Goodwork Almanac

Tag: composting

  • The Creepies and the Crawlies

    The Creepies and the Crawlies

    Bats, Moths, Spiders, and Other Creepy Critters

    Bats are not the kind of cuddly creatures we imagine when talking about friends of the garden. They are not like butterflies or frogs or a yellow songbird. In the storybooks, they do not sing with the princess or guide the hero. They have been relegated to the dark and the macabre, associations with the suspect and with death. In short, they can be a bit spooky. There are plenty of other critters who are seen as creepy or undesirable, merely for their appearance or behavior. But these creepy critters are usually as beneficial, if not more so, than other, more desirable creatures and we should take the moment to celebrate them when we can.

    I love the creepy and the crawly. I have always had an affinity for both bugs and this spooky time of the year around Halloween. For the past month or so we have had a lodger come to stay with us and she puts up free Halloween decorations. The cat-faced spider, a type of orb weaver, looks quite intimidating at first. Anyone who finds spiders scary would find living with this one intolerable, most likely. She is large and fast, a sickly yellow color in the light, with two spikes on her round back and long, hairy legs. She repels from her web, dropping in one deft motion just like a droplet of rain. One’s first instinct may be to crush such a creature and to wipe the webs away from the corner where she made her refuge. But if one knows about her nature, knows her work and what she contributes, one could more easily recognize and celebrate her life and her beauty.

    We do not crush spiders, especially those known for being beneficial to the garden. Our orb weavers help us manage the population of flying insects that so readily populate the garden’s atmosphere. Flies, mosquitos, moths on occasion. She does her goodwork so we can do ours. Why crush or banish something that is so integral to the health of our little patch of ground?

    We invite the spiders in by planting our garden, giving them ample room for shelter and the very things which invite their food. Tall plants with sturdy stems, good soil, and many types of flowers can create an environment welcoming to the spiders most common to our gardens – the wolf spider, the jumping spider, the orb weaver, the yellow garden spiders. And of course, once they come to inhabit our space, being careful not to disturb their web or destroy their environment with chemicals and other methods of sterilizing the outdoors.

    There are many other critters who get similar treatment, simply for the association we make in our minds. The average bat is nothing to be scared of and, in fact, could be something we give a lot of love and attention to in order to bring life to our gardens and more joy and pleasure to evenings typically overrun by mosquitos and other insects. Though bats have been maligned and misunderstood for a long time, they do their goodwork just like other things and contribute a pivotal role to the ecosystem as a result. Maybe you like spooky things like I do, and you can even appreciate them for that.

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    Some bats migrate, others stick around, some bats such as the Little Brown Bat can eat hundreds of mosquitos in a given night. They can occupy many habitats, including rocky canyons, grassy plains, and wooded forests. Knowing which varieties frequent your area can help you decide the best method to make a place for them. For example, where we live in Colorado there are about twenty common bat species.

    I made an effort to speak with our local natural-areas advisors for tips on how an average person could help bat populations. I also asked people in my neighborhood if they had experience with bats or bat gardening and I got a ton of useful information. I recommend reaching out to your local professionals and even your neighbors to find out more about projects that could interest you.

    You do not always have to provide shelter in order to care for or help wildlife, food and water sources can be much easier to cultivate or maintain and help visitors to your garden. Bat houses, while a thoroughly interesting and sometimes-useful project, have a somewhat lower occupancy rate. It may be more beneficial for us to plant a bat-friendly garden instead of building a bat house.

    It can be frustrating to see all the bats flying around your neighborhood and not have any stop by to use your bat house. So why not provide for them in other ways? By cultivating part of your garden to attract critters that bats feed on, you can create many helpful opportunities for bats. Our local professionals recommended native, evening-blooming plants such as evening primrose, 4-oclocks, yucca, and mentzelia. These are fragrant and attract moths and insects which the bats will then feed on. Native trees and shrubs are important as well, acting as host plants for a variety of caterpillars and other insects.

    As for water, bats typically drink in mid-flight, swooping down low to catch a drink without stopping to perch the same way birds do. If you have space in your yard for a large water feature such as a wildlife pond or the like, then this may serve to give bats a drink. Sources recommend a body of water 7-10 feet in diameter. But if you do not have the room for something that large, don’t despair! Any source of water can help insects flourish, and this will, in turn, help bats. It all goes around.

    Now onto the topic of bat houses. There are a lot of details to this topic, as there are many variables to get correct if you want to help the bats without unintentionally creating a harmful situation. We do not want to introduce a bat population to disease or predators or lure them into our garden only to hurt them with pesticides or herbicides. The whole point is to help wildlife thrive and to do that we must know a bit more about this project.

    Bat Conservation International recommends paying attention to six specific safety principles when installing a bat house: preventing the house from overheating, protecting the bats from predation, avoiding pesticides and herbicides, protecting bats from domestic pets, waiting for bats to find their house on their own, and observing them from a distance.

