Oh Jungle, my Jungle

Adam and I found our home by accident. I had recently moved to Martin County for my job at the hospital and had not explored much of the area besides what I found in the route between my low budget apartment and my job.  Adam and I had just started dating and while he was basically living with me in my one bedroom apartment we weren't looking to move in together right away.

One random day, Adam decided to drive me around Martin County so I could get more acquainted with the area.  We drove through Jensen Beach, Stuart, Port Salerno and then into Hobe Sound.  I could see the giant houses of Jupiter Island across the intracoastal and asked him to take me there.  

In our efforts to try to find an East/West thoroughfare, we stumbled onto a for lease sign.  For no other reason then curiosity, we started driving into this little old Florida neighborhood until we stopped in front of the house for rent.  It was adorable.  Perfect. Picturesque.  It was really close to the water so when it didn't have the price on the sign we tried to guess how much it would cost.  He and I both grew up in southern Palm Beach County and were conditioned to believe anything by the water would cost an arm and a leg.  For shits and giggles, Adam called the number and asked for more information.  It was way cheaper then either of us thought but still more then either of us, individually, could afford.

Somehow we ended up meeting the landlord a few days later to tour the inside.  It was love at first sight and we knew it was too good to pass up.  I broke my apartment lease and we moved in a week or so later.  To this day I've never regretted our rash decision or as I like to look at it, leap of faith in what the universe had to offer.

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One of the many reasons I love this area so much is because there isn't an over-manicured yard in sight.  Everyone maintains their respective jungle yards but no one really bothers with mulch or planting anything that isn't native.  It's a beautiful thing.  There seem to be more squirrels then people in our neighborhood and that suits me just fine.

Our yard looks like this:

Obviously, having such a jungle-like yard has it's pros and cons.  On the plus side we have complete privacy, very little grass, and hardly anything requires regular watering because they are all native drought-resistant plants.  The down side is trying to maintain the balance between quaintly jungle-like and completely unkempt.  While yard work in general is not my responsibility (Adam takes care of most of it with help from his boys), I could see that with the amount of yard debris collected after just a few hours we needed to do something proactive about our waste.  

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, we had a compost heap in our back yard growing up.  I talked to Adam about it and he was excited to start the project.  With 4 posts, some chicken wire, and a bag of manure (to jump start the breakdown process) we made our very own compost heap.

 It isn't the most attractive thing in the world but it does the job.  We try to maintain a 2 part brown to 1 part green ratio when we can.  For the most part we try to keep food waste out of it for no other reason then attracting wildlife (although with how lazy our worms have been lately I've been known to toss a corn cob or two in the heap without noticing any disturbance). Bringing the bottom contents to the top once a week and making sure it stays moist but not soaked is key to making an ideal environment for composting.

Composting has its perks beyond creating less waste.  The finished product is nutrient rich soil for a backyard garden.  Coincidentally, that is a perfect segue into my next post. Stay tuned for "How Black Thumbs Bare Fruit."

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out...

When I was in college, I signed up to take an Environmental Science course, despite the fact that I was firmly entrenched in my hippie-hiatus period.  It would seem that my subconscious was not so subtly trying to tell me something.

I don't remember a heck of a lot about the class aside from two things:

1. There are a surprisingly large amount of nature preserve parks in Palm Beach County.  I know this for a fact because 50% of my grade depended on me finding these parks, visiting them, and subsequently writing essays about their flora and fauna.
2. My professor was a total hippie.  Hair down to her waist, barefoot, worm composting kind of hippie.  When she was explaining her kitchen worm compost to the class she enthusiastically offered her surplus worms to whoever was interested in starting their own. At the time, I thought she was a total loon.  The thought of having a nest of worms on my kitchen counter sounded ludicrous to me.  

Well, this is me eating my words (thoughts, really).  The idea stuck with me all these years and now that I've embraced this hippie-feeling I decided a worm compost was just the ticket to minimizing my contribution to the landfills.  

Adam and I eat a lot of fresh fruit and veggies and it made no sense to me to put easily biodegradable food waste into a not-so-biodegradable plastic garbage bag.  Not to mention the fact that you can only feed so many raw veggies to the dog before his farts reach toxic, nose hair singeing levels.  After doing some online research Adam and I made a trip to Home Depot and our local bait shop.

