How to recycle the green waste?

[Rebena]

I have a small vegetable garden at my home and I am struggling to manage the green waste. I wonder how people manage the waste. I have a bag of leaves and tree branches. I am planning to hire some garbage removal services near Ontario. Heard about Junk works (https://www.junk-works.ca/ ) and seems the reviews are also good. Do I need to hire them or does anyone have any other suggestions? Read that green wastes can be recycled. Would like to know about how green wastes can be recycled?

[JayPoc]

If you can find an unused corner of your yard, you can make a compost pile. Do a little research on composting. It really can be as simple as piling up the waste as you generate it, being sure to mix in both "browns" and "greens" when you can, and then turning it ever so often with a shovel or fork. Not only do you keep you waste out of the local landfill, but you get a rich soil amendment in return.

[tomc]

A tower composter aided by some anvil pruners can make small work of yard waste.

[rainbowgardener]

RE: " I am planning to hire some garbage removal services near Ontario. "

No, no, no! All that green waste is valuable stuff for your garden! It is nutrients that the trees/ plants have taken from the soil and you want to give it back to the soil.

Recycling green waste is called composting -- breaking it back down into the nutrients. We have a whole section on composting here: https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=35 Please read the composting basics and composting 101 threads. You will see it is easy to do.

You will want to separate out leaves, from tree branches (I don't mean pulling leaves off the branches, just the fallen/ raked leaves). The leaves are piled up with green wastes (plant trimmings, pulled weeds, grass clippings, kitchen scraps) in a compost pile and will break down in a few months to a lovely nutrient rich soil amendment "compost." The branches will be much slower to break down and can be piled separately in a brush pile.

I use a little chipper shredder about like this:



to chew up small branches into mulch. It is lightweight, easily portable, electric, and cheap. It only does small branches, up to maybe an inch in diameter or so. The rest is firewood. The chipped up branches can be mulch (saves you buying wood chips and you know they don't have a bunch of chemicals added) or can then go into the compost pile.

[Rebena]

Thank you so much . Great thought.

[Gary350]

I throw green stuff out in the sun to dry then I burn it with sticks and dead tree limbs. Ash makes great fertilizer for the garden especially good for BER in, tomatoes, squash, peppers, melons. The more ash I can save for spring planting the better the garden does. I collect free old lumber on Craigslist with nails to burn also. I put about 20 rusty nails in the soil under tomato plants in the spring iron is good to help prevent blight. Rusty water is good to spray on tomatoes for blight. I don't do compose anymore too much work for what little I get, I can buy a pickup truck load of compose $15 at the garden center. It is hard for me to burn anything directly in the garden spring or fall we have too much rain.

[jal_ut]

Green waste? What's that?

Here any leftovers get put back out on the garden. The worms can work on it, then in the fall it gets tilled in.

[rainbowgardener]

sigh... Gary and I have this discussion all the time.

Wouldn't be my recommendation. 1) Drying and burning you are consuming a lot of the nutrients that could otherwise go in your soil. 2) ash is very alkaline. If your soil is very acidic and needs "liming," then the ash might be good for it. For most of us that isn't true, since vegetables like their soil a little on the acidic side anyway.

I do low energy composting, hardly any work. Just pile stuff up and let it compost. I don't turn it, except to turn it over. I just keep adding more stuff on top of the pile. After it's been working for at least a couple months (in warm weather, more in cooler), I turn the top of the pile over to be the bottom of a new pile, down to the level where the earthworms are and where the stuff is mostly composted. Then I stir that around. Exposed to more air and stirred it finishes composting quickly. So other than throwing the compostables on as they come (and always covering "greens" with "browns" - if you read the composting basics threads you know what that means), I only mess with the compost piles once every two or three months. I get a pretty continuous supply of compost that way, enough for my small-ish garden.

[imafan26]

I have also done trench composting. I just dug a trench, put all of the leaves and branches chopped up in the pit. I put some nitrogent fertilizer on it, watered it well and covered it up. It takes a while to compost but it does work. When it is done the ground will sink and it will be ready for another load or planting.

[Gary350]

I could use one of those chipper shredder machine for my corn stalks. Corn stalks are the only thing I have trouble getting rid of. I wonder if it works good for corn stalks? It would be nice to chop corn stalks into tiny pieces then till them right into the soil. Other garden plants dry up in the sun and get tilled into the soil. I have a lot of tree limbs to burn, tomatoes, peppers, squash, melons, all need a small amount of wood ash for BER. Potatoes need wood ash too. The rest of the wood ash makes good lye soap. I started making lye soap 3 years ago this soap is actually very good, I like it better than store bought soap. Tree service is coming next week to cut down some of these trees. It cost less to get trees cut down than hauled away.

