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Setting up a compost pile going by all of the rules that the "experts" have on composting is difficult. All the so-called "experts" out there will tell you that you have to have just the right amount of "green materials" which are materials that have a higher nitrogen ratio, and just the right amount of "brown materials" which are materials which are higher in carbon. Then you need to add the green and brown materials in 4-inch alternating layers, wetting the pile down as yo

I have been researching various ways of making fresh yogurt here at home instead of spending so much buying manufactured yogurt from the grocery stores. After thoroughly going over each method from start to finish I started noticing flaws in a few of the methods that from a food safety perspective I know from all of my years of training in food safety will allow harmful bacteria to multiply in the milk before it has a chance to become yogurt. I also noticed that most of these

One of my neighbors came over yesterday as I was preparing some slides for the microscope from samples that I collected from my soil and compost piles and the question of why verifying the microbiology in the soil is important to do came up. This is an important question so I thought I would discuss it today. I explained to him that I could tell, just from sitting in my house across the street and looking at his lawn, that his soil microbiology was not correct because parts o

It seems every time I turn around I hear someone talking about the food shortage and wondering how bad it will get. Recently you can't walk into a Walmart or Kroger store without seeing signs on the bare canned vegetable shelves about the food shortage. Lets take a breath here and think about this for a minute and use some common sense before we start yelling "SHTF" and "it's the end of the world". What the stores are supposedly short of is canned vegetables, that's it. Not

I had to take a break from the compost piles yesterday as I was not feeling good so I did not get to turn them on their regular schedule. Since this is the end of the cycle for the main pile skipping a day does not make a difference anyway. I am not trying to heat the main pile up anymore I am just waiting for it to drop out of the Active temperature range to start its slow decomposition cycle. I did check the temperatures on the piles each day, and on both Monday and Tuesda

Since giving the tip yesterday on the organic means of dealing with caterpillars and tomato horn worms in your gardens I have had two people ask me about how to organically deal with other common garden insect pests, so let's go ahead and tackle that one now. I have a few solutions that I can recommend, but first before I would go straight to a pesticide application, even an organic one, I would want to try a couple other methods first that do not cost you anything and may ta

Welcome to Day 27 of our Active Composting series where we follow along with the life cycle of a compost pile from beginning to end. When I checked on the piles yesterday the main pile was running at 135 degrees . . . and the second experimental pile was running at 169 degrees. Because the Hawaii weather has been so hot lately both piles were getting quite dry so I gave each of them 2-gallons of water to get them by until today when I turned and watered them on their regular