2023 was another busy year at Shadyside Worms! These pictures only give you a small peek into all the composting, gardening, pick ups, and soil making that went on throughout the year. Looking ahead at 2024, we are excited to continue our amazing Compost Exchange Program, now with the addition of Potting Soil on our available products! Stay tuned for some more updates as we get ready for spring!
There’s still time to plant some vegetables, annuals, or perrenials in your yard or garden space! Sign up for our Compost Exchange program now and you’ll get 2 bags of compost when you sign up. Too much food in that CSA? No problem! We pick up every week, and clean your composting bucket for you. Pickups are Thursday through Saturday, depending on you neighborhood.
A huge part of our business model at Shadyside Worms is connecting Pittsburgh gardeners with local community gardens and other gardening projects around the city. Each year, a portion of our customers donate their yearly shares of compost to go to one of the many awesome gardening communities around Pittsburgh.
Last year we did 22 in ’22, and were able to donate compost to 22 community gardens around Pittsburgh. We had a lot of fresh compost to get rid of, so we brought a truck full of compost to each community garden, from Wilkinsburg and Homewood, to Greenfield, Oakland, Northside, and a whole lot more in between. This year, we want to donate our compost again- but we need your help!
Not everybody that reads this knows about their local community gardens, and while Grow Pittsburgh provides a great resource to find gardening projects around the city, it still helps to have grass roots efforts to make sure contacts are up to date, and to help find all the smaller community projects that could really use a boost with some free compost.
Do you know of a community garden that would be interested in receiving donated compost? Help us find 6 more gardens this spring to donate to. We aren’t too picky about what the garden looks like. As long as the project is meant to foster community gardening, and help bring residents together in this way, we want to help!
Please fill out the form below! All we need is a point of contact for the garden- and we’ll do the rest!
Link to our Google Form Click HERE
Our “22 in ’22” started on Monday 2/28, and it was 22 degrees outside with 22mph winds! Yikes! It wasn’t going to stop us though!
We are currently 2/3 of the way through our donations for 22 in ’22. We had a solid push last week to deliver to 14 different gardens! Despite the harsh weather conditions on both days, we coordinated and delivered! Through all the madness we weren’t able to document every garden, but we did our best to take some pictures to share. Take a Look! We will have more updates when we continue our deliveries soon:
CLICK THE LINK TO OUR GOOGLE FORM TO ADD YOUR GARDEN TO THE LIST!
Ask any composter about “food waste”, and you’ll see the gears turning in their head immediately. They might even have a glimmer in their eye, or bated breath, as you begin the discussion.
The term “food waste” encompasses a lot of different kinds interactions between humans and the food that we grow, farm, sell, purchase, eat, share, preserve, and then compost. As a residential composting service, our exposure to food waste starts with what our customers don’t like, or don’t want, to eat, and then leave in their buckets for composting. Most often this comes in the form of food scraps– pieces of produce, or even stuff like fermented grains from brewers, that was never really meant for consumption, or takes too much time to “upcycle” into another dish. It also comes in the form of unwanted food– leftovers, moldy foods, or excess. Both of these elements of food waste at the residential level can be controlled somewhat by the consumer. The reasons why might vary, and the how can become a bit of a burden when people have large families, or busy schedules and a composting stream is in place. Ultimately the nutrients are going to the right place, so why bother worrying about the last apple of the bunch getting composted, or stressing about the day old casserole that’s not going to get eaten.
In March 2020, a very simple concept in food waste was brought to everyone’s attention as the regular task of grocery shopping was flipped on its head during the initial outbreak of Covid-19. The concept was this: With the stay-at-home policy in place, grocery shopping, as well as what we cook and eat, was fundamentally changing, along with the food waste that comes from all of it. Shopping trips needed to be planned out. People shopping from home didn’t have a say in what the produce looked like that was being picked up for them at the store. The community at large began baking sourdough bread, and with the timing of the outbreak, more people started gardening too. The potential catalyst for real change was present.
The pictures you see here were taken sometime in the spring of 2020. They represent my occasional observations as a composter. It seemed that even as people tried to adjust to new shopping habits, fresh foods were still being discarded. Again, reasons why can vary. As we enter 2022, two years after this shock to the system, it’s hard to say for certain how food waste has changed at the residential level overall, but from a collector’s perspective food waste still exists in this same capacity. Food often enters the composting stream as edible, undesired food. It’s hard not to see this and wonder how this could be avoided. To try and tackle this one small part of the food waste, let’s ask ourselves, “Why should I worry about food waste coming from my home if I am composting it?”
Pittsburgh has some great recourses for gleaning food and distributing it to places in need. For the sake of simplicity, this blog post is focusing on just the compost collection stream.
If you have a bell pepper sitting in your food waste-bin, and it looks crispy and juicy enough to cut and dip into some baba ghanoush, I’m going to assume you didn’t grow it. If you had, you wouldn’t be so quick to pitch it. If it has a produce sticker on it, then there’s a better chance it got trucked in from another state, or maybe even brought in from a different country. It’s just one pepper, but attached to that pepper is potentially hours of travel, energy, and commerce. As well, seeing as how a bell pepper is something that can be grown locally, depending on the time of year, this pepper bound for compost may even be associated with a local farm. Even if it’s just a dusty looking russet potato, our food waste leads right back to our purchasing, cooking, and eating habits.
As a composter, it’s easy to see this wasted food as extra weight. Why is it even entering the composting stream? Some foods look slightly bruised, but certainly nothing my mother wouldn’t have told me to “cut around”. Looking at an apple that has a produce sticker from another country on it, as it’s about to get composted, I think about how it would make a great addition to my lunch, and provide a good afternoon boost of energy, instead of travelling across the globe just to be mixed back into the earth, thousands of miles away from the earth beneath the tree where it grew. Sure, the bell pepper is going to make for great nutrients in the soil, but only after it is processed for a few months with machinery and time. Why not process it the way it’s meant to be processed, through our metabolism?
