Backyard Ecosystem

Spring Bee Hive Update and Move

2010-04-08T19:27:00.000-06:00

Backyard Ecosystem has moved to its new home at http://www.backyardecosystem.com/ . Please update your links, RSS feed, and bookmarks so that you will not miss updates. Lots of bee news and photographs in the latest update. Please take a moment and tell us what you think about the new site.

Kevin and Natalie.

Even Worms Want to Save the World... Part One

2010-03-30T18:21:00.002-06:00

One sunny afternoon three summers ago, Kevin and I were tidying up the backyard in preparation for our joint birthday party. We were both turning older than dirt that year and thought we would have a big soiree and invite all our friends to celebrate, check out the garden, and see my latest artwork.

While cleaning up the various bags of potting mix and accumulated stuff on the bench, I came across an old plastic grocery bag containing something which appeared to be dirt. Kevin said he’d brought the bag home months before, and the contents were worm castings from the large demonstration bin used by his master composting program. Looking closely at the bag of castings, we realized there were juvenile red wrigglers in the castings and we had everything we needed on hand to get started. All cleaning for the party immediately stopped.

Although Kevin hadn’t been particularly excited about vermicomposting, being otherwise engaged, I thought worms eating my vegetable scraps was fabulous and wanted to start immediately. A suitable plastic bin was found, holes were drilled, newspaper was ripped and leaves gathered, miscellaneous bits fit together, and viola! An hour later we had a bin. It was so exciting when we gently dumped the little worms and castings into their new home.

The only tasks left to complete were to actually finish the cleaning and the great debate over where to locate said bin. It was a full afternoon.

We moved the vermicomposting bin indoors for the winter and it took up permanent residence in the laundry room. It operated better free from pests and the wild temperature swings endemic to Denver.

Months later we’d reached full capacity. We thought about splitting the bin, but due to limited space, that wasn’t going to work. However, one afternoon while visiting pseudo-spring at the local garden shop, I asked the manager if he would be interested in carrying vermicomposting worms. He said no. I was dashed. ‘But, he’d be happy to give our phone number to people who came in looking for them.’ It was perfect. And BackyardEcosystem.com was born.

People would call, wanting vermicomposting worms and would end up sometimes staying an hour while we walked them through all the details of this tidy, compact indoor composting set up, and also show them the beehives, the garden beds, herb garden, leaf mould pile, weed tea container, and outdoor conventional composting set up. (Okay, maybe longer than an hour.) After a local high school science project wiped us out, demand forced us to upsize and split into two separate bins. We learned a lot along the way about how not to run the bin, and about what made the worms happiest.

Denver Recycles estimates that about 11% of the waste stream is compostable food waste suitable for a worm bin. When you include the leaves (yard waste is another 20%) and paper products (another 20% although technically recyclable) we add to the bin as bedding, the total reduction is probably closer to 33% of our waste stream.

Realizing there was a serious interest here in Denver and other large urban areas in vermicomposting, urban backwards beekeeping, urban farming, and composting in small spaces, we started this blog to share with others what we had learned through bitter experience. We also learned a lot about what others were doing right and wrong from talking with them about their own urban homesteading experiences.

And it’s amazing what one can learn! For example, we recently learned from a reader that growers of medicinal (and maybe not so medicinal) marijuana consider worm castings their fertilizer of choice. Who knew that drug dealers wanted to work so hard to save the world by converting food waste to fertilizer in an ecologically sound manner? A refreshing change from the approach of conventional drug and pesticide peddlers in the guise of multinational corporations whose products often seem to be deliberately engineered to destroy the planet and the customers they pretend to serve.

Here is a link to the Denver Urban Gardens Vermicomposting Guide. The Vermicomposting Guide is a great basic introduction to indoor worm composting. You too can save the world with urban worm composting.

Check back soon for more wormy goodness in Part Two!