We purchased:

• a 3 quart Rubbermaid plastic storage container
• 4 dome wall protectors (you know those things you line up with your door nob to keep it from whacking into the wall and leaving a dent)
• approximately 5 dozen red wigglers  

When we got home I drilled about 20 holes into the bottom of the container with a 1/4" drill bit.  I did 10-15 holes on each of the sides as well.  Next, I stuck the self-adhesive wall protectors onto the bottom 4 corners of the container.  (These will be the feet to facilitate drainage.)  Then, I dug into my perpetually full shredder bin (not something I ever remember to empty on trash day) and filled the container halfway with paper shavings.  A light mist of water to moisten the paper and voila!  A happy house for my new creepy crawly pets!  I put the lid under the bin as a drainage tray and used an old OR towel with a rubber band to cover the top.

Surprisingly I haven't noticed any smell associated with the essentially rotting plant matter on the kitchen counter.  I love the way this bin has basically cut our weekly garbage contribution by half.  We've had our worm compost for about a month now and have strayed a bit from the online guidelines.  Here are my observations:

• We have been lazy about burying the food waste when we put it in the bin so fruit flies have been a problem.  Learn from our mistake and when you drop the food in the worm bin, cover it up with some paper shreds.  It's worth the 2 extra seconds it takes.
• Research recommended feeding your worms once or twice a week.  We have been dropping food in daily as we acquire compost-able items.  Seems to me they are taking an awfully long time to munch our tasty morsels.  We haven't really figured out the ratio of worms to food yet because I can't bring myself to weigh the amount of worms we have and the total amount of waste we put in the bin per week.  I figure they will eventually procreate and make up for the apparent discrepancy.

So, there you have it, sports fans.  My worm composting adventure!  Stay tuned for the next exciting episode:  "Oh Jungle, my Jungle!" 

(For more information check out this link.  It, along with many others, were what I used as a rough guide for making and maintaining my worm bin!)

An Introduction:

I come by this hippie thing naturally. My mom is and always has been a self-proclaimed hippie. I grew up with a compost bin and a doggie dooley in the backyard. I swear she could hear me dropping an empty apricot nectar can into the garbage from across the house. The echoes of her shouts, “That's a recyclable!” rang in my head during my years of hippie-hiatus.

That militant recycling is only one of the many ways she brought me up to be green, long before it was trendy to do so. We regularly frequented consignment shops and thrift stores, not because that was all we could afford, but because my mom refused to waste anything. Hand-me-down clothes and toys are just another way of recycling to her. She is creative with her re-purposing and any and all MacGyvering I do I learned from her. She can make a toy out of a kitchen sponge that would keep even the most fickle child occupied for hours. Waste not, want not is a mantra I've learned to live by because of her.

This green way of life has been something deeply ingrained in me but not particularly embraced until recently. My years of hiatus can be blamed 90% on laziness and 10% on ignorance. After moving out of my parent's house at 18 I lived in a number of apartment complexes that didn't offer recycling. Add that to the fact that I was a poor, working, college student and you can see why I didn't have a lot of energy to devote to any endeavors besides surviving. I married young, to a kind but emotionally vacant man who had never worn a used article of clothing in his life. Needless to say, fighting the battle of being green was a losing one. After my divorce, I lived in yet another non-recycling apartment complex. (It still amazes me how prevalent complexes like that are to this day.)

Thankfully, my next (and current) home is in this beautiful little beach bungalow on a jungle-like corner lot in one of the few “Old Florida” towns left in South Florida. Just being in this place makes me feel closer to the nature child I was born to be. Add a very supportive and equally green-oriented significant other and you've got all the fixings for a hippie rebirth!

So here is my blog. A Chronicle of my evolving world of born-again hippiedom. Some of the topics I will touch on are: composting (both outdoor and worm), homemade cleaning products, green candle making, gardening. and anything else I stumble upon on my journey to enlightenment. The strides I will make to minimize my carbon footprint will occur simply by being truer to myself!