Allison

A few months ago I moved into a quiet apartment that had one amazing feature: A large balcony. We aren’t talking 4′ x 9′ or even 5′ x 10. We are talking a 6′ by 25′ balcony that had so many possibilities that the mind boggled.

I happened to move in next to a green thumb and, throughout the cold winter months, before she ran off to Arizona, we devised greater and greater plans for what to do with my space. Her balcony, even in the dead of winter, was a warm, cozy place with chairs spaced appropriately for company and gardening pots and tools carefully placed on the side, ready to be used again as soon as it was time.

Why compost?

So these grandiose plans came down to one simple fact: I needed dirt. Three options arose.

First, sneak out and “borrow” dirt from neighboring homes in the dead of night. Second, buy dirt from a dirt store. Third, and the most enticing, make dirt. Create compost using all the organic materials left around after making a meal, coffee and reading the newspaper!

The first one would land me in jail, the second was not very appealing due to a small budget and even smaller ambition to carry large bags of dirt up to the second floor where my apartment was located. The last one made the most sense. Eco-friendly, cost-effective and hey, I have a balcony, I have plenty of room to “grow” dirt.

What I knew about composting at that time could have fit into a very small paper lunch bag. With room left over. But, with the help of my gardening nerd neighbor and what I was able to find on the internet, I have successfully handcrafted a balcony compost system. A huge thanks to Balcony Compost for the directions, which I’ve slightly modified.

Materials needed:

Two 5-gallon buckets — available at any hardware store or at thrift shops — usually holding skis and other random objects for display in the store. Dump out the contents (carefully) and make the thrift store an offer.

One large plastic storage tub with lid — also available for pennies on the dollar at your local thrift shop.

Drill with small bit (or a hammer and screwdriver, my dad happened upon my grandfather’s old drill and gave it to me, bonus!).

Small, recycled plastic container with lid — you’ll use this in the kitchen to store your compost materials.

Shredded newspaper, about a weeks worth of papers — after using the color comics to wrap a gift for your bestie, of course! This is one of the things considered as “brown” material you need for composting.

Two cups soil/dirt — recycled from repotting a plant works perfectly.

One cup water — recycled rainwater, if your balcony and/or state allows you to catch it.

Kitchen scraps – as much as you can save up in a week or so should do. Carrot peelings, egg shells, coffee grinds, strawberry greens, etc. Nothing cooked and no meat. This is some of the “green” materials you’ll need for the composting process. Well, eggshells are considered “brown” but you get the gist.

Materials

Make your compost bin:

First, I’d recommend safety glasses, just in case. Take the two plastic buckets and plug in your drill or get out the hammer and screwdriver.  Around the bottom and top of the buckets, drill holes approximately one inch from the top and bottom, two inches apart, around the entire bucket.

Then drill five holes in the bottom of each bucket, this is to let water or “compost tea” drain.

Next, drill holes throughout the body of each of the buckets. You’ll want them to be about three to four inches apart, going around and up the bucket. This allows air to flow through and help create a nice, warm, composting friendly environment within the bucket.

Air holes

Start your compost:

Now, with the hard work out of the way, let’s make dirt!

Place one bucket into the plastic storage tub (this catches any water and/or compost tea from dumping all over the balcony and your neighbors heads if they live below you).

Place two inches of the shredded newspaper in the bottom of one bucket. Wet with the cup of water

Dump the kitchen scraps on top. Add the two cups of soil to jumpstart the composting process. Cover the bucket with the storage tub top and weight with a rock (or in my case, a large, purple hippo paperweight).

Place in sunny corner of your balcony and sit back to enjoy the feeling of a job well done.

Keep it up!

Use the small plastic container in your kitchen to save scraps as you make them. Mine usually has fruit discards, egg shells, coffee grinds (a lot of coffee grinds), flower cuttings and leaves from plant trimmings. Again, nothing that has been cooked and NO meat. Oh, and no used kitty litter or other animal droppings. First, it doesn’t break down quickly and second, you might be using this compost to grow peppers on your balcony next year. Do you really want it to be grown in poop compost?

Compost's temporary residence

Continually add more kitchen scraps until you get a good three to four inches of scraps in the bucket. This is where the second bucket comes in. Take the first one, dump the scraps and newspaper into the second one so that it gets a breath of air and decomposes more quickly. Drop in a few more scraps of newspaper, water with a bit of recycled rainwater (or tap, of course), recover and start the process all over again.

A few notes:

1. Scraps being left on the kitchen table in the plastic bin. I make sure and dump it every few days, but even when I have forgotten to, it hasn’t smelled bad. A little mold, but nothing too icky.

2. The compost bin on the balcony – does it smell? No. Except when I put garlic cuttings from my best friend’s garden in it. Then it smelled like I’d made pesto and forgot the basil.