Adventures in Kombucha making

2010-03-09T20:29:00.003-07:00

The first hurdle was finding a brewing container. After much research, we decided to use the continuous brew method. Continuous brew results in a more consistent flavor and contains more of the complex compounds such as B-vitamins, antioxidants, and glucaric acids to which many health benefits are attributed. For continuous brew you need a moderate sized container with large mouth and a spigot. Available containers were plastic (bad), ugly (very bad), or were manufactured in China with glazes of questionable chemical content (really, really bad). We finally were able to purchase two Italian made heavy glass containers with spigots that worked perfectly. The mouth of the container is covered with layered cheesecloth and held on with a large rubber band. This allows oxygen to exchange, but keeps out anything which might contaminate the brew. The whole jar is then covered with the box the jar came in to protect the contents from sunlight which can potentially damage the SCOBY.

The second hurdle was obtaining a SCOBY. “SCOBY” is an acronym standing for Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast. This is a communal yeast and bacterial organism that takes tea and sugar, and transforms it into a mildly fermented probiotic drink which promotes health and happiness. SCOBYs are sometimes incorrectly referred to as a Kombucha mushroom, but the SCOBY is not actually a fungus. SCOBYs can be purchased online by searching for Kombucha SCOBY or Kombucha mushroom. If you are lucky enough to know someone who already brews Kombucha, then you can ask if they will split it and give you half. Never known to take the easy path, we decided to create our own from scratch with nothing more than unflavored commercially available raw organic Kombucha.

The third hurdle was that we live in Denver, Colorado and it was the middle of winter. We live in a poorly insulated house we heat around 70 degrees when we are home and awake, and around 60 degrees when asleep or not home. Getting a new batch going works best at higher temperatures than 70 degrees. After the brew is going and you have a strong SCOBY, the low temperatures actually work to our advantage because slower fermentation produces better tasting kombucha. But to get things going we purchased a heat mat used for starting seedlings and a controlling digital thermostat with a food safe temperature probe.

Having acquired the handcrafted Italian containers, the bottle of unflavored raw organic kombucha, the heat mat, and thermostat with probe, we set out to brew Kombucha and save our bank accounts from implosion.

Creating our own SCOBY was a simple matter of combining 2 cups unflavored raw organic kombucha with 1 cup sweetened tea. We filled a quart jar 2/3 full with the mixture and covered the opening with cheesecloth. We placed the jar on the heat mat, set the heat mat at 73 degrees. Then we covered the jar with an upside down cardboard box just slightly larger than the jar so that air could circulate. The box keeps the heat in and light out.

Because we would not stop checking hourly (and by “we” I mean Natalie), SCOBY formation was slow at first. It also did not float initially but hung about halfway down. This is fine and we have been assured that a sinker SCOBY will make fine kombucha. Also, about this time the SCOBY temporarily took on a darkened colour. Panic checking against online photographs helped us determine that everything was fine. We waited two weeks and had a small but happy SCOBY about a ¼ inch thick.

We then upsized our operations by moving the contents of the quart jar to its permanent home in the 1.6 gallon container. The larger container was placed on the heat mat, protected with cheesecloth, and covered with its box. We added more tea equal to the current mixture and waited a week. We began tasting the mixture every few days and adding more tea till we reached the ¾ level. The SCOBY was by now nice and thick and a creamy white disc that covered the surface completely. We were also starting to get carbonation at this point. We removed the heat mat to slow down brewing.

Tasting continued until we had a brew we liked about a week later. At that point we were able to draw off 12 ounces of kombucha every third or fourth day. To the 12 ounces of Kombucha tea we added 2-4 ounces of 100 percent organic fruit juice. The goal is to perfectly fill a 16 ounce jar with no airspace. The jar is then placed on the counter protected from light for 5-7 days. This is the secondary fermentation stage. If you get lucky you will get more carbonation in this step, but even without carbonation it is hard to beat an ice cold homemade Kombucha.

Once we were able to produce a consistently tasty final product, we split our SCOBY and started a second 1.6 gallon container. About this time (two months from our start) the Kombucha lost its cloudy appearance which is a result of suspended yeast. After both containers equalized, we were able to draw 36 to 48 ounces of raw Kombucha every third or fourth day. If we were brewing at higher temperatures we would probably be able to do it every other day. Success with brewing Kombucha is more tinkering to adjust to your specific local conditions and tastes than following a recipe.

