NewsFlash
April 2015
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Green Mountain Compost is throwing a party!
It’s that time of year: Spring is springing, flowers will soon be poking up through the snow, and compost is going to party down.
A party for compost? Yep! Those restless compost microbes can be quite the party animals. They’ve been waiting for winter’s end, for the moment when they can start doing what they do best: Urging your garden to grow.
Seventy squintillion soil-building, plant-boosting microbes can’t be wrong, so the folks at Green Mountain Compost are throwing a party for you and all the plants just waiting for a chance to reach for the sun!
WHEN: Saturday, April 25, 10am-3pm
WHERE: Green Mountain Compost, 1042 Redmond Rd., Williston, VT
WHAT: Free workshops, prizes, tours, fun — and great deals on compost and other soil products:
$10 off per cubic yard of bulk Complete Compost.
$1 off all bagged Compost, Topsoil, Potting Soil, and Seed Starter, including Bag-Your-Own Complete Compost and Raised Bed Mix! Come and get it!
Tour the facility: Get a gander at our high-tech compost-making facility
Free raffle prizes:
Enter for drawings of free compost, a backyard composting bin, a Healthy Living gift card, Green Mountain Compost hats, T-shirts, and more!
Plant some seeds: We’ll provide the seeds, seed-starter, and small containers to help participants start seeds for their home gardens. Folks from the Vermont Community Garden Network will be on hand to help make it happen.
Climb on the big trucks & sand pile: Kids both small and tall get a chance to climb into the driver’s seats of the big rigs that help make compost happen: a full-size excavator, bucket loader, and dump truck — and dig around in a giant sand pile.
Munchies:
Food trucks: Skinny Pancake and Mo’s Backyard BBQ
The famous Green Mountain Compost Sundae: chocolate cookies, ice cream, and gummy worms!!
Free how-to workshops:
– How to plant a tree (10am-11am) with Meghan Giroux of Edible Landscapes. A well planted tree is a happy tree! Learn how to put down roots the right way.
– Backyard composting (10:15am-11:15am & 1:30pm-2:30pm) with Marge Keough of CSWD. She’ll show you how easy it is!
– First-time Gardening (11am-12am) with Charlie Nardozzi
– Raised Bed & Lasagna Gardening (12pm-1pm) with Mark Krawczyk of Keyline Vermont. No we’re not planting lasagna trees — but we are introducing you to a great way of growing the ingredients for lasagna!
– Edible Landscaping (1:45pm-2:45pm) with Mark Krawczyk of Keyline Vermont. Birds do it. Bees do it. You can do it, too — feasting on your yard, that is!
Save the date and come on down! Want more information? We’ve got it at Green Mountain Compost.
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Grab a bag of Green Mountain Compost at CSWD Drop-Off Centers!
Starting in mid-April, all seven CSWD Drop-Off Centers will be selling bags of Green Mountain Compost products! Now you can grab a bag while you’re out doing your errands.
Here’s what we’ll be selling at CSWD Drop-Off Centers:
Complete Compost: $6.99 + tax Chock-full of the nutrients and soil-building properties that gardeners and landscapers look for in a growing medium. Made with a high-quality recipe of yard trimmings, wood chips…oh, and plenty of community food scraps, probably from your own neighborhood! Complete Compost truly closes the “local food loop.”
Premium Topsoil: $5.99 + tax If chemical-free, lush lawn grass and thriving garden beds are what you’re after, try our organic Premium Topsoil. It’s high in organic matter to give plants a boost and improve soil structure for optimum drainage. It’s also super easy to spread and great for a wide variety of lawn and garden applications.
Premium Potting Soil: $9.99 + tax Professional-grade, organic Premium Potting Soil, custom blended for the perfect balance of texture, moisture retention, and drainage. Made from our organic Premium Compost, regionally-sourced sphagnum peat moss, aged pine bark, and a mix of organic fertilizers.
Note: We accept cash and checks only at Drop-Off Centers. Unfortunately, we cannot at accept credit or debit cards at Drop-Off Centers at this time.
Bagged organic Premium Compost Topsoil, Potting Soil, and Seed Starter
Bulk Complete Topsoil, Complete Compost, and Raised Bed Mix.
Bag-Your-Own Complete Compost and Raised Bed Mix
Credit cards accepted at Green Mountain Compost.
