It's such a pretty day outside today, I decided to check out my backyard to measure out some future projects. With the kids happily ensconced in pretending to be Mr. Potato-Head (with Big Bro trying to talk Little Bro out of the plastic eye glasses and yellow mustache) I stepped outside.
I'm so pleased with how the back yard is turning out. Last week, it looked like this:
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| Somewhere out there is a clothesline. It's hard to find since the hay field behind the house took over my back yard. |
Luckily, one of my friends offered to mow my lawn for really cheap. Normally, I don't like to let anyone else mow my lawn (Hello? It's cheaper to mow the lawn than pay a gym membership + I LOVE mowing the lawn!) but my fibromyalgia has been flaring just a little too much for me to battle the tall grass. So, this is my lawn today:
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| Lots of grass clippings to rake up! Oh! Look! A clothesline! |
Since I can now walk through my backyard without wading through waist-deep grass, I decided it was time to do something about all the grass clippings. So, I pulled together a little compost bin for less than $10!
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| The supplies: One roll of chicken wire ($4.98), one pack of zip-ties ($1), and three sets of garden stakes (@$1 each). |
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| First, unroll your chicken wire and zip-tie the edges together to make a circular cage.. This is half-inch mesh since the neighbors have little dogs. I just put it in an area that my kids have been dumping the grass-clippings from the lawn mower and other larger food-waste like watermelon rinds. |
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| Second, use the garden stakes to hold the bottom of the bin to the ground so animals don't flip it over. (Again, this is mostly because my neighbor's dogs have been rooting through the previously un-caged compost heap.) |
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You can leave this without a lid or make a frame of chicken wire for the top. Me? I've got an old wooden pallet laying in my front yard that I'm going to stack on top. It'll allow my kids to dump scraps and grass clippings in between the slats, but not allow dogs in.
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How long did this take me? About ten minutes. The funny thing is that the paper on the chicken wire is compostable as well- so I tossed it in. (That's the blue stuff showing in the bin.) Now I have a place for grass clippings, shredded paper, and all the potato skins and corn cobs I'll have left-over from cooking for picnics this summer- Happy Composting, Y'all!
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