What's Going on at BCSCD

Today’s problems cannot be solved if we still think the way we thought when we created them. – Albert Einstein

            Butterfly Madness

Butterflies, butterflies everywhere!  As you walk up to the Burlington County Soil Conservation District’s office, you will notice the beauty that is now our Butterfly Garden.  Look closely and you will observe the elegance of a monarch butterfly soaring in and out of the multiple colors of the cone flowers and around an astonishing display of cardinal flowers, only to land on the brilliance of a milkweed or golden rod plant.  Walking towards the hibiscus you may notice a bumble bee collecting pollen to disperse throughout the garden.  With summer ending, the butterflies will be moving on, so take some time and see the exquisiteness of the Burlington County Soil Conservation District’s Butterfly Garden.          

      Best Cool Season Grasses

On average, these climates have cold winters and warm/hot summers. Usually they also have regular intervals of rain throughout the summer months, but grasses will tolerate some extended periods of draught by going dormant. Typical cool season grass types include:

Bentgrass Bluegrass(KY) Bluegrass (rgh) Fescue(red) Ryegrass(ann) Ryegrass(per)

Typical Transition Zone Grasses

There is a “transition zone” between northern and southern turfgrass regions, which follows the lower elevations of Virginia and North Carolina west through West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas and includes parts of southern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Kansas. In this transition zone, neither Warm Season nor Cool Season type grasses are uniformly successful. However, several of the Cool Season type grasses such as Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass and tall fescue, do well across Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Missouri. Tall fescue is the best choice in Tennessee, North Carolina, northern Georgia, northern Alabama and the Texas panhandle. In the lower elevations of these latter states Warm Season grasses do well too. Typical grass types suitable for the Transition Zone include:

Bluegrass(KY) Fescue (tall) Ryegrass(per) Thermal Blue Zoysia

Warm Season Type Grasses

In some ways, growing and maintaining a good-looking lawn in the South is more involved than for northern homeowners. Choosing a grass type is trickier; many turf grass varieties do much better when started as plugs or sod than from seed, as is usually done with Cool Season turf-type grasses. Good soil is critically important for growing a low maintenance lawn in this region. Most all Warm Season grass types will turn brown when cooler temperatures arrive. Some southern gardeners seed their existing lawns with ryegrass each fall to maintain green color during the winter months. This is called “winter overseeding.”

Maintaining ideal growing conditions for your particular grass type is critical, otherwise unwanted grass varieties will start popping up and will be extremely difficult to remove. For example, St. Augustine grass being invaded by Bermuda and vice versa.

Typical Warm Season grass types include:

Bahia Bermuda Buffalo Carpet Centipede St. Augustine Zoysia

Energy Conservation in Your Home

"When the well's dry, we know the worth of water."
- Benjamin Franklin, (1706-1790), Poor Richard's Almanac.

The picture below will provide energy efficiency and renewable energy ideas for your everyday life provided by the U.S. Department of Energy.  Please take a moment to see how we all can do our part in a clean future. 

Things People May Not Know About Southern New Jersey

The eight-county region is home to:

 The second-highest yielding fishing industry on the East Coast

An under-utilized, high-capacity international airport near Atlantic City

The South Jersey Port Corp., which continues to set records for cargo handled with tonnage exceeding 3.1 million bulk cargo up 73%, break-bulk cargo (e.g. steel, fruit, wood and cocoa) up 6% and ship days at the port up 12%

A sizeable land bank that includes more than 480,000 developable acres

A hard-working labor force of more than 1,177,000 workers

Four colleges and universities offering four-year degrees, including Rutgers-Camden, Rowan University, Richard Stockton State College and Georgian Court College, as well as community colleges serving all eight counties.

Exciting recreational opportunities, including more than 200,000 acres of open space and; the 110,017 acre Wharton State Forest, the largest single tract of land within the New Jersey State Park System.

The New Jersey Redevelopment Authority may have redevelopment opportunities in your neighborhood, please check if your township is eligible in the redevelopment project by click here.

Redevelopment of contaminated properties in New Jersey's urban areas is pivotal to the success of Smart Growth efforts in New Jersey.  The New Jersey Redevelopment Authority's Environmental Equity Program (E²P) advances these efforts by providing the up-front capital to assist with the predevelopment stage of a brownfields redevelopment project.  Brownfields are former or current commercial or industrial sites presently abandoned, vacant or underutilized, and on which there has been or is suspected to have been a discharge of contaminants. 

 The E²P funds will assist with site acquisition, remediation and demolition costs of brownfields redevelopment projects in NJRA eligible municipalities. 

Criteria

• Project is located in a NJRA-eligible municipality

• Site is a component of a redevelopment plan

• Scope and timeline of remediation is known

• How existing funding sources for pre-development and development are leveraged

• Remediation plan for brownfields site shall be subject to the approval of the Department of Environmental Protection, and the State Treasurer

Use of Funds

• Acquisition/Acquisition related costs

• Planning/Predevelopment

• Remediation (no responsible party is available to remediate site)

• Demolition

 

Composting Fundamentals

Good composting is a matter of providing the proper environmental conditions for microbial life. Compost is made by billions of microbes (fungi, bacteria, etc.) that digest the yard and kitchen wastes (food) you provide for them. If the pile is cool enough, worms, insects, and their relatives will help out the microbes. All of these will slowly make compost out of your yard and kitchen wastes under any conditions. However, like people, these living things need air, water, and food. If you maintain your pile to provide for their needs, they'll happily turn your yard and kitchen wastes into compost much more quickly. Keep in mind the following basic ideas while building your compost piles:

 

How does compost improve the soil?

