Star City Compost

09/03/2024

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/k1eTRvgcB3X6Hz8S/?

http://gardenvarietyharvests.com/tickets

08/30/2024

Some photos of our food waste processing. 😉

08/23/2024

Hi folks- click to learn some important lessons about plastics in our lives and how we all should be supporting laws that create extended producer responsibility. Thanks for your work Sustainable Roanoke!

https://roanokeoutside.com/5-questions-with-sustainable-roanoke/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0XDK0hCelqNUJzBVgD1gZFFwv3VS55U0UIinohYSKPPlgdGSE3oE_I9Co_aem__MM5xoUnP7Zs4bfdG1N3ug

Sustainable Roanoke is a grassroots environmental group with a mission to educate, inspire, and empower the community to achieve a sustainable lifestyle by sharing knowledge, increasing awareness, pooling resources, and promoting social equity. Since its […]

08/19/2024

Working in compost stinks. From freelance journalist Ralph Berrier Jr., learn about Star City Compost, a new company that takes food waste from Roanoke residents and businesses and converts it into clean compost that will soon be available for sale.

Story link in comments. Free to read.

08/16/2024

We got jokes.

08/14/2024

There was a great article written about us in the Roanoke Rambler today. Give it a read and learn a little more about our company.

If you haven’t yet, sign up for service or suggest us to friends. Food waste shouldn’t be thrown away! It should be turned into compost for local farmers and gardeners.

07/24/2024

We had Blue Ridge PBS out today to film an educational video about compost and decomposers today. We also got Star City Compost T-shirts in stock today. And I met a praying mantis friend.

07/10/2024

We had another great visit with ’s Explorer’s camp. Today we learned about harvesting plant medicine from the garden. Our superstar kids were introduced to the superstar plants calendula, blue vervain, chamomile, passionflower, and yarrow. I’m grateful to introduce the next generation to some of these great plant medicines.

07/09/2024

We’ve got a new gate over our rain garden. Michael special made the sunrise over the gate with an arch from an Osage orange branch.

07/04/2024

Check out the new Star City Compost and Harvest collective newsletter.

Star City Compost and The Harvest Collective are two businesses working under the same leadership to provide opportunities for people to garner a more direct relationship with our local ecology. The intention is to build cooperatively owned structures that provide food, fight climate change, and enh...

07/03/2024

It is my genuine belief that access to work on land to grow food and create medicine is a human right. Over the course of the past 5 centuries, we have seen a barbaric stealing of this right away from people worldwide. Before mass industrialization and urbanization, if you were to ask any person from any culture, worldwide, they would agree that access to land is synonymous with access to create your own food, livelihood, and hack out an existence for your family. Still many people live this way across our globe and I honor their humility as a paramount solution to climate change and privatization of critical resources.

This awareness, combined with the pressing need to do something besides begging the government for action, led to the creation of The Harvest Collective. Over the course of my many years pursuing this dream it has always been community centered and ecologically driven. My desire is to create a container for people to enter into so that we can, together, can design, play, work, and collaborate in creating ecological resources controlled by the community who put the work in. Through these efforts, we are generating a culture resilient to a potential collapse due to political instability, inflation, corporate greed, climate change, and/or mass human migrations from other unstable regions. Regardless of whether you believe a collapse is imminent or not, taking the steps to humble ourselves to the earth and potential to work in community makes us healthier, safer, and happier.

In a society predicated on transactional and monetized relationships, pharmaceutical companies, energy companies, big banks, and the politicians beholden to them hold more influence over your beliefs than the very nature of your being in relation to your natural environment. It is clear to me that we need to figure out how ecological abundance can be shared by the general community without making money the barrier to entry nor the complete basis of our exchange. I truly believe that becoming “free” requires a release of these paradigms and a rebirth into the appreciation of all the natural world has to offer if we tend properly to it.

I do not believe we are capable of transcending money, nor the structures of a society meant to benefit the most wealthy. The Harvest Collective is a container within general society that can support itself financially, so that more people in our community can garner access to work with land and to enjoy the literal fruits of their labor without money being a barrier to entry.

With 3 ½ more years left on a lease on hand, many plants and planting areas already established, a burgeoning business to support our access to land in Star City Compost, and a number of years experience spent learning lessons organizing this type of community, The Harvest Collective is poised to deliver on this promise. We have created and drafted a system of grassroots democratic governance through our LLC operating agreement. With time put in, you too have access to propose projects and help steer the ship of this community should you desire to. We do not exist to force ideas through the power of bureaucracy, but rather to empower and embolden all of our creativity to create more abundance, fertility, and nourishment from the land.

Come learn more about how you can be involved in our organization, as well as learn about the timebank for food and plant medicine program we are going to open up this fall, at our upcoming social and quarterly meeting on July 14, 2- 6:30 PM at the compost facility property - 2051 Blue Hills Dr NE.

07/02/2024

There was a great article about the state of composting in the United States published by . I appreciate the optimistic outlook that food waste recycling is set for a boom in the next 5-10 years. But if we as Virginians, or Roanokers, want to see that happen we need legislation and key policy put in place at the state and local level. I believe composting is the basis of people building ecology which is why I pursued this business. Society and government needs to catch up and educate themselves on the benefits of large scale, not just backyard composting.

Consumer interest in waste composting is picking up given climate and farming benefits, but national numbers remains very low, decades behind recycling.

06/28/2024

We were on the news yesterday!

ROANOKE, Va. (WFXR)– All the Dirt: Composting returns nutrients to the soil

06/27/2024

Today on there was an injection of laughter between the headlines of a murder trial and the upcoming presidential debate. It was fun to be interviewed again as a part of the “All the Dirt” segment. Watch the segment and see how well I represented for the smallest participant in our soil ecology - the microbes.

https://www.wfxrtv.com/news/all-the-dirt/all-the-dirt-composting-returns-nutrients-to-the-soil/

06/26/2024

I had a fantastic time hosting the Explorers camp through Roanoke Parks and Receeation this morning. We did a tour of the compost facility with lessons on gardening, native plants, ecological diversity, and of course composting. Then we put together a worm bin with students digging for worms in the bottom of our compost education trailer.

I have been an ecological educator for youth and adults for years. It brings me joy to find a home where I can teach about many of the elements critical to ecological literacy and resiliency. I worked hard to create this space and it’s not just for me!

I am available for field trips at the facility or to visit schools with the compost education trailer. Please reach out!

06/23/2024

And… We’re cooking. Goodbye w**d seeds, goodbye pathogens from food scraps. This is why big piles are better than backyard piles.

06/21/2024

It’s hott at the compost facility today! But this compost operation can’t get caught taking too long of an afternoon siesta. We’ve got to mix food waste with wood chips and load it into its aerated bunker.

The waste industry never sleeps. And neither do the microbes in our compost piles that get the heat above 140 degrees.

Finley and I found a skink roasting in a bucket. We gave it some water and an escape.

Take breaks, put up shade tents, put water on your head, and DRINK water.

06/20/2024

Hi Folks - We have had to start a new page for Star City Compost due to owner/operator Davey Stewards losing access to his personal facebook account that Star City Compost was linked to previously. Please help us rebuild our facebook audience, which had grown to 500 people before we lost access, by inviting some of your friends.

Thanks and look forward to lots of great content coming from us soon!