Home-made compost is the best way to cycle kitchen waste back into your landscape to enrich your soil with nutrients and beneficial microbes. It’s also the best way to ensure it’s free of plastics and other unsavory materials. Composting does not have to be complicated (you can certainly become rather sophisticated at it eventually!).
Here are some basic suggestions to encourage you to start now and to continue throughout the winter.
In urban yards, an enclosed compost bin to collect materials is best, as opposed to throwing kitchen waste onto a heap.
Step 1: Make a wooden bin or purchase a large plastic bin. Make sure you get a bin that is wider than 24 inches and not too tall, otherwise it’s very difficult to turn the contents. (Note: Most people find the “Garden Gourmet too tall and narrow, which makes it difficult to turn and it also dries out too quickly).

Step 2: Place the bin on a fairly level surface in your yard. Make sure it’s fairly easy to get to your bin through snow and in cold weather. Ideally, the bin is placed in part sun to help speed up the decomposition. It’s also helpful to place it near a source of water during the summer, such as a rainbarrel. Avoid placing your compost bin on concrete.

Step 3: Collect your kitchen waste in a nice bucket. Lee Valley has conveniently sized metal buckets. Collect veggies and fruit, eggshells, tea and coffee grounds. Avoid dairy products, fat, meat, eggs and pet waste in this kind of open, aerobic composting method.

Step 4: Throw the kitchen waste into your compost bin every few days. Ideally, you should balance all these “greens” (fresh materials that contain lots of nitrogen) with “browns” (dry leaves, straw, and shredded paper that contain lots of carbon). In the winter, if you didn’t save your leaves, you can shred some newspaper and mix it with your green material. If you have storage space, you can purchase a square bale of straw at a local garden centre. (Straw is also fabulous to mulch your veggie beds in the summer.) Next fall, be sure to collect bags of dry leaves and store them near your compost.
For every 1 bucket of “greens”, add 1-2 buckets of “browns”. This is more important during the warm season when the microbes become active.

Step 5: If your bin is full, you may want to add a temporary bin, such as a wire cage (line it with cardboard to retain moisture and prevent materials from falling out). I have recently purchased a roll of plastic, a “Geobin” from Lee Valley, as an extension to my regular bin. It’s easy to set up and I’m hoping it will retain more humidity and keep in the small bits.

Step 6: From December to March, your compost is likely not very active, so you can just keep adding materials. In April, use a fork to turn the compost and if necessary, add some water. The materials should be like a wrung out sponge. Turn the compost every couple of weeks or so. Ideally, you will not add any new materials to this bin to allow the microbes to decompose everything by fall. Set up a second compost bin for all your summer kitchen waste and garden clean up materials.

Step 7: In the fall, sift the materials from your first bin and add the finished compost to your garden. Any materials that have not decomposed to your satisfaction can be added to your fall pile (see next step).

Step 8: In October, it’s fall cleanup and compost mixing time. Empty out the summer compost bin, mix it with plenty of fall leaves, fresh kitchen waste and the yard waste from fall cleanup. Ideally, you will combine 2 parts of loose, dry leaves or straw with 1 part green materials from the garden. Mix and add water to the point where the materials resemble a wrung out sponge. Place all the materials into one of your bins and turn them every 5 days until everything is frozen. Now we’re back to Step 4 – add your kitchen waste all winter long!

Fruit trees and berry bushes are the key species of a food forest. They are an investment for the long term and are worth a bit of money and care to keep them healthy. It is rather tragic when wildlife causes major damage that leaves the plant susceptible to stress and disease.

An easy way to protect trees and small shrub is with a wire fence. Here are some tips on what to buy and how to get extra mileage out of this product. I am a big proponent of the permaculture principle to “stack functions”, so I like to find many uses for an item or materials I purchase.
 
