One of the 101 goals I have is to make compost.  I like feeling like I am taking part in the circle of life when I work to keep my chickens happy and healthy, when I take care of what I eat.  (Eggs)  So dumping empty egg shells in trash headed for a static landfill is a small scale travesty.  The chickens eat lots of bugs and plants from our land, I want to put back into our land.

I have tried to make compost in a black 55 gallon trash can.  I did not have success.  Maybe it was too dry.  I had holes on the top, sides, and bottom for air, drainage, and rain to enter, but it just kind of sat there.  Egg shells, grass clippings, coffee grounds, hay.  This time around, I’d like to compost on a bigger scale with bulk ingredients.  My kitchen scraps (plant based only) and egg shells will be only a small percentage.

For something to compost well, it has to have a combination of dry ingredients (like hay, leaves, and already rotted manure) and hot, or green ingredients (like fresh manure, green grass clippings, and coffee grounds.)  (There are books and web sited dedicated to composting!)  I’m short on both dry and hot ingredients.  How can I get bulk ingredients cheap?  I read that hops, leftover from beer making, make good compost.  And I remembered a tour we took of Dillworth Coffee, our guide mentioned that they give away the chaff to gardeners to compost, as well as burlap bags.  So I emailed our local coffee roasters, Dillworth Coffee and two local breweris:  NoDa Brewing and Olde Mecklenburg Brewery.   NoDaBrewing.com got back to me right away!  They have a program in place to share their used hops/grain.  We are emailing back and forth to set something up.  They usually share in batches of 5 gallon buckets, and I am wondering if I can get a pick up load full.  I don’t really know how much they produce.  We’ll see!  My neighbor, who raises horses, offered a truck load of manure.  (Isn’t that nice of him!)  And I am getting a load of wood chips from a tree cutting company.  With a mixture of these three things, I think I should end up with compost in 9-12 months.  We also have asked our local Starbucks if they share their used grounds.  One store bundles it and puts it in a special can with a special compost sticker.  Another Starbucks store said to let them know when I wanted some, they would save them for me, and sent me out with a very heavy bag full of what they had on hand!  Free is good!

Making the compost bins won’t be very complicated.  I have twelve pallets to make three different bins.  The plan might be complicated!  In the first bin, I will dump  kitchen scraps and a shovel full from each pile (wood chips, manure, hops).  And continue until the bin is full.   This might take a couple of months.  When it’s full I’ll transfer the contents to the second bin, thereby aerating and mixing it.  Then go back to filling the first bin a shovel full at a time.  When the first bin is full again, I’ll empty the contents of the second bin and into the empty third bin.  With the second bin now empty I’ll move into it the stuff from the first bin.  Once all three bins are full, the third bin, with the oldest stuff in it, should be compost.  The compost gets distributed around the garden, the bin swap happens again, and I start filling up that first bin again.

We got the potatoes in!  We picked up seed potatoes in a very small town in an even smaller hardware store.  But it catered to gardeners with inexpensive seed potatoes that grow well in this area.  We passed it on the way home from purchasing a third, fourth, sixth, or twelvth-hand sprayer for the tractor.  (It needs work!)  We stopped by the store because small town hardware stores are on the list of favorite things to experience.  This was a cool one with no end of empty hornet nests hanging from the ceiling, along with various turkey tail feather sprays.  It had a little bit of everything, as small town hardware stores do.  I went back to the truck after choosing my potatoes and some nails-by-the-pound.  Satisfied.

So the story on growing potatoes from seed potatoes vs grocery potatoes is this:  Grocery potatoes are sometimes, or maybe usually, treated with something that slows the growth of the buds.  If your grocery potatoes are budding anyway, they will grow.  But the seed potatoes are better becuase they are not treated, and more importantly, they are usually certified disease free.

 I left the potatoes in the bag in a warm spot so they would start to bud.  Plus it has been too cold outside to plant.  Potatoes like cool weather, but the plants themselves do not like freezing temperatures.  I like to cut the potatoes into sets.  They can be planted whole, but cut into pieces I get more plants!  Each piece of potato needs to have a couple of eyes or so.  I left them out for a couple of days so the cut sides would get a dry skin.  Some say that helps the potato stay healthy and not rot.  Some say plant right away because the cut piece looses moisture that it needs to grow.

Potatoes are easy to grow and there are several planting options.  I read about planting in a large trash barrel, but most people were disappointed with their yields.  (I wonder if that is a heat issue.)  I also saw some five gallon buckets planted with potatoes in a suburban backyard.  He got good results.  We have previously planted them in dirt in raised beds and gotten good results.  Another method is to lay the sets on the ground and cover them with hay.  That’s what we did this year.

Because potatoes are heavy feeders, we put down six inches of rich soil.  Then put the sets, eyes up, on the compost/soil and covered them all with six inches of wheat straw.  It is really still too cold so we covered the lot with thin painter’s plastic.  The forecast looks like freezing temperatures should end in a week.  That should be before any of the greenery comes up through the straw, and hopefully  before the whole thing molds from the trapped moisture!  I’ll let you know what happens.