Yes, the composting process is a lot slower in winter, but the process doesn’t stop completely. Even if the temperatures drop well below freezing this winter, a little work and planning now will give your composting a head start once spring arrives.

Harvest your compost, so you have plenty of room in your bin for the winter composting. Since you will be mostly adding greens to your bin throughout winter, you’ll need some browns to keep the bin in balance, this is where all the leaves you raked up come in handy.

With a steady supply of fresh kitchen scraps, your compost pile should be able to keep itself fairly warm and do it’s thing. Some insulation around the bin can help to keep the temperatures up and speed up the composting process a little. While the best place for your compost bin in the summer is under some big trees, or any other shaded place to prevent the compost from drying out, in winter you’ll want to place it in a sunny spot, so the sun can warm up your compost pile.

What if you don’t want to move your compost pile or add insulation? Keep on adding your kitchen scraps to the bin and balance with dry leaves. When your compost pile completely freezes this winter, don’t worry, it’s a good thing! The freezing and thawing will damage the fibers in your soon-to-be compost making the breakdown easier once spring arrives.

Do you compost during winter?

Once the basil plants grow big enough, they will start flowering and the flowers will produce seeds. You can see the seeds when the plant drops its flowers. Each flower usually produces four seeds, with a few dozen flowers on each stem, you can easily harvest a hundred seeds from a single stem.

After planting seeds that I harvested from a plant last year, I have also tried to propagate the plants by taking cuttings. The cuttings where a great success and I soon had more basil than we could eat in salads. As the plants where already flowering, I had to use the leaves before drying the seeds. I decided to make some pesto and it was good!

Here’s how I made the pesto:

Ingredients:

• a few hands full of chopped basil leaves.
• A clove of garlic
• A handful of cashew nuts
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• A little lemon juice
• Some pepper and salt

Pound the garlic, cashew nuts and basil in a pestle and mortar or use a food processor. Real pesto is made with pine nuts, but cashew nuts are a lot cheaper alternative often used in the pesto you can buy in a glass jar from the supermarket. Add a little olive oil until you have a consistency you like and add pepper, salt and lemon juice to taste.

The pesto can be kept in the fridge for a few days or you can freeze it. I use this pesto to make sandwiches, just smear a nice thick layer of pesto onto a slice of bread and top with turkey or chicken breast and tomato slices.

If you want to use the pesto with pasta, you can add a few handfuls of grated parmesan cheese, just stir it into the pesto. When storing the pesto in the freezer you should omit the cheese as it doesn’t freeze to well. Just add the cheese after thawing the pesto for use. Enjoy!

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As we where running out of good soil for the planting I decided to try something different. We had some Styrofoam fish boxes laying around which looked like a perfect size planting container to grow some cucumbers in. The worms in the worm bin had not produced enough vermicompost yet, but I figured: why not let the worms continue their work while the plants are already growing?

So, I filled up the fish boxes 2 thirds of the way with a mixture of halfway done garden compost and the contents of my worm bin, including the worms. The boxes where toped of with some good soil. While the plants grow the worms should create a steady supply of worm castings.

Not knowing if this would work, I was pleasantly surprised by the growth rate of the cucumber plants. Now, six weeks later, the plants have grown nicely and are starting to develop fruits. This method of growing cuts out the work of having to harvest the vermicompost and the plants seem to like the steady supply of fresh nutrients.

I just found out that Compost Guy is doing the same, he calls it “Garbage Gardening”. I think if you want to sell your produce, a better term for this method of gardening should be used, as “Garbage Gardening” will probably not market very well.

Looking for information about good cookware, I found a lot of rather disturbing information about non-stick coatings. I wouldn’t just trash all my non-stick coated pans, but I have decided to not buy any new ones once our current ones have been used up. Now, since our new kitchen has an induction stove, all the aluminum pots and pans we have, had to be replaced by steel ones anyways, so now I’m cooking Teflon-free.

In my search for new cookware I came across a very nice deal on a 5 pieces set of Fissler pots. Cost shouldn’t really be an issue when buying cookware, with pots and pans you usually get what you pay for, so you should invest a little more and get something decent. My last set of pots have been used for daily cooking for about 7 years now and they are still like new. The only reason they had to be replaced is because they don’t work on the induction stove.

I still needed a good frying pan when I found out about how good cast iron pans are. When seasoned right, they have very good non-stick properties and can last several lifetimes. Old cast iron pans are usually better than new ones. They used to make two types of pans: plain cast iron (which has a kind of rough feel all over) and cast iron which has been machined inside, making it a lot smoother. They don’t do the machining anymore, but machined pans are so much better because of their smooth inside. Garage sales or flea markets are good places to find the old smooth pans. Don’t worry about how it looks, almost all old cast iron pans can be restored to look like new. Just be sure the pan you buy is not warped or cracked.

