Trevor van Hemert

We got a batch of isa browns and a batch of cornish cross meat birds on the same day. This is what they look like together at 3 weeks.

Hard to believe that these are the same species!

I've been brewing wine in small batches lately, right in the containers that I buy them from in the grocery store. This eliminates the need for most of the chemicals and equipment that are normally associated with winemaking.



I'd encourage anyone interested in getting into winemaking to try doing it this way first, as it only takes 5$ in equipment to get started and you can set a batch going in about a minute.



I wrote out the full tutorial at Five Gallon Ideas

I didn't find anyone talking about pig toys on this forum yet, so I'll share our experiences with keeping our pigs entertained.

A lot of forums recommend bowling balls, but they aren't so easy to find out in the country.

We accidentally discovered that a 5 gallon bucket makes a fantastic pig toy. And 5 gallon buckets are much easier to find.

For some reason, it keeps them entertained for hours. Here's the four of them fighting over an old laundry soap bucket.



I've got more detail and pictures in the toys for pigs article on my website.

Kevin,

I wish you the best luck starting up in Calgary! I'm actually living in Lloydminster right now, maybe I'll be in Calgary sometime in the next year and I'll see your progress

The other compost companies in Victoria took only vegetable matter, and they ran on trucks just like you. They are called Community Composting and Refuse.

There's one guy, Curtis Stone, in Kelowna who does the bicycle based compost pickup and takes only vegetables to my knowledge. I don't think he charges though..

And there's a company in Oregon as well, I don't remember their name but there's a video...

The contamination you've seen so far with your current 50 gallon drums is part of the biz in my experience... I usually leave plastic in to compost, and remove it after one or two flips when the compost is much more pleasant to work with.

-trevor

Yeah that's true, but we sell them so have to meet certain aesthetic standards. Eggs will still last more than a month when washed.

Here's a 5 gallon bucket DIY egg washer made from cheap materials. Linked article includes detailed pictures and video of it being tested.

I love five gallon buckets!

Recently I had to replace my chicken feeder and waterer since they were not big enough for the size of our chicken flock. I made sure to take lots of pictures of the process and write what I did and learned down online for all to see!

Five Gallon Chicken Feeder

Five Gallon Chicken Waterer

Five Gallon Nesting Boxes

Note: I haven't actually built any of the nesting boxes yet because the coop has plenty built in already. But it fit the 5 gallon chicken care theme.

Dale,

Could you get in touch with me? I live in Victoria BC and look for various scavenged stuff often. Right now I'm looking for brick or stone for an herb spiral I'm putting in on Vining.

Let me know

PedaltoPetal@gmail.com

-T

We live on Vancouver Island, where most of the trees are douglas fir. We have a good deal of these that have fallen and rotted on the forest soil over the last 100 years since this land has been logged last. I figured that the main reason to not use fir (since it doesn't rot well) is not valid if the wood is already very rotted.

The following picture is at about 70% of the final height of the hugelkultur. I erred very much on the side of taller rather than wider, since I expect to only tend this bed 4 or 5 times per growing season, since it's 50 miles north of my residence on my parents' 3 acres. I am hoping that the well-rotted wood will keep water through the summer months, which get far less rain here than the winter.

I've located the bed in a very wet low lying area, water flows 24/7 here during this part of the year. I dug down 1 foot which essentially created a pond up to ground level instantly. It will be interesting to see what happens to a hugelkultur that has its feet in water 6 months of the year.

Here we are dumping some gray clay on the hugelkultur. We have gray clay (almost blue) by the thousands of tons in this area. I am very much playing this by ear as far as design and materials go. The bed is probably 3 feet wide and 6 feet tall counting the part underground.

The tractor pictured here sunk into the mud all the way to the tops of the front wheels, since it is so wet here. We spent an hour digging it out and did not use it for the rest of the day.



Above is the completed hugelkultur bed. I layered with everything on the property I could get my hands on, in the following order: bluegray clay, a little sand, brown mud, charcoal from a burn pile (20% terra cotta from all the clay here), heavy chickenshit straw compost, paper feedsacks, dry straw from the property, more chickenshit straw mat, more dry straw, logs to keep the straw from blowing.

In the above picture, you can see the pool of muddy water from where we had to dig the tractor out. I'm leaving the pond there for now.

The chickens are always very excited when earth is being moved or torn up.

I hope to update this post in this thread as progress continues. I plan to grow indeterminant sauce tomatoes and possibly basil here.

Hi folks, Trevor from Pedal to Petal here. I wanted to respond to some of the revenue statements to clear up any misconceptions.

First, our base price is the cheapest composting option in the city. We manage this by maintaining very spartan infrastructure, everything is done by hand on free-to-use backyards and community gardens. The statement that people "pay more because they support the way it's done" is only partially true.

Second, Pedal to Petal could switch to a different revenue source if the economic climate changed so that people wouldn't pay to take their food scraps away anymore. We could sell vermicompost (worth up to 900$/tonne), soil mix, or even use the compost to grow vegetables for market (Curtis Stone of Kelowna runs a free version of Pedal to Petal, and sells salad greens for his primary revenue.)

Third, the "sliding scale" payment model isn't ideal, but we only offer this to our residential clients - office lunch rooms get charged a fixed rate. Since the bounds of the sliding scale make sense price-wise, we average smack dab in the middle. I've seen fundraising dances where the price is $20 to $2 million, which is just kidding yourself. If they set their price to $20 - $35, I think they would average higher per ticket sold, since both boundary prices are realistic.

Fourth, we barter sometimes as well, and I barter with my website business as well. In exchange for bucket pickups, we have so far traded painting work and radio advertising. I've exchanged bucket drop-offs for a packaged red wriggler compost worms. For the web company, I've exchanged work for a CSA-style food subscription.

Fifth, on the podcast where Pedal to Petal was mentioned, the hosts talk about using the food scraps to feed chickens. We actually do this with a chicken flock share model I've developed called the "chicken trust" - where duties for a medium sized flock are shared among shareholders.

In conclusion, I believe this model really can work almost anywhere - but you may have to toy with how you generate cash flow. We do what works for our community, your results may vary. I'm happy to help anyone start a Pedal to Petal clone up in their city, just shoot me an email! pedaltopetal@gmail.com

- Trevor