Materials
You will have to look, google or ask for the following terms, depending on the hardware store you visit: Welded Wire Fabric or Fence, Garden Fence, Rabbit Garden Fence
The gauge of these products is around 14. The larger the gauge, the thinner the wire and the floppier or weaker the fence is.
Suppliers in Edmonton and Area: Home Hardware, Home Depot, Lowe’s and maybe others.
 
Mesh Size
Ideally, you can find a sturdy product with a mesh size 2 inches by 2 inches or 2 inches by 1 inch. Larger mesh size is available, but you need to be careful – if you have small children, their hands may get trapped. A mesh size of 1 inch or smaller is usually a less sturdy product as well. It will work, but you will need to support it with stakes.
 
Poultry Netting, Chicken Wire or Hardware Cloth or most plastic products are generally very floppy and will not work without a frame. If you have lots of mice, you may need to use hardware cloth, which has a finer mesh to keep them from chewing all the way around the trunk of a tree.

Creating a Cage
For trees, create a sturdy wire cylinder around the trunk that has a diameter at least twice the size of the trunk. That way you don’t have to cut a new piece as the tree grows.
The height of the cage should be about 2 feet minimum. You want to be sure that a hare or jackrabbit cannot reach the lower branches or reach above the fence when we have a winter with lots of snow.
The rolls of fence are usually around 2 feet to 4 feet tall. I cut my wire closer to 3 feet tall, as I also use the cages for temporary compost bins when I don’t need them for plants (see more info below)
 
Shrubs grow much faster and you really only need to protect them for the first couple of years. Once the shrub is 2-3 feet tall and well branched, even heavy pruning by a rabbit will not kill the shrub.
 
With the welded wire fence, you will need to wear thick gloves and wire cutters. Place the fence around the trees and shrubs and use a pair of pliers to bend the cut wires and connect the fence into a cylinder. You can also use twist ties or plastic zap straps to connect the ends.
 
Stacking Functions – Using the Cages for Composting
The wire cages are really important when trees and shrubs are young, and during the winter when our local Jackrabbits have nothing else to eat. So eventually, you may not need all your cages or you only need them during the winter.
 
I like to connect together some extra welded wire fence to create larger cylinders (2.5-3.5 feet in diameter) for storing dry leaves or extra compost, and I have even used a cage with extra compost that needed more curing as a growing bed for cucumbers, melons and potatoes. Check out this blog post and photos below.

Two easy permaculture principles to try out in an urban yard are to “catch and store energy and materials” and to “use biological and renewable resources”. This year I decided to put my red wrigglers to work in the garden. I found a used plant pot and drilled some holes around the sides, then sunk it into a raised bed between a zucchini and tomato plant. Next I put in some leaves and kitchen scraps – bedding and food for my worms. I placed a handful of worms from my indoor worm bin inside the new home and covered them with more leaves. Finally, I covered the “worm home” with a piece of tree stump to create a roof. Voilà! I now have a fertilizer generator and kitchen waste processing plant right next to nutrient hungry plants. 

Growth in the potato tower has been great. I have added more compost and leaves (see bands of different coloured material - click on photo to enlarge) and I will need to add more very shortly. The musk melon in the second cage is doing ok, but I'm sure it will grow much better once we get some heat.

As part of our Organic Gardening program, we discussed different types of garden beds. Our session also dealt with composting and options for compost bins.

I have always wanted to make some kind of potato tower. Last fall, I made a quick compost pile (while the snow was flying), but because I made it so late, it did not have a chance to decompose very much. So during our class, we turned the pile onto the lawn, mixed it with some wood and water, and piled it into a wire cage. (During the winter, I use these cages to protect my trees and shrubs from rabbits).

Then we planted potatoes in it, leaving some space to add some straw and leaves as the potatoes grow. After 2 weeks, the potatoes are just starting to poke out.

We also had some partially composted material for a second “vertical growing cage”. I added a layer of soil and seeded some buckwheat for a cover crop. In a week or so, I will be planting a muskmelon in it, just to see if it will grow and mature. I love experimenting in the garden, don’t you?!