Ultimately, the question of food waste leads to more questions, but they’re good ones in my mind. There’s something to be said for cutting around that bruise on your vegetables, or knowing that peppers do tend to get mushy if you freeze them, but since you didn’t end up making that salsa, maybe freezing them for a soup later on would be better than composting it. If we continue to think about how we plan our grocery shopping, and what we are buying and preparing, can we save a few thousand miles of transport by avoiding simple kitchen waste? Does learning how to preserve food better at home lead to a better appreciation for what we eat and where it comes from? Maybe it’s not about having the sweetest and juiciest apple, but instead just being grateful for the slightly softer one that still gives us just what we need.
To keep things simple as a composter, I have to keep in my mind, the soil that will be ultimately made from all this food. Come springtime it’s easy to forget about the food wasted from households, as the compost we’ve created goes out to backyard gardens and local community gardens. Ultimately the food won’t go to waste if we can continue to do our job as composters.
There’s always going to be some food that gets thrown away, even if it was homegrown, or could have been rescued to a local fresh-food desert instead. In this day and age it’s probably better not to lay guilt or personal dogma onto others- certainly not about something as universal as food. Whenever we pick up food scraps, there is always going to be some food that looks like it shouldn’t have gotten discarded. At the heart of this “food waste”, it could be said, is simply a preference for something fresher. Churning this food into dirt is still a magical process, and we’ll have the opportunity to replenish the earth in new ways when the days get longer and warmer, and start over in our collective gardening quests to grow, preserve, share, and enjoy, to stay healthy, happy, and strong.
There are a lot of great uses for compost in the fall! We have been chugging along with our residential composting program, returning compost to customers and donating to non-profits, but we are taking some time today to give you some recommendations on how to use that fresh compost in your yard or garden this off season.
COVER CROPS
There are a couple really helpful cover crops that we can use in our gardens here in the city and suburbs. All you have to do is spread the seeds, and apply a small layer of your compost on top, and you’re all set. These cover crops are used in no-till farming, and the help:
My favorite cover crop to use in the garden is WINTER RYE(annual). The truly amazing thing about winter rye is that the seeds will germinate in below 50°F temperatures. This means that while your garden is getting cleaned up and your summer plants are dying off, you can spread some rye seed. The grass will grow slowly throughout the winter, holding your compost and topsoil in place. WINTER WHEAT is also a great option, although the germination for these seeds should be done as soon as possible- 60°F-75°F is the ideal temperature. Winter wheat will grow in colder temperatures once it is established.
Winter rye(annual) is a cereal grain, which means it dies off naturally after you mow it or terminate it manually. No herbicides or special techniques are needed. You don’t want to get perennial rye grass seed, otherwise you will be pulling clumps of lawn grass from your garden next spring. When spring comes around, the winter rye grass will continue to grow, and help prevent unwanted weeds from sprouting if their seeds were dormant in your garden from the previous year. This is a HUGE help for me, because I can’t always get out to gardening first thing every year.
Next spring you will have the option to either mow down the grass, or let some of it grow for a nice looking decorative grass. You can even harvest the rye seeds if you want to! Once you cut the grass, you plant your seeds or plants directly into the soil where the roots were! You will add organic material to your soil, and feel like a real urban farmer. I like to plant rye grass all around my garden, and in the spring I let the grass around the edges grow until the summer. It keeps weeds out and looks really cool. Once the rye goes to seed in the summer, I cut the grass and I have material for mulching.
Cover crops like Winter Rye or Winter Wheat can be really helpful, and once you figure out how to utilize them in your garden, it can be really rewarding. You can start to look into using oats and peas during the season, or even crimson clover, and you’ll begin to save yourself a lot of time weeding and spreading straw.
For more information on winter cover crops, check out the links below. CRIMSON CLOVER is another great cover crop in fall, although it may winter kill, it does not require herbicides to terminate in the spring, and it will help fix nitrogen into your soil.
https://www.uvm.edu/vtvegandberry/factsheets/winterrye.html
https://www.no-tillfarmer.com/articles/4089-using-crimson-clover-as-a-cover-crop
PLANT GARLIC
I always talk about garlic this time of year, and I’m pretty sure I’m repeating this post from a couple years ago, but HEY, garlic is SO easy to plant. I know it’s getting cold, and it doesn’t seem like much fun gardening in October, but planting garlic cloves in some healthy compost will get you delicious, fresh, and free garlic, next spring. Each clove you plant will grow an entire bulb!
This is all you do! Find a spot in your garden, grab a bucket of compost, maybe a trowel to clear away old plants, and you’re all set. Don’t forget to mark the area where you planted! Despite what people will tell you, you CAN use garlic from the grocery store, but just make sure it is organic, and has some color to it. I recommend checking out the farmers markets, and finding a variety you really like. Some garlic is spicy, some is nutty, you can look for different varieties. Just don’t plant that white stuff that comes in bulk bags. You’ll get garlic next year, but it won’t have a great flavor, and a lot of the bulbs won’t even grow that big.
I look for garlic that has a little color to it. Some reds or purples-even just a few streaks of color on the outside.
TOP DRESSING
Last but not least, use your compost as top dressing around your perennials. Just because you may have trimmed back the foliage, it doesn’t mean the roots aren’t still active. When perennial plants die back, they are actually draining a lot of the nutrients from the foliage down into the roots to get ready to hibernate. Adding some compost on top of your perennials will help the root zone, and even insulate the plant from harsh winters.
ENJOY THE FALL!
We will try to update more soon!
Shadyside Worms 