Two stages of turning food waste to fertilizer, the first stage takes 30 minutes

Below are the different stages of getting fertilizer out of food waste. The first step uses the Clean Garbage by UFO, and the second step (an optional step) uses the Earthworm System by UFO. You can always stop at the first step, you’ll have already spared your kitchen food waste odors or even extracted a liquid organic fertilizer for your plants, in minutes. Since scraps are collected over 1-3 days, you can obtain liquid fertilizer every few days. The second step will produce a solid fertilizer through earthworms, and fits indoor because it doesn’t produce odors.

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Why grow local, and organic: famrers occupy Wallstreet

Dave Murphy: Video: Farmers March With Occupy Wall Street, Sowing the Seeds of Hope and Democracy.

OMAFRA published a guide for urban farming, including a guide on vermicasting, by UFO’s founder

OMAFRA published a guide for urban farming, including a guide on Vermicasting, by UFO’s founder

Why parsley (or wheat!), and how to sprout it

UFO is exhibiting its waste processing equipment at Nuit Blanche in Toronto (October 1st), along side a cricket chef. Yes crickets! They’re a sustainable way to produce proteins, locally (my apologies if you have a beloved cricket pet, and I agree there might yet be less emotionally taxing ways to eat).
This will be the Hart House exhibit, themed “sustainable food”. The exhibit will show a food to waste to food cycle. The restaurant will use UFO’s equipment to turn its food waste into an odorless fertilizer, used to grow plants (herbs) in-house. Hence the parsley! It is used to demonstrate the last part of the cycle.

Parsley seeds can take a month to germinate, unless pretreated. A published peer reviewed study showed that pre-treating seeds with a polyethylene glycol solution (302 g PEG “6000” per 1 kg distilled water) at 15°C for 3 weeks, the surface drying the seeds led to seeds germinating in 1 or 2 days.

Update, I ended up planting wheat because I ran out of time! Crickets eat wheat too, so that’s ok. The wheat seeds sprouted in 2 days. I pre-treated them by:
- submerging them in water in the fridge for a day
- draining them
- putting every 1/2 cup of these seeds in a sealed plastic bag on top of the fridge, to use the appliance’s wasted heat. This was for a day as well.

At the end of the second day most seeds had sprouted, and I placed them in pots. These were filled with a 1:1 soil to vermicast mix. In fact, I placed them in self-watering mini pots I created.

Nuit Blanche is in 2 days, and the wheat grass is already 10 cm tall, 3 days after planting them and 5 days after starting the pre-germination treatment. In my Nuit Blanche exhibit, the grass display will illustrate how vermicast cycles nutrients from waste back into plants.

teaser about mini composting equipment in development

I am using a $12 crock pot to pre-compost food scraps, then feed it to worms. In 24 hours a mix of food scraps and earthworm casts placed in the crock pot turned to black material, indicating it’s breaking down. It smells like wet soil, and I’m working on controlling the smell. It stabilizes at 153F but I plant to reduce that temperature by changing the hot plate thermostat threshold. For thermophilic compost, the optimal temperature range is 135° -160° Fahrenheit.

New Texas legislation to promote urban farms

I learned about this via Linkedin’s Urban Agriculture group. Now if Toronto, then Beirut, then other cities passed the same bill!

“New Texas Legislation- Urban Farm Microenterprise Support Program:
House Bill 2994 amends the Agriculture Code to require the board of
directors of the Texas Agricultural Finance Authority to create an urban
farm microenterprise support program to provide financial assistance to
microenterprises in urban areas inside the boundaries of a municipality
with a population of 500,000 or more that are primarily engaged in
research into processes and technology related to agricultural
production in an urban setting, the production or development of tools
or processes for agriculture in a manner suited for an urban setting, or
agricultural activities in a manner suited for an urban setting. The
bill provides for the establishment and administration of the program
and sets out guidelines relating to the issuance of loans under the program.

House Bill 2994 prohibits state money from being used for purposes of
the urban farm microenterprise support program, but authorizes the board
to accept certain gifts and grants of money for use in making loans
under the program. The bill establishes the urban farm microenterprise
development fund for the deposit of money relating to the program.”

The cup that becomes a self-watering pot

The self-watering cup is the small answer to large sub-irrigated pots, so you can sprout seedlings or grow a small bunch of herbs on your counter. More is coming soon!

Most readers look at UFO’s website in the morning.

I looked at my website’s statistics, hosted on bluehost, and found that most of UFO’s readers check its site between 7 and 8 AM. On average about 10 times more page visits take place in that period of the day that any other. I never knew! I guess that’s a good time to send twitter updates as well.