    There are still more bugs that deserve our attention for the goodwork they do! We know about earthworms and butterflies. It is becoming somewhat normal to celebrate these critters and it feels easy because butterflies are usually colorful and beautiful to look at and worms are familiar and friendly-looking. But there are still more insects to appreciate, in spite of their appearance.

    Our compost bin was recently host to a decomposer that we celebrate and cultivate, the Black Soldier Fly Larva. But these are bugs that look fairly disgusting and which may be associated with the lowly maggot or ideas of rot, decay, and foul smells. While they are certainly playing their part in the natural processes of rot and decay, there are no foul smells here to be had! The compost bin continues to break down these materials into a dark, rich compost and the larvae’s frass (their waste) is added to the compost’s fertility.

    The flies themselves have no mouths or stingers so they cannot harm people, though their long, black bodies may remind them of a type of wasp. The larvae, doing their goodwork in breaking down our kitchen scraps, end up creating a massive amount of food for livestock or other birds – we have given our hens these larvae by the handful and they devour them greedily. In this way, a loop of waste can be closed but not only that, it can be turned to benefit, profit, abundance, and fertility.

    The scraps from our kitchen become compost and bugs, the bugs become healthy chickens and eggs, the compost becomes healthy soil for the garden, and the garden ends up on our plate and in our bellies as tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, and the rest. What a powerful process, and all because we have learned to celebrate the rot and decay, we have cultivated a corner of our world for the lowly larva, the disgusting bug which might otherwise have been eradicated or destroyed.

    The Power of Preference

    It is at this point in the post that attention must be drawn to the fact that our power of choice in cultivating our own environments yields tremendous results, for better or for worse, when compounded over the entire population. It is the reality that people have a tremendous amount of influence over their environment without being entirely conscious of what this means. This prowess has created huge improvements in the quality of life but our blind spots to certain aspects of nature have also created havoc in the systems of plants and animals. It becomes clear that, for a creature to go on living, it must find a place in our psychology rather than just a niche in its environment.

    When writing our ‘friends of the garden’ posts, it is difficult to elaborate on the intricacies of an ecosystem when there are very clear preferences being played out in the kind of environment humans tend to inhabit. It can be frustrating and a little disheartening to try to convince people that bugs should not be seen as pests, that moths and bats are inherently beautiful and valuable, not just as staples of a productive food web but in themselves as creatures of the universe, interesting and worthwhile as any other lifeform. You eventually come up against a lot of complacency and apathy. Moths and other bugs are seen as pests, so the pesticides come out. The poisoned insects become food for other animals which become sicker and sicker. Imbalances create ecological issues and the delicate balance we rely on demands evermore intricate technological intervention. All this because the moth is not as graceful as the butterfly.

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    One day, when we reconcile ourselves to the nature of our psychology, we will see that we are inextricably linked to the seemingly spontaneous operations of nature. As long as we reduce, deemphasize, trivialize, or ignore certain aspects of ourselves, it will inevitably follow that parts of nature will suffer. We wield power over nature and environment that is disproportionate when compared to the power we wield over our own minds.

    Which is why I love this season so much. It provides for us a moment to contemplate the parts of ourselves that we typically avoid or have little relationship with – death and decay, frights and fears, the things that haunt us or gross us out, the things which are swept under the rug, sanitized, or ignored the rest of the year.

    We celebrate them in this spooky season, we put out spiderwebs and fake bugs, skeletons, ghosts, zombies eating brains. So, this October, consider inviting the real spiders to stay in your garden (doesn’t have to be your living room!), create a corner of your world for rot and decay to take their natural course, celebrate the macabre and the terrifying and the lowly. The spiders, the bats, the moths, the larvae. These are part of the natural world and they are part of us. We find them haunting and beautiful as they put together their corner of the universe.

  • Good Work Wastes Not

    Good Work Wastes Not

    Composting worms hard at work after a long winter.

    Poop is king. This may make me sound insane but once you get involved in farming and gardening, you really learn to love poop. Big ol’ piles of manure are like gold to me now. I fancy myself a collector of poop, a veritable poop connoisseur, if you will. Right now, I am actively collecting chicken poop as well as worm poop for amending the soil in our garden. Recently, I traded three dozen eggs for a trailer full of composted horse manure.

    Gardeners and farmers are not really in the business of growing plants or animals but in growing soil. From the soil comes all the abundance we are looking for so we must look to growing the highest quality soil we can if we are to accomplish our aims. Poop is the way.

    Okay, I’ll stop saying poop so much. Let’s call it “waste.” But what is waste, and how do we classify it as such when looking at the inputs and outputs of a system? Other than manure, what other types of “waste” can be made use of? Is the waste really waste if we can find some value in it?

    Let’s take a look at common waste streams as an example. In the U.S., it is estimated that 120-130 billion pounds of food goes to waste per year. From consumer and retail sources, this waste goes directly into landfills. There are a number of reasons for this food to be considered waste – it sits around too long and falls outside of its ‘best consumed by’ lifespan, it is post-consumption material that people would not consider worth saving, or it is deemed unacceptable for consumption by producers, wholesalers, and retailers and must be disposed of. No matter the reason, the core principle of this waste stream is: it falls outside of the circle of value to people. It is not considered as having value to people so it is not considered as having value, period.

