A 55-gallon unit like shown above might cost around $200.
So why not build your own on the cheap using a 55-gallon drum? This is currently our leading choice, although we plan to build a vertical tumbler instead of a horizontal one. A vertical one can have the opening at the end, which should be structurally more sound and easier to engineer than an opening at the wall. Also, a vertical one can easily be built to pour out into a wheelbarrow. The narrower design will allow more compost volume for a similar axis of axle, meaning that a 10′ length of galvanized steel conduit might support three barrels instead of two (not sure if the math actually works out on that one). Additionally, the vertical tumbling will produce more motion in the compost, hopefully speeding the process up.
We’re leaning towards something like this:
Additional barrels could be added by simply extending the design to the sides.
Here are links to the instructions for building the two homemade composters shown:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Compost-Tumbler-2/
http://www.instructables.com/id/compost-bin/
For bonus, here’s another clever design that simply lays the drum down on scooter-wheels. This method avoids all necessity of installing an axle, although it loses the ability to get a wheel-barrow up underneath your bin for easy emptying.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Compost-Tumbler/
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