Important notes:

The sweetened tea I have used to feed the SCOBY is 1/3 black tea to 2/3 green tea. The black tea gives the final product a better taste; the green tea feeds the SCOBY. Sugar is ¼ cup to a quart of tea. Use filtered water and white cane sugar only. If you heat the water to make tea, do not let it boil. Boiling drives out oxygen that the SCOBY needs. Let the tea reach room temperature before adding to the Kombucha.

The white cane sugar is for the SCOBY, not for you. Very little will make it through into the final drink. Do not use other types of sugar or honey which are bad for the SCOBY. I have white cane sugar in the house for only two purposes, feeding the SCOBY and making sugar water for the bees if they need supplemental feeding. Do not use unfiltered tap water; the chlorine can kill the SCOBY.

Try to always leave at least as much Kombucha with the SCOBY as you are adding sweetened tea. This keeps the PH balance correct for the SCOBY. If you need to add more sweetened tea, add tea over multiple days with at least one full day in-between each addition.

I have added a link to Food Renegade in Resources. They have a nice post regarding research on health benefits.

http://www.foodrenegade.com/

The beekeeper mentioned in the previous post as the inspiration for our adventures in Kombucha making is Dennis Murrell from Bee Natural, which I have also added as a link in Resources.

http://beenatural.wordpress.com/

Kombucha: The golden elixir

2010-03-02T16:51:00.005-07:00

I remember it like it was yesterday….

One Saturday afternoon we were sitting in the café at our local Whole Foods market, preparing to dig into our lunch purchases. We had each grabbed a different flavor of GT Dave’s Kombucha, mine was the Multi-Green and Kevin’s was the Cosmic Cranberry. Our journey was about to begin.

We had never had Kombucha before, but Kevin was interested. He’d read an article by an organic beekeeper about how he’d sprayed his bees with raw Kombucha as a substitute for sugar water when opening the hives. (Sugar water spray is used when handling swarms and opening hives as a substitute for smoking. Sugar water spray has a similar calming effect, bees cannot fly when wet, and grooming themselves keeps them occupied.) The hives which had been sprayed with the Kombucha had been the weakest prior to the spraying, and finished out the season as the strongest. The beekeeper had also found diminished arthritis and other health improvements after drinking the tea himself.

We each took our bottle; I glanced at the instructions and the extensive sediment at the bottom of the bottle and shook hard. Kevin, paying attention to the instructions, then told me to “shake gently” while pointing at the large words on the bottle. A woman sitting at a table near us, asked if we’d had one before (she had her own bottle), to which we’d responded “no”. She said “they’re really good”, with the gleam in her eye only a true addict can convey. I learned the validity of the “shake gently” instructions as my bottle when opened produced a huge volume of froth, but not being deterred, took a sip.

At first the taste was a little weird, a slightly sweet tea with sour overtones, and well carbonated. Kevin and I looked at each other, and looked at our neighbor and she smiled. We were hooked.

Once lunch was over, we went over to the display and bought our first case. The bottle said to drink one a day and we did. Sometimes we could not restrain ourselves and would have two bottles a day. Whenever I had a bottle, my mood improved, I felt less stressed and calmer. Whenever we’d spot someone with a bottle, there was the gleam in the eye, the smile and nod, like we were part of a secret society. Cravings for coffee, alcohol, and overeating vanished within days. Within a week, we’d panic if we ran out.

We were running a $40 a week habit. Teetering on the brink of financial ruin we decided to try making our own.

Tune in next time for: Adventures in Kombucha making.

Posted by Natalie

Why you need to compost, even if you have a green bin.

2010-01-24T16:28:00.003-07:00

Many municipalities now offer a third (after garbage and recycling) or green bin for composting. And while this is a very good thing it is not a substitute for urban individual compost piles. Your grass, houseplants, vegetable garden, herb garden, and flower garden need compost. Desperately. The single best thing you can do for soil of any kind is to add compost in a layer on the surface. The single best thing you can do for houseplants is to make your own potting soil with 1/3 finished compost and 2/3 regular soil.