[gumbo2176]

Not only do I recycle mine, I go out and look for more to use. I've been hitting the big cemetery near my house and taking the grass clippings the landscapers leave behind and bring them home to spread in my garden. So far I've put in close to 20 large bags of clippings over the top of the soil, let it dry out and then tilled it under. When fall hits I'll grab as many bags of oak leaves as I can get and spread that in there too. By then my rows will be made and planted with the fall crop, the pathways between the rows will have a nice layer of cardboard and then I'll toss the leaves on top of that to compost over the winter months and till it in when spring hits.

It's an ongoing cycle I've been doing for years.

[Gary350]

Not only do I recycle mine, I go out and look for more to use. I've been hitting the big cemetery near my house and taking the grass clippings the landscapers leave behind and bring them home to spread in my garden. So far I've put in close to 20 large bags of clippings over the top of the soil, let it dry out and then tilled it under. When fall hits I'll grab as many bags of oak leaves as I can get and spread that in there too. By then my rows will be made and planted with the fall crop, the pathways between the rows will have a nice layer of cardboard and then I'll toss the leaves on top of that to compost over the winter months and till it in when spring hits. It's an ongoing cycle I've been doing for years.

When I was younger and has lots of energy I use to have the city bring me 6 large trucks of compose material every fall. The city has vacuum cleaner trucks that drive around town and suck up all the tree leaves people rake to the street. The city has to drive 12 miles round trip to dump it at the land fill it saves them 6 trips to dump 6 loads in my garden. The compactor truck pushes the leaves out into my garden it is 4 feet deep, 7 feet wide, about 30 feet long after it is dumped. 6 loads are 42 x 32 x 4. That stuff produces its own heat even when covered with snow in winter cold weather by spring it looks like 15 inches of potting soil. I use to spread it 40 x 80 feet to cover the whole garden then till it in. Check with the town where you live see if you can get compose material delivered to your garden.

[Rebena]

Thank you guys for your great time.

[Rebena]

I have also done trench composting. I just dug a trench, put all of the leaves and branches chopped up in the pit. I put some nitrogent fertilizer on it, watered it well and covered it up. It takes a while to compost but it does work. When it is done the ground will sink and it will be ready for another load or planting.

Sounds great.

[gumbo2176]

When I was younger and has lots of energy I use to have the city bring me 6 large trucks of compose material every fall. The city has vacuum cleaner trucks that drive around town and suck up all the tree leaves people rake to the street. The city has to drive 12 miles round trip to dump it at the land fill it saves them 6 trips to dump 6 loads in my garden. The compactor truck pushes the leaves out into my garden it is 4 feet deep, 7 feet wide, about 30 feet long after it is dumped. 6 loads are 42 x 32 x 4. That stuff produces its own heat even when covered with snow in winter cold weather by spring it looks like 15 inches of potting soil. I use to spread it 40 x 80 feet to cover the whole garden then till it in. Check with the town where you live see if you can get compose material delivered to your garden.

I just wish my city had such environmental concerns as to do such things, but it doesn't. We are lucky to have a recycling program going on and twice a week garbage pick-up. New Orleans is not that progressive or environmentally conscious, unfortunately. We do have the idiots that cut their grass or clean their front lawns and blow the clippings and leaves into the streets so it eventually works its way back to the curb and into the drainage system that carries away our plentiful rainfall. Then these same people wonder why their streets are flooding. Go figure. Idiots.

[rainbowgardener]

Re going out and finding more "green waste" to bring home. In my previous location, I didn't have a lot of trees that dropped leaves, at least not where I could get to them. So every fall when people started putting bags of leaves at the curb for pick up, I would drive around the neighborhood and "steal" bags of leaves, to be "browns" in my compost pile. I would collect up to a dozen big bags of leaves and stockpile them and then just gradually feed them into my compost pile, each time I added green stuff. A dozen bags would last me for composting and mulching until the following summer. Usually I would end up buying a bale of straw around June to get me through until the leaves started falling again.

[Gary350]

These days I would be afraid to put other peoples green grass waste on my garden it seems like everyone puts weed kill on their yard. I do not want any toxic cancer causing poison in my garden.

[rainbowgardener]

It's not grass, it's all fallen leaves. I don't think anybody much sprays their big old trees.

[gumbo2176]

It's not grass, it's all fallen leaves. I don't think anybody much sprays their big old trees.

Here in New Orleans, 2 trees do tend to get sprayed more so than any others and those are the pecan trees and oak trees. The pecans to help keep web worms at bay and the oaks to kill buck moth caterpillars which are very fond of falling out of the trees and stinging the hell out of people. Their sting is very painful and the area I live in has streets lined with oaks. The city won't spray, but it is not unheard of for some homeowner's to spray the trees lining the streets outside their homes to help with the problem.

[Rebena]

Thank you so much for your time guys.