Closing the Cycle
9:25:00 PMIn my efforts to "reduce, reuse, recycle" and "go green", I decided to close the cycle on a couple of processes in my garden. First, the ducks require high amounts of calcium and other minerals to create those fabulous egg shells each day. But, those lovely egg shells come already loaded with the perfect combination of vitamins and minerals in them. So, why not dry, crush (and bake them to kill any microorganisms) and feed them back to the ducks for the next round? Instead of throwing the shells away, or composting them, I'm simply feeding them back through the cycle to become a shell anew.
Second, my garden produces a lot of spent material. It was mostly going to the landfill, until last year when I paid for a subscription for a green waste can. I stuffed the can nearly every week with a wide variety of compostable materials. But, I decided that was not a good thing. It was expensive and I got nothing back from it (such as the rich compost the green waste was made into.) Then I was spending a lot of time and money hauling back in compost for the garden and bedding for the ducks. How inefficient!
Over this winter, I decided to finally take the plunge and buy a small, but decent chipper/shredder, and send away that green waste can, and create another closed cycle in my yard. Plants create waste, waste shreds to mulch, ducks compost the mulch with rich droppings, compost feeds plants. Tada! Take some help from nature.
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