    One of our garden beds, amended with composted horse manure we traded for eggs.

    The typical laying hen may eat approximately 1 to 2 pounds of scraps per week. Mine may eat much more than that, they are like little pigs with wings! Composting worms may eat approximately half their weight in scraps per day. Black soldier flies, another popular feeder insect, can eat about twice their body weight per day as larvae. And what are these critters eating? Food “waste” that humans have considered inedible.

    All three of the above-mentioned critters can eat fruit peels and cores, rotten and spoiled vegetables and post-process vegetable scraps. The chickens can typically pick through the leftovers of an old meal for the tasty morsels they really love, leaving the things they don’t like for the compost heap. Worms can eat coffee grounds and composted manure, as well. Black soldier flies eat ANYTHING you throw at them other than carbonaceous material (paper, cardboard, wood bedding, etc.)

    This means our flock of forty chickens can eat between two and four thousand pounds of food scraps per year. Our worm bins can process about the same amount of food scraps per year, depending on how their numbers fluctuate throughout the warm and cold seasons. The black soldier fly system is in its infancy but as it begins to rival the scale of our worm bins, it will consume roughly the same amount as the chickens and compost worms. That means about six thousand pounds of food scraps – material that nobody wants, material that people are paying to take to a hole in the ground – are turned into valuable resources. Feeder insects and farm-fresh eggs. This is the closest I’ve ever come to getting “something for nothing.”

    These old shoes were covered in plenty of poop! And my pants, and shirts and… all of it, really.

    And then we return to poop. I know, I have to say poop a bunch more. We got rid of the food scraps by putting it through these livestock and insect systems but what do we do now with all this s**t ?! Remember how I mentioned the farmer and gardener being a grower of soil? The worm poop, the soldier fly poop, and the chicken poop all make fantastic composted manure material that we can use for growing the soil. Anything they can’t eat is processed in a compost pile by billions of microbes. It’s almost as if this system was developed over millennia as a means of managing a multitude of waste materials created by diverse groups of flora and fauna.

    In nature, there is no such thing as waste. Every output created by one system is picked up by another system and used as fuel. Flocks of birds follow behind roving herds of ungulates, picking through their manure for fly larvae. The worms eat whatever is left over of the grass nobody munched on and the droppings they left behind. The soil keeps growing thicker and more fertile year after year. It is a closed system.

    It is only when we consider the human system in isolation to other systems that we get waste streams we don’t know what to do with. If we consider something without value, then it must have no value. But many people in various fields, driven by the desire to take advantage of these unappreciated and underappreciated materials, have brought them back into the fold of the human system. The more we do this, mimicking nature’s methods of “zero-waste”, the more value we can derive from human systems without creating resource mismanagement and untenable waste streams. What would a zero-waste world look like? What systems could create this, and what incentives would drive us to create the necessary processes? How would it reform the systems we have come to take for granted, and how would the institutions and systems of humanity be changed in order to achieve this level of organization?

    Many might think of business and waste as going hand-in-hand. Businesses create waste. Perhaps businesses are thought of as wasteful, in general. Here is where my experience in “lean manufacturing” comes into play. In the world of manufacturing, the old ways are being seen as ineffectual, unsafe, and downright inefficient. Made manifest in the principles put down by The Toyota Way, the philosophy behind manufacturing has changed in order to both respect the individual person and to continuously improve systems to lower the levels of waste present. Why? Because respected individuals are much more productive and lower waste means higher profitability.

    I would highly recommend looking into this philosophy and the systems associated with it. I may write more on these topics later, as well, as I feel they align with several principles inherent in the tenets of goodwork.

    Whenever I have need of visiting a landfill, I am somewhat overwhelmed and disheartened. They are feats of engineering and problem-solving, to be sure, but the implications of the systems that must produce these as a necessary tool are staggering. The amount of trash creates an image of post-apocalyptic wastelands. How nice it would be if we developed systems to render these pockets of sequestered garbage unnecessary. I am also not so naïve as to think that this will happen anytime soon. But we focus on what we can control and we make continuous improvement. If each family owned half a dozen chickens and a worm bin, that would be a great start! If neighborhood compost heaps became the norm alongside their community garden counterparts, even better. One step towards a happier, healthier world.

    Coming down from my soapbox daydreaming, I return to our daily work that we must do — our goodwork. I can talk about getting rid of XYZ waste stream and having ourselves a local food and gardening frenzy all day but what really matters is how this relates to the work we are doing now, today. Is there a waste stream in your work that you find inconvenient, unsightly, or high cost? Is there a waste stream in your personal life that may be draining valuable time, energy, or money? We take advantage of our food waste in order to feed our chickens, insects, and gardens, but maybe you take advantage of yours to cut down on expenses, save some time that you could spend with your loved ones, or give you more energy throughout the day to tackle the tasks of daily life.

    Whatever you find in your journey towards a more efficient, fulfilling life, I hope you keep going, keep getting better, and keep doing your goodwork.