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CSWD to hold more Waste Warrior training sessions
What’s a Waste Warrior? A friendly and passionate advocate for keeping as much as possible out of the landfill — and spread good cheer in the process. It’s someone who receives special CSWD Waste Warrior training so they can volunteer to help attendees at events make the right choices when it comes to recycling, composting, or trash. They bring that training and recycling and composting know-how to every corner of their lives: their neighborhoods, their work, their friends, their homes.
Response to the two Waste Warrior trainings we’ve held so far has been fantastic! Both were filled to capacity with folks eager to help our community trim our collective waste stream. So, we’re offering two more!
Here’s the deal: Your Waste Warrior opportunity starts with a free one-hour training, where you’ll become a certified CSWD Waste Warrior. You’ll meet like-minded neighbors, have a snack, and learn how to help make composting and recycling efforts at local events successful.
You’ll learn:
– How to determine what goes into trash, recycling and composting containers at events. It’s not always as easy as you think because there are a lot of different kinds of materials and products out there!
– How to communicate with attendees in ways that help them learn.
– How to help an event up their game in making sure as much as possible stays out of the landfill.
– And more!
Visit the Waste Warrior web page and sign up for a training session today!
Monday, April 13, 5:30-7pm, Richmond Free Library, 201 Bridge St., Richmond
Monday, April 27, 5:30-7pm, Williston Town Hall, 7900 Williston Rd., Williston
Volunteer as a CSWD Waste Warrior for any event and you’ll get a Waste Warrior team bandanna and that special feeling that comes with helping your community become a cleaner, greener place.
Need more info? Contact Marge Keough, CSWD Community Outreach Coordinator, atmkeough@cswd.net.
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Lend Us Your Creativity!
We’re scheming a new, exciting, mashup event celebrating innovative, creative ways to reduce, repurpose and reimagine the concept of “waste” in Chittenden County — and we need your help.
You’re invited to a brainstorming meeting on Tuesday, April 28 from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m.in Williston to kick off the creative thinking for this new happening.
Not sure what you have to offer? We can help you figure that out. We’re looking for inspiration from a wide range of skills, interests, and perspectives. Here’s just a taste of the possibilities:
- Repurposing wizards: You made an automatic cat waterer out of a burned-out humidifier or a house from spent tires. For you, anything can have nine (or more) lives.
- Repair gurus: You’re an inveterate tinkerer, a fixture on ifixit.com, and you haven’t met an appliance, gadget, tool or toy that can’t be patched, repaired, or refurbished.
- Creative repurposing cooks: You’ve honed shopping to a zero-waste art and revel in creating new, deliciously creative “reuse recipes” to make use of every last potato peel and carrot top.
- Re-imagineering inventors: Your imagination thrives on cranking out new machines and systems to solve old problems.
- Reuse crafters and artists: You see useful or artistic potential in everyday discards — zippers and license plates become hair clasps, jewelry and light-switch plates. Old climbing rope is a colorful new doormat. Discarded objects become enduring, original expressions of beauty.
- Hoopla specialists: You know the ins and outs of creating fun, fabulous events and connecting with just the right people and resources to create buzz and inspire participation.
- Students, parents, teachers, business owners, community members: If you’re interested, we’re interested — come and let us know what you’re thinking!
Light fare will be served and space is limited, so sign up now!
If you think “waste” is a verb, not a noun, we want your ideas for how to rock the reuse house! There’s no commitment, no (unwanted) assignments. Just come enjoy a lively discussion and exchange of ideas with others who want to kick “waste” to the curb-with flair. Questions? Email CSWD’s Michele Morris at mmorris@cswd.net. Put “CRF Meeting” in the subject line; or call Michele at 802-872-8100 x237.
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Sustainability Academy to throw trash on lawn right before Green Up Day
This school isn’t the only one to throw its trash around. Since October of last year, four — count ’em: FOUR — other schools have done the same thing. Trash! Just thrown on the ground!
What is wrong with these students?!
Actually, here’s what’s right about these students: They’re participating in a Trash On Lawn Day, where schools dump out a day’s worth of trash and sort through it, seeing what is slipping through the cracks in their recycling, composting, and other waste-diversion programs, and ending up in the landfill. This way, they’ll see what needs tightening up, or even change what they offer in their cafeteria to cut down on non-recyclable packaging. After all, you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and these schools are doing just that.
