More Composting

This week I spent a day at the Wishing Well Community Garden in the Bronx with 5 teenage interns from GrowNYC's Learn It Grow It Eat It Program working on building a 2 bin compost bin approximately 6 feet long by 3 feet wide by 3 feet high. There were wooden pallets of various sizes and other scrap lumber around the garden left by contractors working on renovating the garden. We purchased galvanized steel hardware cloth which we attached to the pallets with staples. Using cordless drills, we attached the pallets together using some of the scrap lumber as braces and to make slots for 2X4 slats for the front. The youth used hand saws to cut the lumber to size and hammers and pry bars to remove nails from the lumber. Now the gardeners and the students can easily compost leaves, weeds, prunings and vegetable scraps into compost to use in the garden beds. While this composting operation is not yet as developed a project as some of the community composting projects I wrote about previously, it is a first step. If the interest and energy continues this could be the first step toward a community composting project for this Bronx neighborhood.