Tuesday this week, we learned the definition of a Farmer's Tan. It was 80, we had shovels, and we had work to do. First we had to move two pickup truck loads of wood chips from one site to another. With just shovels and people. After loading and unloading woodchips from our friend's pick up truck, we needed to turn our pile. Woodchips are good "brown matter" for our compost pile. Brown matter is a carbon source that helps balance the C:N ratio of a compost pile. Woodchips just happen to be really accessible so we use those. Next we had to plug in the generator and power the water source to water our pile. You know, moisture levels and such. It was a lot easier than when Jason showed us. We just got information the He is no longer working for the community garden and can't really help us, he has his own farm to manage. Sad but cool for him. After we got the generator working, we took all the bags of garbage (from the Alumni weekend they INSISTED on composting but it was actually all garbage) and put them in the truck and took them to some dumpsters. Well done, alumni weekend. thanks for playing, try again next year. We got out pile turned, watered, and covered, and we decided to break for lunch. And by lunch I mean showers. Lots of shower.
The afternoon was spent planning on what we would do for the rest of the week. We also came up with a list of all of the components of our plan for the Fall Semester. It's pretty thorough, but it has to be or we won't be very successful. It includes:
1) Pick food waste stream (Rathbone, Brodhead?, Cort?, off campus?)
2) Collection (5 gal buckets, 40 gallon buckets, compostable bags, student collection, Sodexo, Brickman/ABM)
3) Transportation (Lehigh does NOT have trucks or frontloaders...(Brickman?) student hauling (Amber?), outside contractor (aliens?))
4) Added to the pile (students, sustainability interns, LUPD, Brickman?, outside contractor
5)Management of the pile (Student, sustainability interns, outside contractor, labor, management -->us, science --> us)
6) Curing (see transportation)
7)Use - Brickman(figure out permitting)
granted some of these are jokes, we have a lot more expanding to do on these subjects. We plan on doing that on Wednesday.
GR2OW Stands for Green Resource Recovery of Waste, and that's just what our project is. We will be researching composting and its implementation, and our long-term goal is to implement a composting facility on Lehigh University's campus. Here is where we will be posting our project's process, pictures, ideas, etc. to keep everyone updated. Team Members: Alec Entress - Junior Aly Lang - Junior Tori Weidorn - Sophomore Ben Cicchillo - Sophomore
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