Want to see one of the most effective ways of figuring out how well your waste reduction system is going — no matter where you work? Drop on by the Sustainability Academy Trash On Lawn Day and get a gander!
WHEN: Friday, May 1, 10 a.m. – noon
WHERE: Sustainability Academy at Lawrence Barnes, 123 North St., Burlington, VT
“Trash On the Lawn Day (TOLD) not only measures how much (and what) trash is generated at a school in a day, it also provides a clear picture of weaknesses and strengths in the sorting procedures practiced at school,” Says Rhonda Mace, CSWD’s School & Youth Outreach Coordinator, who will be on hand to help guide the students through the process. “Four other schools have held TOLDs this year: Colchester High School, Milton Elementary/Middle School, and Winooski Middle School,” she added. “The Sustainability Academy held one in December. The TOLD in April will help them see how well they’ve done since they last analyzed their waste stream.”
Sustainability Academy’s Sustainability Coach, Suzanne Weishaar, adds, “I would like to make the connection between reducing consumption and changing habits to reuse items so that we can spend less time cleaning up waste and more time beautifying our neighborhoods with art and plants.”
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Cultivate your mind … with your garden
Part 4 of a beginner’s gardening blog by Clare Innes
I was on a ramble through my neighborhood, ruminating about my plans for starting a little garden for the first time, when I saw it: A sculpture freshly planted in a neighbor’s side yard — an enormous, scrap-metal syringe, artfully composed and as big as a missile. Packed into the body of the syringe was a jumble of small TVs and clunky, old computer monitors. The syringe was labelled, “Cultivate your mind.”
And that’s what I’m hoping happens as I work the soil and poke seeds and plantlets into the loamy bed, inhaling the scent of upturned earth teeming with life. There are many things I want from my garden, food being only one of them. I’m also looking for a way to give my inner stream of chatter a simple delight to latch onto. I’m looking forward to cultivating my mind and cultivating my senses as I cultivate the soil.
It’s early April as I write this. The spot on the lawn where I plan to make my raised bed is still buried under about a foot of snow. But the snow is melting quickly and here’s a peek at my to-do list:
– Start some seeds with organic Seed Starter Mix mix from Green Mountain Compost. Here are a couple of tips from garden guru Charlie Nardozzi:
“A nice tip to get seeds to germinate and grow faster indoors is to invest in a heat mat,” says he. “These are designed to warm up to around 70 degrees and are waterproof. Place it under the seed trays or pots and you’ll notice everything grows faster and better. You can use them for years without any problems.”
I’m going the el-cheapo route and opting not to go the heat-mat route. Maybe I can borrow a laying hen from a friend to sit on my seed starter tray to encourage my seedlings to hatch… 😉
Another tip from Charlie: Soak your seeds overnight to give them a head start on germination. Now THAT I will do.
– Get my first garden tool — a steel garden rake — and rough up the soil and grass in the area where I want to replace lawn with garden.
– Make my bed — I’ll cover the 4×4-foot garden area with a couple layers of newspaper, and include a 2-foot moat around the garden so I can mulch it and keep it clear of lawn for extra protection from bugs and seeds from the lawn. I’ll give the newspaper a good soaking (and poke slits into the paper for drainage where I’ll install the bed) and build my raised bed right on top of it.
– Fill the bed with organic Raised Bed Mix from Green Mountain Compost to ensure that my plants have plenty of fast- and slow-release nutrients and optimum soil structure that allows great aeration and that mysterious ability to hold onto just the right amount of moisture and allow excess to drain away.
– Wait for spring to stabilize — and in go the plants — likely late May for me, earlier for those living in low-lying, sun-warmed valleys.
– Keep harvesting information. Free gardening workshops at Green Mountain Compost’s CompostFest on April 25, more free workshops during International Compost Awareness Week May 3-9, and others offered by Gardener’s Supply, the Vermont Community Garden Network, and many other local experts.
Check out the CompostFest story above for more details about the event. See you at one of the workshops!
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Reuse tip 0′ the month
Wood pellet bags
We’re as frustrated as you are that there are products made from recyclable materials, but that we can’t recycle. If manufacturers designed their products for easy recycling, we’d all be sending a LOT less stuff to the landfill!