3. This isn’t going to make you a lot of compost very quickly. In order to set up my garden, I did in fact have to purchase dirt in bags. But, it will be great for when you need to replant indoor plants or want to set up seeds for next year’s growing season.

4. Compost tea, if you collect it, can be used as a non-chemical fertilizer. Pretty cool, right? Google it!

Finished product:

Interior

And outside…

Exterior

Allison Barrett loves everything online, gardening and figuring out how to make things work. She works at the Camera as their Online Coordinator and always knows where her towel is. You can catch up with her on Twitter (@tofallfromgrace).

Scott Pardee, a technician for Bestway Insulation, finishes installing insulation in a crawl space beneath a home in Longmont on Thursday. Insulation projects are a popular improvement paid for with money from Boulder County's ClimateSmart Loan Program.

Boulder County has suspended its popular, voter-approved ClimateSmart Loan Program, which lets you borrow money from them (at relatively low interest rates) to make energy-efficient improvements to your home like adding solar panels or blowing in some more insulation.

There are, apparently, a couple of problems that came out last week. One is a set of new rules from the DOE that govern loans like ClimateSmart — though that one will  likely be no that big of deal. The second, which is more of a problem, is a letter from mortgage-buying giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The letter implies that the government-sponsored agencies won’t buy mortgages for houses that have ClimateSmart liens on them.

“Every program in the country — in Colorado the programs that are just getting set to launch in Eagle County — are going into neutral and saying, ‘We’ll continue developing programs,’ but nobody is going to issue any additional financing until there’s clarification of the letter,” Commissioner Will Toor told the Camera on Thursday.

“The timing here in Boulder County is very unfortunate because we had a round of residential loans that would be closing tomorrow and we were looking at a bond sale in a few weeks,” he said. “There are a bunch of property owners and a bunch of contractors who were hoping that this would move forward.”

Read more about the suspension at DailyCamera.com.

Patrick Doyle made this trellis with lead spun from Thor's loom or something. I don't know, just click through and find out how yourself.

OK, actually, the trellis here won’t make any beer for you at all. The fellow who made the trellis however, Patrick Doyle, will be a strong candidate for Vanity Fair’s “Awesome Gentlemen” issue in about 25-30 years, and does make a good beer. 

Here’s what he has to say about his newest design for urban gardening — the Most Indestructible Trellis Ever 2.0:

Introducing the Most Indestructible Trellis Ever 2.0, which is so strong, I’m confident I could grow watermelons and pumpkins on it. (Which I’m not planning on doing, but it’s that beastly.) All that stainless steal is just gorgeous.

Looks awesome. I’m going to grow bowling balls and anvils for my famous Most Inedible Chili Ever recipe.

Check out the specs over at Grown In The City.

You can do it, too!

Hope Mom loved it, Nick!

Erika

This weekend, we took advantage of a program that swaps carbon-meanie gasoline-powered lawnmowers for small, efficient electric ones.

We have a small yard; we leave the grass clippings mulch to keep them out of landfills. We have an organic garden that feeds us. We are persnickety about our water usage here in the dry American West, using as little as possible and only in the cool of early morning or late evenings.

But yes, our mower was powered by gasoline. Even last summer, when gasoline cost about $100 a gallon. Because in addition to trying to be green, we are also thrifty. The mower was from the 1970s and was a hand-me-down from our children’s grandpa; it was too small to be very useful (except for small yards, like ours) and it took some serious muscle power, as it was both old, and a push mower.

This weekend, the Regional Air Quality Council (RAQC) had its annual Mow Down Pollution one-day event. It’s like a “cash for clunkers” for your lawn care. They sell enviro-friendly mowers, and offer a steep and heavy discount to those who trade in a gas-powered machine. 

The new mower

Is it a big deal? According to www.ozoneaware.org, lawn equipment contributes to nearly 10 percent of the Denver region’s ozone pre-cursor emissions.

We picked up a battery-powered CE5 by Neuton. The model retails for about $400, but thanks to the promotion and our trade-in (sorry, dad!) it cost us just $150.

We tested it out. It’s light and easy to maneuver, and the charge on the battery far exceeded our needs (you recharge the battery with a power cord.) The blades of grass were quite even, though we could see it doesn’t leave the tell-tale mow “lines” that some suburbanites can obsess over.

The only problem is that it’s so adorable, small and lime-green, that I didn’t want to get it dirty.

Erika Stutzman is the editorial page editor of the Camera in Boulder, a native Coloradan, a mom, a lover of libraries and all things local, and a somewhat slow-moving weekend warrior.

It's built, it's re-enforced, it's painted. So where's the sunshine?

You may recall that a while ago, I started working on a DIY terraced urban farm, which is my fancy-talk for four shelves on which we’re going to put containers.

The idea was that I wanted an attractive, mostly out-of-the-way place to put plants so they’d get sun that they need — while also protecting them a bit from the high Colorado winds that we get. (If you hear faint tink-a-tink chimes from the north in Boulder, duck; it’s not an ice cream truck — it’s my neighbor’s wind chimes migrating south at about 70 mph.)

