Queens Farm Composters

The project is a volunteer-based project managed primarily by two Master Composters, with advice and guidance from staff of the Queens County Farm Museum. Our goal is to provide an interactive/educational food waste drop off location in Far East Queens and to provide the Queens County Farm with an abundance of high quality vermicompost.. The tumblers are part of a larger project which aim to meet two

complimentary goals:

 

a- Connect visitors to the Queens County Farm Museum in direct and meaningful way, and to provide a drop off location for others who live in far eastern queens. Through outreach, we encourage visitors & local residents to bring their vegetable and fruit scraps with them on their visit to the farm. Visitors learn about composting by directly incorporating their food scraps into the tumblers. We also provide information about composting at home using vermicomposting during our tabling days at the farm.

 

b-

Our second goal is to produce high quality vermicompost for use at the farm. Our compost system replicates some elements of creative neighborhood composting projects such as the Added-Value’s Community Compost model: After some initial decomposition, the materials are introduced into the tumblers are transferred into worm bins to create vermicompost.

What we have done so far:

 

With your help of some of you awesome donors, we were able to raise a total of 250 dollars. With this money, we purchased a durable, high capacity tumbler.

 

Before setting up the tumbler, our friends from the farm employed the sheep to clear out the compost area. We then laid down a horseshoe path around the compost area using woodchips to make the area more attractive and accessible to passer-byres.

 

Also throughout the season we tabled by the vegetable stand to let people know what we are doing and encouraged them to bring their kitchen scraps to the farm during their visits. Through our tabling efforts we have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of compostable materials being brought to the farm. Prior to our project, the farm received approximately 20lbs per week of compostables. Currently the farm receives on average 60lbs of veggie and fruit scraps per week. That's a lot of important nutrients kept out of the waste-stream! The farm now accepts kitchen scraps year-round.

 

What we are planning to do:

 

We need to raise money for a total of 800 dollars for our next phase of the compost project. The Queens Farm Compost Project is expanding!

 

This spring, we are pulling the all the stops- we are going to transform the Queens Farm into a truly exciting, interactive compost drop-off location for residents of Little Neck and visitors to the farm. We are adding additional tumblers, adding outdoor vermicompost boxes and making fun and informative signage. We need money for: 

 

1-Purchase of two additional urban composter 9 cubic ft tumbers- 250 each

 

2- lumber, insulation and heating element for outdoor vermicompost boxes- 300 dollars.

 

 

We are passionate about composting and can’t wait to turn others on to composting too! We also love the farm and know that many of its regular visitors love it too. We want to offer them new ways of connecting to the farm- and we believe that community composting can do that. So many of us feel bummed out when we see how much organic matter is lost to landfills in our ecologically unsustainable system. We feel grateful that places like the Queens Farm Museum exist, and look at them as “incubators” for the sustainable future that we must create.