Compost does several things to benefit the soil that synthetic fertilizers cannot do. First, it adds organic matter, which improves the way water interacts with the soil. In sandy soils, compost acts as a sponge to help retain water in the soil that would otherwise drain down below the reach of plant roots (in this way, it protects plants against drought). In clay soils, compost helps to add porosity (tiny holes and passageways) to the soil, making it drain more quickly so that it doesn't stay waterlogged and doesn't dry out into a bricklike substance. Compost also inoculates the soil with vast numbers of beneficial microbes (bacteria, fungi, etc.) and the habitat that the microbes need to live. These microbes are able to extract nutrients from the mineral part of the soil and eventually pass the nutrients on to plants.

AIR

Composting microbes are aerobic -- they can't do their work well unless they are provided with air. Without air, anaerobic (non-air needing) microbes take over the pile. They do cause slow decomposition, but tend to smell like putrefying garbage! For this reason, it's important to make sure that there are plenty of air passageways into your compost pile. Some compost ingredients, such as green grass clippings or wet leaves, mat down very easily into slimy layers that air cannot get through. Other ingredients, such as straw, don't mat down easily and are very helpful in allowing air into the center of a pile. To make sure that you have adequate aeration for your pile and its microbes, thoroughly break up or mix in any ingredients that might mat down and exclude air. You can also turn the pile to get air into it, which means completely breaking it apart with a spade or garden fork and then piling it back together in a more 'fluffed-up' condition.

WATER

Ideally, your pile should be as moist as a wrung-out sponge to fit the needs of compost microbes. At this moisture level, there is a thin film of water coating every particle in the pile, making it very easy for microbes to live and disperse themselves throughout the pile. If your pile is drier than this, it won't be very good microbial habitat, and composting will be slowed significantly. If your pile is a great deal wetter, the sodden ingredients will be so heavy that they will tend to mat down and exclude air from the pile, again slowing the composting process (and perhaps creating anaerobic odor problems). If you are using dry ingredients, such as autumn leaves or straw, you'll need to moisten them as you add them to the pile. Kitchen fruit and vegetable wastes generally have plenty of moisture, as do fresh green grass clippings and garden thinnings. Watch out for far-too-soggy piles in wet climates (a tarp may help to keep rain off during wet weather). In dry climates, it may be necessary to water your pile occasionally to maintain proper moisture.

FOOD

In broad terms, there are two major kinds of food that composting microbes need.

'Browns' are dry and dead plant materials such as straw, dry brown weeds, autumn leaves, and wood chips or sawdust. These materials are mostly made of chemicals that are just long chains of sugar molecules linked together. As such, these items are a source of energy for the compost microbes. Because they tend to be dry, browns often need to be moistened before they are put into a compost system.

'Greens' are fresh (and often green) plant materials such as green weeds from the garden, kitchen fruit and vegetable scraps, green leaves, coffee grounds and tea bags, fresh horse manure, etc. Compared to browns, greens have more nitrogen in them. Nitrogen is a critical element in amino acids and proteins, and can be thought of as a protein source for the billions of multiplying microbes.

A good mix of browns and greens is the best nutritional balance for the microbes. This mix also helps out with the aeration and amount of water in the pile. Browns, for instance, tend to be bulky and promote good aeration. Greens, on the other hand, are typically high in moisture, and balance out the dry nature of the browns. If you'd like specific information on different materials, check the 'What to Compost' section.

OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER

If you live in a cold climate, your compost pile will probably go dormant in the winter. No problem -- it'll start back up again when the springtime thaw comes.

A common misunderstanding about compost piles is that they must be hot to be successful. This just isn't true. If you have good aeration and moisture, and the proper ingredient mix, your pile will decompose just fine at temperatures of 50 degrees Farenheit or above.

Hotter piles will decompose a bit faster, however. One way to understand why this is so is to realize that the heat in a hot pile is the result of the collective body heat of billions of microbes that are busy digesting the ingredients in the pile. Generally speaking, a hotter pile means more microbes or conditions that allow the microbes to have faster metabolisms, and therefore a faster composting process. If you'd like to keep your pile as warm as possible, consider the following:

For a pile to get hot and stay hot for a long period of time, the typical minimum size for the pile is one cubic meter (a cube one meter, or about three feet, on a side). A pile this size has plenty of mass in which those billions of heat-generating microbes can live, yet is also large enough that the center of the pile is well-insulated by the material surrounding it. Smaller piles just cannot insulate themselves well enough to remain hot for long, if at all. You can also provide additional insulation to a pile by stacking bales of hay or straw, or bags of dry autumn leaves, around your bin system. Some people even used stacked hay bales to make bin systems

Click here for a list on what to compost!!

The above article was brought to you by http://vegweb.com/composting/