Compost purchased from the garden shop or from a municipal composting operation could contain nearly anything. Commercial compost is not what you want to grow your vegetables in, but is just fine for growing grass and suppressing weeds and pests on the front lawn. Compost you make is superior in every way to purchased compost. Water retention, weed and pest suppression, reduced chemical content, reduced salt content, and fertility of homegrown compost are measurably better. If you do not believe me, cover half of a garden bed with commercial compost and half with your own. The very first time you water the bed you will be able to see the difference.

The world as a whole, and your backyard ecosystem specifically, need relief from chemicals pushed by monolithic corporations whose only motive is increasing profit margins. Chemicals for the lawn and garden are like heroin for an addict. The chemicals create the problem they pretend to solve, and require increasingly higher doses for less and less effect. Chemical fertilizers decrease soil fertility long term. Chemical weed and pest controls simply create superior pests and weeds while killing you and your loved ones by inches.

Your children will love composting. Without even noticing they will be learning about the food web, decomposition, and soil fertility. There will be adult approved messing about with wet muddy stuff; or if you are vermicomposting, with worms! Either way composting is kid paradise. Some of my earliest memories are of composting and vermicomposting. Vermicomposting back then was called ‘raising fishing worms’.

One third of the waste stream is compostable. While any alternative is superior to landfilling, the green bin is a poor alternative to urban composting. The green bin requires petrochemicals to make the bin and move the contents to the industrial composting site. It requires more energy to cook or turn and requires precious urban space to operate. Industrial composting also suffers from the Not In My Back Yard syndrome. No one wants to live next to an industrial composting operation. Use your green bin for composting things that you cannot add to your pile or worm bin. Use your green bin for meat, dairy, and other originally alive but not suitable for home composting items. Everything that you can compost in you worm bin or your outdoor compost pile should be composted so that the precious nitrogen and carbon never leave you home.

Urban composting is one of the most effective tools for fighting climate change that is available to a single individual. While governments and politicians at best dither and at worst willfully stick their heads in the sand, urban populations can act immediately and effectively. Start now. Climate change is not about the future. Climate change is now. Composting is not about saving the world for future generations. Composting is about saving ourselves.

Saving the world, one compost pile at a time.

The easiest thing you can do to save the World

2009-12-17T20:00:00.006-07:00

As part of the master composter program through Denver Urban Gardens we were required to take a tour of a landfill near Denver. This experience should be mandatory for school children nationwide. The worst thing about the trip was not the stench, the seagulls, the sheer size of the endless wasteland, or the continuous stream of trucks arriving to add to the landfill. The most appalling thing about this field trip was the plastic grocery bags blowing everywhere; thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions of them. Everywhere you looked they were fluttering in the wind, on the ground, in the fences, in the air.

Recycling is not the answer. Billions of barrels of oil have already been wasted. Virgin forests have already been clear-cut. When you hold the bag in your hands the damage has already been done. It is far too late by the time you put it in the recycle bin.

The answer is to never personally use a disposable bag again. The answer is to educate your friends, because friends do not let friends destroy the planet. The answer is to pressure the businesses you patronize to reward those who bring their own bags, and if they will not, then find other business to patronize.

The answer is to hold the toes of your local, state, federal, and national politicians to the fire until they pass laws banning disposable bags of any kind. The list of nations who have already done this is growing. Never in history has so much been wasted on objects that will only be thrown away.

The environment is now the only issue that matters, because poverty cannot be erased, wars cannot be ended, famine cannot be averted, and basic civil liberties cannot be obtained with the planetary ecosystem in an ever downward spiral. No less a figure than former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has publicly stated this.

The single easiest and best thing you can do right now today for the environment is never again let any store of any kind provide you with a disposable bag made of paper or plastic for any purpose. Bring your own reusable bags made of recycled plastic, canvas, or hemp. Start now. Never turn back. The world is counting on you.

You will live long enough to see the devastating impact of failure to act. Saving the environment is not about future generations anymore. Saving the environment is now about saving ourselves.

