Garden Greenhorns: Round and Round It Goes

an update from Garden Greenhorn and AmeriCorps VISTA Kelsey Grant

Now, I know that you can reuse certain things, but over and over? I’m not familiar with this concept for straw. Straw is vitally important to the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture’s Urban Farm. This straw has many purposes. The main lesson that I got from this week was the continuous cycles and reuse of materials.

For example, we got one bed completely ready for transplanting by removing the straw that was on top of it. The straw is then transported to an area of the farm to be later reused. Some of the uses for this straw include covering up the compost piles, laying it down in the chicken bed, or using it on the beds in the garden in the future.

Some of the straw that we take off of the beds goes inside the chicken coop. The chickens then can eat some of the insects or bugs that are inside the straw. The straw then is collected and put into our compost bin to further decompose, thus bringing this straw a full circle in all of its different ways we can use it at the farm.

This concept of using and reusing different materials struck me like a lightning bolt. Working in the farm atmosphere, I had the mentality of using everything over and over again, but never had considered straw.

Imagine if we could use this method of re-purposing on everything?!