hiya from the PNW (western Washington)

Hi everybody! Pretty new to any kind of homesteading, starting simple recently with some basic composting. Hoping to learn more, gradually, over the years. This seems like a good place for that, with many years of information here. I may be more of a lurker than a poster, but I do hope to socialize with some kindred spirits. Oh, and I'm a middle-aged male, for whatever that information's worth. lol.

Welcome to Permies!

Composting is a great place to start in my opinion. You can be as creative or as simple as you want when creating it and still have a useful product in the end. I appreciate composting for the waste diversion aspect.

Welcome to the forum!

I would say you are off to a great start.

Folks here love to answer question so be sure to ask away.

Thanks Timothy!

Yeah, composting has been a lot of fun so far. It was cool seeing so many different ways to do it and picking an approach that feels natural to me and easy to implement. I drilled a bunch of holes in a 32 gallon trash can and started adding stuff. Most recent challenge to solve was getting a suitable tool to use for stirring up the material in these early stages - for now I'm using a piece of rebar, lol, until I decide to splurge on a much more expensive fork (if I even do . . . I like the rebar, honestly).

As for the waste diversion, totally, I probably won't even have to put out my trash bin for collection this week.

Thank you too, Anne! I appreciate the positivity. I used to mine the mountain of old reddit posts for information when I had questions. I imagine I'll start searching & asking questions here instead.

Welcome J! I grew up in Western Washington and similar to my area now of NW California, it is a great place to use hugelkulture (woody debris filled raised beds) and decentralized water retention. If you are interested in the water cycle and catchment restoration, waterstories.com is another great community of similarly kind folks to permies, with a focus on water. Our west coast forests are the key to water cycle restoration for the entire continent, and restoring water retention so they can make it to a fire resistant age is critical to doing so.

Best of luck, and let us know how we can help!

Here is an idea about compost bin made of recycled can. I did not make this, but took these pictures a few years ago at a feed store in town.

Notice how the whole thing sits on these rollers, for easy turning.

Thanks Ben, fellow PNWer! I'm intrigued by hugelkulture; I was looking it up briefly earlier after seeing it mentioned somewhere on this site. It's an idea I'll probably return to down the road.

Decentralized water retention sounds like something I'll want to work on sooner. (Maybe the ideas are related?) Thanks so much for mentioning it and giving the link. Being in such a rainy area, I've wondered about how I might use that in a homestead-y kind of productive way. I recall hearing something years ago about the city being kind of cranky about residents keeping rain barrels, but a quick google search tells me that they actually encourage it. So that's nice. Anyway, I'm definitely interested in projects I can do on my little plot of land that will benefit the wider area (like right now working on planting lots of wildflowers in my yard to attract and support pollinators), so doing something that might play a part in benefitting the entire continent, well that's pretty exciting. Much for me to learn. Thanks again

Liv (another fellow PNWer!), that looks awesome! Thanks for sharing that. That'd be a lot of fun to have and even to put together. Looks well within my limited construction abilities, lol. The easy turning is very appealing, and it'd be nice to try a different method of composting and sorta compare/contrast. I'll remember this and start keeping an eye out for the supplies to put this project together.

Welcome, from your neighbour to the south, also in zone 8b

Hey Riona! So many Pacific Northwesterners here!

Welcome to Permies, from the opposite coast!

    In these forums I've been applauded through the tiniest victories.  I've found sympathy with "failures" big and small and learned that they aren't really failures:  I tried but oops!  What can I learn from this?
    The best part?  I found a bunch of really cool (and kind) people that help each other along the way!
     Again, welcome to the adventure!

Thanks for the welcome, Susan, and the perspective on the community here

Small victories keep me going.