International Day of Climate Action

2009-10-24T20:45:00.010-06:00

Bees in Action to save the world (click to enlarge)

It's only a model, shhh! (click to enlarge)

Our honeybees would like to remind you that today is the International Day of Climate Action and that we must work to pressure our leaders to agree to reduce carbon emissions to a fair and sustainable level of 350 ppm. A level that scientists and honeybees agree is necessary for our survival and a level that we have already surpassed.

Check out this video to understand why 350 is the only number you need to know.

I would like to thank the academy...The interconnectedness of things.

2009-10-01T23:26:00.010-06:00

Nothing like a good salt lick! (click on photo to enlarge.)

I created this blog as a resource for backwards beekeepers, urban farmers, composters, vermicomposters, observers of the backyard ecosystem, and those who want to practice landfill reduction, brown to green architecture, urban renewal, and photographing the beauty and abundance of nature. I am inspired by those I list as resources and I would encourage you to check them out even if they at first do not seem to relate to your areas of interest. We are all interconnected in this brave new world.

Ecological Disaster Looms! Film at 11:00.

2009-09-27T20:32:00.006-06:00

It is fall which means just one thing: untold millions of bags of leaves will go into landfills around the country. It goes without saying, that you are using a mulching mower to convert leaves into fertilizer for your lawn. And, of course, anything you can’t mow in you are adding to your compost pile as a much needed source of browns and/or your worm box as fresh bedding. I say it goes without saying because you would be crazy to be doing anything else.

But what are your neighbors doing? I calculate that in my neighborhood, the average house landfills twenty or more bags of leaves each fall. This means on my block alone, 33 houses x 20 bags = 660 bags of leaves shipped to the landfill. This is just from one block in the Denver Metro area of 2.8 Million people.

About a third (33.3%) of what goes into landfills around the world could be composted and used to improve the environment rather than destroying it.

If you think this compostable material will decompose in the landfill you are absolutely wrong. Excavations of the Fresh Kills Landfill in New York (where the rubble from the World Trade Center was moved) found 30 year old hot dogs which are still identifiable other than a slight loss of colour. The standard method of dating in a landfill is to look for things wrapped in newspapers and check the print date. In the landfill the date is still legible a hundred years later. The newspaper, torn into strips and added to your compost pile, would break down in weeks

Back to the leaves your neighbors are placing on the curb. A walk up the block with a garden wagon or a drive around the neighborhood with a car or truck, and with nearly zero effort and no leaf raking, you can bag (pun intended) all the leaves you could want. Our neighbors know us well enough by now, they just deliver the bagged leaves to our driveway.

What can you do with the leaves once you have them? I am glad you asked. You can make leaf mould.

What is leaf mould? Again, I am very glad you asked. Leaf mould is the incredibly rich layer of organic material on the forest floor just below the current layer of un-decomposed leaves. Leaf mould is the best thing you could spread just about anywhere you want things to grow. It will also suppress weeds between existing plantings, encourage earthworm activity, increase the water holding capacity of the soil, and protect exposed soil from erosion.

I know you are asking, how can I get some of this great stuff? This is so easy, you’ll be embarrassed you have never done it before! Start by mounding up the leaves in a wire enclosure. The enclosure needs to be open enough to allow air circulation and tight enough mesh that it will keep them from blowing around. Wet the leaves thoroughly after each bag is dumped in. The leaves should feel like a wrung out sponge just like a standard compost pile. The pile should shrink by about half before you need to turn it. Our pile shrunk by a foot the first 48 hours. Entertain your kids! If you stick your pitch fork in, and pull the surface layer away, you’ll see steam, and all kinds of interesting fungi and bugs. If your area is dry, you may need to set a sprinkler on low on the pile for an hour or so once every two weeks.

By spring, the pile should be less than a quarter the original volume and most of it should look like humus. Spread the finished leaf mould over anything that needs it, including your grass. We use it to start new garden beds and to mulch around existing plantings. Water thoroughly and stand back. Anything not broken down enough to use, can be added to your compost pile or turned, re-wet, and left to break down further.

