Spring cleaning.

  Spring will be here before we know it and then everyone will be hustling to clean up yards and prepare garden beds.

  Will you be ready? For what it’s worth I did most of my yard work last fall, as soon as grasses and the weeds were dying out I mowed them up and deposited them in my compost bin.

  I raked up all the leaves that fell in the street and thin strip in front of my house as soon as they fell. Had a huge pile too, totally over filled my large round wire compost bin. It’s four and a half foot tall and three foot in diameter.

  I coverd it with a layer of cardboard weighted down with a car tire after watering it down well and wrapping with a couple of tarps.

  It’s settled down about three forths of way and I’m curious to see just how much it has broken down, though I suspect it will take this year and maybe a bit longer to become usable compost.

  There are equal amounts of woodvine, grass and leaves with generous layers of kitchen waste in between layers so I have high hopes. I’ll post pictures of the compost pile when I unwrap it for Spring time. Supposed to be warm this weekend so I will uncover the top and throw close to 20lbs of coffe grounds and paper pulp in and water down again.

I bought a cheap Walmart blender just for this.

  I finally found a source for wood chips and so will cover pretty much the entire yard in a thick layer wood chips to lower my soil PH a little so I can hopefully grow blueberries someday.

  I’ll cover everything with a layer of cardboard first to help choke out weeds, I’m also running an experiment in a small area where I grew cantaloupe last season.

  I’m putting all most all of our paper waste through the blender and pouring in into a bucket, after the bucket if full I’m pouring it on the ground in about a two inch layer, whatever doesn’t get covered in the paper pulp will get cardboard before covering with the wood chips. I have bind weed.

  This will be my attempt to combat the bind weed. I’ve tried chemicals, burning and digging. But it just keeps coming back. I even had it grow up through a 55 gallon drum that I was trying to grow potatoes in. I was surprised that it was able to do that.

   I twisted the barrel enough to brake it off and pulled as much as I could out of the barrel.  It didn’t come back so I know I can get rid of it if I don’t give up.

What are you working on?

Best of luck and may your ventures be met with success!