Source For Composted Manure Near San Jose, California?
westes Zone 9b California SF Bay
3 months ago
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westes Zone 9b California SF Bay
3 months agolast modified: 3 months agoRelated Discussions
San Francisco taking heat for free compost
Comments (32)this subject been around here and there before. where i live they compost all compostable waste they chip up old furniture and lanscaping timber/logs you name it, it gets added to garden and tree lopping waste, along with up to medium grade industrial liquid waste and the humus from the sewerage treatment works. over here they sell it to gardeners sometimes give it away, it goes to blenders of all sorts of products ie.,. potting mix, soil improvers, etc.,. and gets sold over the counter. the heaps they compost it in and mix the liquid waste into obviously get hot, how hot dunno? the stuff that goes to potting mix blenders and baggers of soil improvers is likley screened but that from the dump sites can have all sorts of stuff in it notable pieces of plastics that get mixed into the stream early on. it is in all over the counter product. to use or not to use, i follow the regime so long as you are fully educated into what something may contain and that product is all that is available then what to do? use it i would say but maybe sparingly. we all use potting mixes so very likley we are all using the stuff in someway anyway? if gardeners don't use it they will put more of it onto conventional farms that is the thrust so maybe down track it will no longer be available to gardeners. a vexing question? is this the lesser of 2 evils? len Here is a link that might be useful: lens garden page...See Morerisks of using horse manure that is not composted thoroughly
Comments (49)Karen, why use raw manure, you ask? Because the point of using the manure directly is for the nitrogen. The nitrogen that is lost in composting. In fact, many of us use manure in compost because we know it will lose it's nitrogen as it's used to activate that pile. If applied directly to a field and tilled in, more of the nitrogen sticks around and is available when the plant needs it. The bacteria that eat it up in the pile aren't nearly so prevalent in the soil. You can't have the production we have today organically because production today is only possible because we have enough synthesized nitrogen. Farms need as much nitrogen as possible if they don't go synthetic because it doesn't stick around for long in the ground. Especially when you till that ground for planting, which is one of the many reasons for no-till farming. If only composted manure was used, the farms would go out of business thanks to reduced yields. Otherwise, don't you think the USDA would prohibit the use of raw manure altogether? It's necessary. It's that simple. Man has overcome that in only one way, with chemicals. Chemicals not used by those who go the "organic" route. Kimm, what is it with you and changing words but putting them in quotes as if they aren't your own words? (I know it seems like a matter of semantics to some of you, but factory farming is a very intensive method that involves animal cruelty and the overuse of antibiotics, which makes animal feces toxic and sometimes full of mutated bacteria. Not the same as a family farm or an industrialized organic farm.) I said industrialized farming and the organic farm you mention is likely the same as the one that Karen mentioned concerning the huge surprise E-coli outbreak with an organic spinach producer. THAT IS AN INDUSTRIALIZED FARM! Again, you try to twist things. Industrialized doesn't mean non-organic and you know it. This website is supposed to be about helping people. Not misleading them so you look like you know what you are talking about. So stop doing so. Besides, just because something is recalled doesn't mean it was because they used manure and I know you know that, too. Show me which one determined that listeria was from the manure conclusively. I mean, I can actually reference sources. Can you? In fact, all of those that involve listeria that I have found specifically make a point to mention it could be from manure OR soil. Doesn't exactly prove much, now does it? The only ones that were proven to be from manures in soil were the E-coli outbreaks. The salmonella was from manure being sprayed directly on the plants. That has nothing to do with this discussion. The thread is about putting manure on your garden in fall. Not directly spraying your plants with a water-manure mix. Okay. I'll stop on this thread. There are real resources out there. I referenced some. Go enjoy gardening and refuse to live in fear unless the facts (and I mean all of them)......See MoreCrap in my Manure?