So! To recap: I drew what I thought would make sense based on literally nothing except a sentence from a book, I bought some culled wood at a hardware store and screwed it all together; I realized it was horribly wobbly so I got more culled wood and added supports; I sanded it down; and I waited.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the weather has been ridiculous here lately. So we only got to paint the thing today. But hey! It’s painted! And it’s ready for planters… after the snowstorm we’re supposed to get on Wednesday.

What I’m saying here is — if I can do this, you can do it. What’s your solution for farming in your tiny little space?

Chuck it! | Photo by Mark Leffingwell

Boulder residents typically descend upon the campus to grab some of said perfectly-good items for use in their own homes, as you can see in this poorly-produced (I can say that; I did it in 2005 before I had any idea what I was doing) video for the late, great newspaper dirt:

Click here to view the embedded video.

But CU’s puttin’ the kibosh on all that — with a big ol’ recycling program that the Environmental Center says saved 14 tons of material from the landfill last year. Fourteen tons of TVs, IKEA lamps, tiny throw rugs, desk chairs and everything else!

“Theres a history that carries on in this campus, and people assume what they’ll find based on the history and the past,” Gheysar said. “But we have a station in every building for renewable items, and this year we have arranged with the Salvation Army to take them away. We also provide a location for cardboard, co-mingled containers and you name it.”

CUs Environmental Center even staffs the move-out season with volunteers who help students keep the stuff they dont want from ending up in landfills.

Though you’ll still undoubtedly find lots and lots of things set out on the sidewalks along the hill and down on Moorhead Ave. Just sayin’.

Carol O’Meara, gardening columnist and host of stellar gardening in Colorado tips videos, pulled together a list of Denver/Boulder-area plant sales, and here are the Boulder ones:

Boulder Garden Club plant sale, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the Eisenhower School, 1220 Eisenhower Dr., Boulder. Homegrown perennials, annuals, vegetables, herbs, shrubs, and trees from the oldest garden club in Colorado. Supersizing the sale with the addition of the Boulder Orchid Society table of orchids, you’ll find unique plants and good advice from the staff at the event. Proceeds go toward supporting the club’s civic projects in Boulder and their international projects.

Growing Gardens community plant sale, Saturday, May 8 and 15, hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. Held at the Growing Gardens greenhouse, 1630 Hawthorn Ave. in Boulder, the event offers thousands of vegetable seedlings, plus annuals and perennials. Benefits Growing Gardens programming, such as Cultiva! Youth Project, Able Gardening, and community gardens.

Boulder Culinary Gardeners plant sale, May 15, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Bickell Sheep Farm, 988 North 75th St., Boulder. Edible plants, vegetable seedlings and perennials are offered. Meet other gardeners interested in growing food, and bring used pots for recycling.

National Wildlife Federation native plant sale, May 15, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., at 2260 Baseline Road, Boulder (Southwest corner of Broadway and Baseline). A great place to find native plants to provide food for birds and wildlife. All purchases will help NWF employees participate in RTD’s Eco Pass program, to reduce their carbon footprint. For information, contact rmnrc@nwf.org.

Bobby Kenney, of Simple Solar, hauls a solar panel up a ladder to install on the roof of the Boulder Friends meeting house in Boulder on Monday | Paul Aiken

The world of solar is about to open up to a whole new group of Coloradans thanks to a bill that is on the way to the governor’s desk to be signed.

People with shady roofs, renters, condo owners and even folks with too-small roofs (or even no roofs, like farmers who want to offset their irrigation pumps) will soon be able to buy a share of solar panels that are installed in nearby “community solar gardens.”

People who buy into the gardens will get all the same benefits as people who slapped the PV panels directly on their roofs, which means they can get rebates and incentive payments as well as have the electricity produced by the solar panels credited directly to their energy bill.

Solar gardens could be sprouting as soon as next fall, according to the bill sponsor, Claire Levy, a Boulder Democrat.

Learn more at DailyCamera.com.

Eagle Crest Elementary student rope off their square foot gardens | Kira Horvath

On Earth day, students at Eagle Crest Elementary geared up for the final stages of their year-long G.R.O.W. project. For the project, which stands for Gardens Renew Our World, students were each able to create their own 1 square foot garden with plants like lettuce, cabbage, radishes, spinach and marigolds.

They started in October with “Leave No Child Inside” day by holding a garden groundbreaking where students cleared a 20-by-20 foot area to get ready for the gardens. Then parents and students got together in December to build 20 planters for the project.

As part of the St. Vrain Valley School District’s Math, Engineering, and Science Achievement program the G.R.O.W. project allowed students to plan their own gardens by researching and choosing the seeds they wanted to plant, and working with landscape designer Cherie Stringer of TLC Gardens.

Read more or check out some tips for gardening in Colorado.

–Lindsay Gulisano