I remember my grandma used to cook with cast iron pans, so I went looking in her basement and found two old pans. They looked terrible, but where straight, had no cracks and where of the machined type! Restoration begins by removing the old seasoning. I put the pans in a bath of lye water and let them soak over night. The lye will eat away on the seasoning but not on the iron. The next day I gave it a good rub with a wire brush and the pans looked like new.

The seasoning of a cast iron pan is done by heating up some oil until it turns black and sticks to the pan surface. (Traditional Chinese woks get the same treatment before their first use.) My favorite seasoning is done with lard: rub the entire surface of the pan (inside and outside) with a thin layer of lard and set the pan in the oven or on the stovetop. Heat the pan on high for about 20 minutes, you should open up your kitchen window as this will produce a lot of smoke! Burned in fat should turn black and stick to the pan. One layer of seasoning is enough for the outside of the pan, I gave the inside 3 more layers. The inside of the pan should now have a shiny black finish.

When cooking in cast iron pans you should use a stainless steel spatula. Scraping the bottom of the pan with the spatula will make it a little smoother each time you use it. Don’t worry if things tend to stick at first, over time your pans non-stick properties will get better. Cleaning is done right after use with a dry paper towel. If that doesn’t clean it you can use a little water and a brush, just don’t ever use soap. After using water, let the pan dry on a hot stove and rub a little cooking oil all over the surface of the pan, both inside and outside. When treated right, I’m sure I can pass my grandmothers pans along to my own grandkids some day.

All that is left on my kitchens wish list is a decent wok and a Grease Keeper

These past 2 months have been very eventful, but we are about settled now. The first 4000 liter fish tank has been set up inside the greenhouse. For now it houses goldfish. We’ll have to see how temperatures develop in the greenhouse throughout the winter. I will probably build a shed around the fish tank and connected grow bed and equip it with a grow light to be able to grow some veggies this winter.

Sorry, no pictures at the moment, as the USB cable for the camera is still in one of the unpacked moving boxes…

I’ve been doing some thinking on space heating and DHW heating for the place. The property contains a big greenhouse complex consisting of 8 greenhouses, totaling over 6000 square meters. We wanted a big greenhouse, but this is way more than we are going to use. When checking out the place, one of the greenhouses had all its windows closed and it was unbearably hot in there. This got me thinking, the property has a huge heating system, which is designed to heat all of the greenhouses. The space heating for the house is just t-ed off of the big heating system, but since we are not going to use much of the greenhouse space to begin with, firing up this monster heater just to heat the house would be a big waste.

What if we can store the heat from the greenhouse for later use? One greenhouse would just function as a huge solar panel with water flowing through tubes and back to a big heat storage tank. A 20.000 liter oil tank, which is already there, can probably be used as the heat storage tank. I would only need to insulate it and run some pipes from the greenhouse to the tank.

I have no idea how much the greenhouse will heat up on a sunny winters day, but I will probably need some supplemental heating. If you have a big heat storage tank, you can use several heat sources to feed it. I will probably install a wood burning stove right next to the heat storage tank, to ensure we don’t freeze in winter. Heat generated by a Lister engine can also be fed into the same heat storage tank.

I found builditsolar.com to be a great resource on DIY solar projects. If you want to know more about wood stoves for heating, you should check out the forums on heart.com

Worms however can compost a lot faster. While digging in my garden I found a good number of worms which I have added to my compost bin to speed things up. When I recently decided to move my compost bin however, I found no worms in it. After a few weeks of hot and dry weather the worms all dug down into the soil beneath the bin and where gone.

If you want to compost with worms, which is also called vermicomposting, you need a different kind of compost bin. A worm bin will have a closed bottom, so the worms can’t get out. You do have to drill a couple of holes into the bottom, so excess water can get out. You can use any type of plastic bin for worm composting, but ideally it will have a matching lid. Worms breath like all animals so you need to make sure they get enough air. A few slits or holes in the side of your bin will take care of the air circulation, but you want to cover them up with some screening to keep flies out.

Fill your bin about half way with moist newspaper or cardboard strips and add a layer of soil. If you have a compost bin you can probably find some worms in there or you can do some digging in your garden. You can also go the easy way and buy some composting worms in a garden center or order them online.

Keep your worm bin out of the sun and make sure it stays moist. The worms will accept temperatures between 10 and 30 degrees centigrade but will do best at around 25 degrees. Be careful not to overfeed the worms or your worm bin will start smelling bad. Don’t add any scraps until the last batch has been eaten completely and always burry the scraps you are adding. In time you will get a feel for the amount of scraps your worm bin can process.

I have also put a cutting from a basil plant into the grow bed and planted some basil seeds. The cutting was cut from a basil plant that I bought from the supermarket and lives in my kitchen window. I just cut a piece and stuck it into the clay granulate. Two weeks later the cutting still looks good and it has grown some impressive roots! The basil seeds have sprouted too.