Comments (7)There are a lot of news stories on it, and even a website devoted to sludge issues. Here is a story from OCA and the link to Sludge News. The People Who Want You to Believe Toxic Sludge Is Good for You Members of the Organic Consumers Association staff went undercover to a meeting of San Francisco Public Utilities Commission employees and the toxic sludge industry last week. What we found surprised us. We figured, in such a green city, that SFPUC employees would keep an arms length distance from for-profit sludge companies like Synagro that make their money dumping city sludge on rural lands. We thought that they would be trying to figure out green alternatives to flushing waste away with clean drinking water. Little did we know. SFPUC, Synagro and CASA, the state lobbying group for all of California's city sewer commissions, are mounting a coordinated effort to salvage the business-as-usual practice of flushing household and industrial waste away with clean water and then contaminating farmland with toxic sludge leftover when the water is removed. They see San Francisco's sludge giveaway program as an essential component of their national campaign to build public acceptance for the disposal of toxic sewage sludge on yards, gardens and farms. They will fight any effort to shut the program down, and specifically named OCA allies the Center for Food Safety and RILES, who filed a legal petition with the San Francisco to stop the sludge giveaway, as enemies of their campaign. The scary thing is, this public-private trifecta is well-resourced and unscrupulous. The Synagro rep boasted of earning the support of a local university for a toxic sludge project by promising a $25,000 yearly donation. The CASA rep talked about using "Congressional funny money" to fund studies that would provide science that backed-up the industry. And, the SFPUC rep, the public employee, stood by them smiling and nodding as they applauded her for not backing down in the face of public opposition to the contamination of San Francisco's green space with toxic sludge. http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=EeX%2Fe1RJUWKt8QhKYN%2BukBxKH%2BWklaGt Click the link to read more. Here is a link that might be useful: Sludge News...See MoreHelp! trying to Xeriscape the front yard in San Jose
Comments (12)I like High Country Gardens catalog but it isn't really suitable for our climate here. I live in the Oakland hills and found very few of their plants worked here. It's much better to stay local since we have such great nurseries here. Even the big box stores and some of the drugstores (like Long's) have fabulous nursery sections. Get a copy of the Sunset Western Garden Book; it's the Bible of Western gardeners and has all kinds of useful info in it. Remember you are going to have water in all plants, even xeric ones, until they become established, for at least the first year. Also, the better your soil, the better they will do. Then mulch, mulch, mulch. Soaker hoses work great in mixed plantings and waste so much less water. Use quick couplers to make it easier to switch your hoses around. A groundcover I'm surprised more people don't use is Convolvulus mauritanicus, a morning glory relative. It's amazingly xeric. Not the prettiest groundcover, but very tough and pest-free. Another groundcover that is xeric but won't look good during the winter, is lambs ear (Stacchys byzantia). 'Helen Von Stein' doesn't have the spikey flowers that some folks object to, but the color is a darker green than the standard variety. Any creeping groundcover will need some periodic maintenance to keep them from running over neighboring plants. It's just a fact of life here in the relatively frost-free zones we live in. I'm always fighting my evergreen vines because they keep trying to swallow their neighboring plants! Any vine that grows to 15' in other regions becomes a 30+' monster around here. Lavenders will be very happy with little summer water, as will tagetes lemmonii (bush marigold), hunnemania, dwarf Indian hawthorn, tibouchina urvilleana, any of the new pelargonium hybrids (people call them geraniums, which is botanically incorrect; true geraniums are less showy and thirstier), salvias, cistus (rockrose), roses (once established), artemisia, leptospermum (tea tree) Again, my soil is quite good - we replaced the first 8" of adobe clay with top-quality compost from the Davis St. Recycling Center - and I mulch every year. We like a cottage garden look, not to everyone's taste. I water every 10-14 days, depending on how hot it gets. This photo is from May, when the lavenders, nasturtiums and poppies put on the best show. But I have flowers all year long, actually....See Morewestes Zone 9b California SF Bay
3 months ago- westes Zone 9b California SF Bay thanked daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
westes Zone 9b California SF Bay
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2 months agolast modified: 2 months agowestes Zone 9b California SF Bay thanked daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)westes Zone 9b California SF Bay
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daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)