Take wood pellet bags, for example. Most are made from materials that can be recycled into new products, but three main things stand in the way of our being able to process that material for recycling here in Chittenden County:
– Different pellet manufacturers choose different types of plastic for their bags. We would have to identify what type of plastic is used in each bag and ship only those types to those specific end markets to be recycled.
– Pellet residue is considered a contaminant in the recycling world. Stray pellets and pellet dust are not welcome by those end markets. Bags would have to be clean and dry to be accepted.
– Filmy plastic, such as bags, tangle up in the recycling process. Machines do a large part of sorting recyclables. It takes only one stray bag to snarl up the works, sometimes forcing a system-wide shutdown until it can be extracted.
Those who heat with wood pellet stoves typically go through stacks of bags, and find few options for keeping them out of the landfill. Why not lend your voice to urge the Pellet Fuels Institute to come up with a solution to manage the heaps of bags generated by their industry members? So what’s a conscientious person to do with all those bags? For now, use them as mini-drop cloths, storage bags or use them to line your kitchen or workshop trash can — or any 18-gallon trash can, for that matter.
Ideally, the bags would be part of a product stewardship program, where an industry steps up to the plate to help manage their products or packaging after their useful life has ended. Vermont is one of the leaders in the country, with seven product stewardship lawson the books, making it convenient and affordable for residents and businesses to properly dispose of paint, batteries, computers, TVs, and certain products containing mercury. Without a product stewardship option, reuse is the next-best option that enables you to not have to purchase that many regular trash bags for the same purpose. One year, I had enough wood pellet bags to last me well into the following autumn, saving me some moolah and helping me keep from adding even more plastic to my landfill legacy — because those plastic bags won’t be breaking down in my lifetime!
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How to keep maple tubing out of the landfill
It has been a fantastic year for sugaring — and sugar shacks are still going strong! Once the sap has all been boiled down and thoughts turn to maintaining those sap lines, here’s what you can do to keep lines you no longer need out of the landfill:
Bring it to the Northwest Vermont Solid Waste Management District in Georgia, VT, where it will be baled and hauled away for recycling. NWSWMD accepts tubing year-round. Please call ahead to make arrangements. Contact Tom Reynolds at (802) 524-5986; info@nwswd.org.
Limitations, regulations and other specifications:
– Polyethylene (PE) tubing only. NO PVC tubing. To determine whether your tubing is made from PE or PVC: clip off a sample and put it in a bowl of water. PE floats; PVC sinks.
– Plastic taps, tees and other fittings are OK to leave attached to tubing.
– Material must be as clean as possible to make this recycling program successful.
– Cut mainline into 4-foot lengths, if possible. Coil or bundle tubing. Tie bundles together with tubing. Do not use string or other material.
– NO drainage, sewer, or water service lines.
– NO string or metal of any kind (includes wires, wire ties, and metal hose clamps).
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Get your hands dirty for a good cause
It’s been long. It’s been cold. It’s been a winter to remember. One of the best ways to celebrate its passing is by spending a day in the dirt — literally!
Yep – it’s time for the Vermont Community Garden Network‘s annual Day in the Dirt, where community volunteers join neighbors and new friends to give gardens a good sprucing up for spring.
WHEN: Saturday, May 9, 9:30-Noon in a community garden, and then free lunch at the Intervale Center 12:30-1:30
This event raises essential funds for VCGN to continue to support community gardens around the state. These funds are used for workshops, technical assistance, and essential gardening equipment to keep gardens growing strong in their communities.
Click here to sign up! Registration closes April 24.
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How about fun facts, and tips & tricks to waste-proof your home?
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CSWD Calendar
Monday April 13: Waste Warrior Training: Richmond Free Library (reservation required — see story above)
Mid-April: Green Mountain Compost bagged products available for sale at all CSWD Drop-Off Centers! (see story above)
Saturday, April 25: Green Mountain Compost’s CompostFest! A celebration of compost, gardening, and community. (see story above)
Monday April 27: Waste Warrior Training: Williston Town Hall (reservation required — see story above)
Tuesday, April 28: Lend us your creativity! Register to help build a community event to reimagine the concept of “waste.” (see story above)
Friday, May 1: Sustainability Academy’s Trash On Lawn Day (see story above)
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