If you have a few extra bags of leaves, you can store them in the bags for when your compost pile is short of browns. You can also use the bags to insulate a poultry house, vegetable storage cellar, or shed. My father uses them to insulate water pipes for the winter.

You too can save the world, one bag of leaves at a time!

Natural Comb / Small Cell Transition

2009-09-21T21:10:00.005-06:00

I wanted to closely document the transition to small cell to help others with the process, both backyard and commercial scale beekeepers. If you are not aware bees raised on natural comb have a good track record of surviving without any chemicals in managed hives. A much better track record than commercial or backyard beekeepers that use chemicals currently enjoy. The fact that feral bees are surviving in natural comb without chemical should be obvious. It seems to be a point on which advocates of conventional beekeeping are in complete denial in spite of enormous evidence to the contrary.

Click on photos to enlarge.

This is natural comb in a conventional frame without foundation. Please note the very technical starter strip made of two large Popsicle sticks/tongue depressors. Simply hold two together and press them gently but firmly into the foundation grove on a conventional frame. The frames I use are from Rossman Apiaries www.gabees.com. I cannot vouch for there being such a perfect fit on frames from other sources. Some sources recommend painting the starter strip with melted wax to encourage the bees. I did not because the bee drawn wax is stronger and I did not want to create a weak link in the frame at the attachment point. Clearly the bees had no trouble figuring things out without a wax coating.

This is a close up of a frame that has been drawn to about a third of the frame. The golden area is cells filled with honey. The frames are not fully drawn and the bees are already packing in honey. The photographs do not do justice to the absolute beauty and perfection of natural comb.

A beekeeper, his bees, and a frame of freshly drawn comb.

Close up of a nearly full frame from the brood chamber.

Nearly full frame of natural comb from the brood chamber. All of these photographs were taken three weeks after the introduction of open frames with starter strips into the hive. All frames shown are deep frames.

You too can save the world, one beehive at a time!

Mite Grooming in one of my hives!

2009-09-20T14:22:00.003-06:00

Today, I opened the hives to monitor and document progress on the changeover to natural cell beekeeping and incidentally noticed a bee doing the waggle dance. This is typically done to communicate to the other bees the location of a new source of nectar and pollen. I paid more attention than normal because I was showing my friend, who was manning the camera, different aspects of the hive and bee behavior.

First full frame of natural drawn comb.

While looking closely, I realized the bee had a mite on her abdomen. The dance seemed funny as well, as she was waggling in place rather than moving in a line. She was on a frame top rather than on the face of the comb. The dance is usually done on the face of comb, and the angle of travel is an important part of that communication.

The bee, however, just stayed in one place and wiggled her "bee-hind". After a moment another worker sort of mounted her from behind and, after a couple of attempts, removed the mite.

Fresh drawn natural comb showing highly technical Popsicle stick foundation starter.

Grooming behavior! This is great news. This is the Holy Grail of organic Backwards Beekeeping. I have not treated for mites since spring and no bees are showing signs of deformed wings. Deformed wings are a sign mites are getting into the cells of larvae before they are capped for pupation and are interfering with the bee's development. This was the only mite I spotted during 40 minutes in the hives. The mite could easily have been picked up by the bee from a flower on a recent trip. Mites are known to drop off bees onto a flower in order to switch to a new bee and infect other hives.

Worker bee on freshly filled cells of honey.

The queen in this hive is my original. She was from a local conventional beekeeper who does a lot of swarm collecting. This means the queen is at least semi-feral in gene line. She also probably mated with drones from the feral hive in our oak tree, and so her offspring are likely to be even more tilted toward the feral (deep) end of the gene pool. Feral bees are thought to have two advantages in the battle against the mites. The first is that feral hives are surviving mite infestations when managed hives are not. The second is that they represent greater genetic diversity than industrially reared queens.

Honeybee and Bumblebee an upclose comparision

2009-09-20T10:18:00.005-06:00

On the left is one of our honeybees, on the right a bumblebee. Both are gathering nectar and pollen from a sunflower in our garden. You can click on the photographs to enlarge.