Category: apartment living

Vermiculture

Post author By claremc
Post date March 4, 2014

Back when Husby and I were attempting to straighten out our apartment composting situation, one of the things we dabbled in was vermiculture. Vermiculture is composting with worms, and in the right conditions the worms eat your kitchen scraps and poop them out as vermiculite, a fabulously rich in nutrient garden addition. In a traditional compost pile, the work of changing the scraps is done primarily through bacteria, fermentation, heat, and time.

You can order special worms for vermiculture, but that’s not really necessary, as any worm has to eat and excrete. In fact your garden variety earth worm will frequently crawl its way into the outskirts of a compost pile and happily live and eat there. So, seeing as how in the summer in the great lakes region, you can go into pretty much any locally owned hardware store and buy “bait”, Husby did just that and brought home about two dozen earth worms.

The trick with indoor vermiculture is that you need to create the right environment for your worker-worms, as they will be contained in whatever sort of container you are keeping your compost in, and won’t have a chance to safely retreat from the pile if it is no longer meeting their needs. Worms don’t want it to be too hot, and if you have a compost pile that is primarily kitchen scraps in a small enough space, the natural rotting process of the food will build up quite a bit of heat in the center of the pile – great for a compost pile, but not at all great for the worms. So it’s very important that the vermiculture pile has enough space to spread out, and is mixed with plenty of “brown” or carbon rich materials to help keep it cool. Good brown materials include shredded newspaper, torn up egg cartons (the cardboard kind, not the Styrofoam) torn up brown paper bags, and dried leaves. You also want to have airflow, which may mean holes in the container or a breathing material for the lid. Finally, starting out with an inch or two of dirt will give the worms someplace to retreat to if the center of the pile gets too hot.

Unfortunately our new pets did not fair so well. We made a couple of mistakes – our bin was just too small for the amount of scraps we were adding to it, and the worms didn’t have anywhere cool to retreat to once the scraps started rotting. But retreat they did, right out of the bucket and across our wood floors. Which, by the way, are also not the right environment for worms to thrive in. Unfortunately, Husby and I didn’t realize we had a problem until we found a couple poor, dried out, worms on our floor. We mourned our pets and decided it would be best to wait on our vermiculture plans until we have space for a larger bin.

If you’re interested in starting your own vermiculture compost, Husby highly recommends the book The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City. It looks like they’ve released a new edition since we got ours. I’ll keep you up to date on our future (hopefully much more successful) attempts at raising worms and making black gold.

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apartment living living green

Apartment Living

Post author By claremc
Post date February 5, 2014

I am so excited to own property. I am excited both to indulge my house decorating dreams, and also to invest in a living space that is focused on efficiency and sustainability. I have been excited for this prospect for years, but it hasn’t been in the cards yet. Husby and I are hoping to make an investment in this direction in the next year, but for the past 3 we’ve been happily apartment living. And we’ve been seizing on every opportunity to decrease our negative impact on the earth and increase our positive impact in our small rental space.

While living in a rental unit there are obviously quite a few limitations to our control over our environment. We don’t get a say in how our apartment is heated, or how the water is heated, the quality of the insulation or of our windows, or what materials are used to make improvements or replacements. With limited ability to make an impact in so many of the heavy hitting areas of our living space, we try to so what we can in all of the areas we can control, hoping that the accumulations of our smaller actions will add up.

One of the great features of our apartment we basically lucked into because of what was available at the time. We have fabulous southern and western exposure, and living on the top floor (out of 4) puts us higher than the neighboring buildings. Our windows and high position allow us to take advantage of wonderful sunlight, reducing our reliance on electricity for lighting. In the winter our large windows allow us to take advantage of heat from the sun. This reduces our need to supplement our heat via gas fireplace in an otherwise rather chilly apartment. In the summer our high position means that we get a pretty decent cross-breeze through open windows, keeping our home a bit cooler than it might otherwise be.

We have been making many other “green” lifestyle choices as renters. We put plastic on our windows in the winter, we unplug unused electronics, we recycle as much as we can, we compost, we support renewable energy, use homemade cleaning solutions, spend our grocery money on organic produce and sustainable, humanely raised meat, buy dry goods in bulk, and reuse often.

I hope to write about many of these topics more in depth in the next few weeks. I think there are never enough resources out there for people interested in improving their impact. Husby and I are always looking for more ways to align our lifestyle with our values and morals, so I’m happy to share what we do with others that feel the same way.

Tags renting

apartment living living green

On Apartment Composting

Post author By claremc
Post date January 31, 2014

Let’s chat about one of my favorite gardening topics: compost. Seriously, how wonderful is it that you can take something you inevitably have if you cook or eat fresh produce – kitchen scraps – and instead of throwing them away, you can turn them into nutrient rich food for the next generation of fresh produce? And it’s a natural process. Depending on your level of patience, there is very little you have to do to go from trash to “black gold”.

One of the greatest things about compost is that it really only requires two things aside from the kitchen scraps – somewhere to keep the scraps as you collect them, and someplace to put the scraps to let them do their thing.

Apartment Composting

Husby and I have been apartment composting for nearly three years. The first six months or so were certainly a learning curve. Previously we had each been living in houses that had their own compost piles, but our apartment does not. Nor does it have a balcony where we could keep our own pile.

Theoretically, you might be able to keep a self contained compost in one of those large plastic storage bins in an apartment. At least that is what the internet will lead you to believe. But we were never able to get it to work. Compost does require some air circulation, and we always ended up with fruit flies in the compost. Just the simple act of opening the bin to add scraps released a gross fleet of little flies. Yuck.

After trying this method out for a couple months and making a couple tweaks to try and control our fruit fly population, we determined that trying to keep our self contained pile was just not an apartment dweller’s reality. We needed another option. Our immediate solution, which allowed us to continue composting without interruption, was to collect our scraps and bring them out to husby’s family’s house, where his mom kept a compost pile. After a couple months we made connections with the neighborhood community garden, and made arrangements to add our scraps to their compost pile. For the past few years, every time we have a full container of kitchen scraps we bring them to the community garden. Since then, more and more community gardens have started in our neighborhood, so we, and our fellow apartment dwellers in midtown Detroit, have plenty of places to bring our kitchen scraps.

As far as how we keep our scraps in between trips to the compost pile, we certainly don’t use anything fancy. We just keep them in a plastic mixing bowl, and keep the bowl in the refrigerator to keep the smell down and the flies away. No need for any specific composting container. No real need for a lid even. We are easily able to keep scraps for two weeks between taking out the compost. In the summer we tend to empty our bowl more frequently, but that is mostly because we are using more fresh produce so we have more scraps in a shorter amount of time, and also because we are making frequent trips to the garden anyway to water or weed our garden plot.

So if you’re living in an apartment and want to compost, find yourself a local community garden and see if they will let you contribute to their pile. Then get yourself a bowl and start collecting.

Tags compost