Earth TUB!!

Check it out. We are the proud new operators of the Earth Tub in-vessel compost system from Green Mountain Technologies. As you can imagine, we’re pretty stoked.

Jim’s excited too.

Meeting of the minds: Guilford Sustainability Coordinator Jim Dees and our Executive Chef Anthony Tisdale discuss the logistics of getting all our kitchen waste through this bad boy.
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Here's a decent shot of the innards. That auger is turned by a motor and rotates around the tub by a hand crank for mixing. Aeration is provided by a blower in the bottom which draws air through the compost and out of the attached biofilter.

Stay tuned to Guilford Green for more pictures and info about how this thing works.

Greening of a Loading Dock (Part III)

Plants are in the ground! We also tweaked the walkway a little bit. I think it’s a great improvment, aesthetically and functionally.

I might be most excited about the six blueberry bushes on the fence line. Eventually there will be climbing roses on the fence. Directly next to the blueberry bushes are a few different varieties of thyme, oregono in the direct foreground, rosemary, two varities of parsley, and basil in the far back.

Garlic Chives:

More planting to come. Stay tuned.

LEED Certification Comes Under Fire

A new study by the US Green Building council shows that nearly a quarter of new buildings certified do not live up to the energy standards projected in their designs. Starting this year buildings will be required to submit their water and energy bills for their first five years or risk loosing their certification. Read more from the NYT below.

Some Buildings Not Living Up to Green Label

Local Offerings this Week at Guilford Dining

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Each week I’m going to start posting our list of local products available in the Dining Hall. We just recently lost one of our main local farmers but we’ve picked up a new vendor in Fresh Point Produce that will hopefully increase our local offerings.

Local Produce:

• Organic Cucumbers – Faucette Farms (18 Miles)
• Organic Globe Eggplant – Cottle Organic (117 miles)
• Organic Arugula – Timerwood Organics (49 miles)
• Organic Red Beets – Somerset Farms (224 miles)
• Organic Green Kale – Pine Knot (65 miles)
• Organic Sugar Baby Melons – Wiebe Farms
• Organic Green Bell Peppers – Timberwood Organics (49 miles)
• Organic Onaway Potatoes – Somerset Farms (224 miles)
• Organic Covington Sweet Potatoes – Cottle Organics (117 miles)
• Red Bibb and Green Leaf Lettuce – Flora Ridge Farm (59 miles)

Local Meat (always in stock):

• Chicken – Hopkins Poulty – Brown Summit, NC (All North Carolina Grown and locally proccessed)
• Ground Beef – Piedmont Prime, LLC – Galax, VA
• Breakfast Sausage and Bacon – Neese’s Country Sausage – Greensboro, NC

Other Products (always in stock):

• Heavy Cream, Half and Half, Buttermilk and Whole Milk – Homeland Creamery – Julian NC (28 miles)
• Flour and Grits – Booneville Flour and Feed – Booneville, NC  (55 miles)
• Chevre Goat Cheese – Celebrity Dairy – Siler City, NC (42 miles)

Greening of a Loading Dock (Part II)

Well the fence and walkway are set, but still no Earth Tub. Unfortunately when it finally arrived we had to refuse delivery due to improper packing. We simply couldn’t accept such an expensive piece of machinery that was possibly damaged. Everyone was certainly bummed. We should be receiving our new Earth Tub by mid-week next week. Below are some pictures of the walkway and fence.

Greening of a Loading Dock. (Part I)

How do you paint a loading dock green? Well we’re starting with a large herb garden right off to the side, and installing a commercial food waste composter right between the garden and the loading dock. Sounds like a good start right? This photo blog will take you through the project so far….

Unfortanately I do not have a proper “before” picture so this will have to do for now. The gravel bed is where our Earthtub is being installed. It arrives on Friday after much anticipation.

The first step in this proccess was to pull out all of the hard packed red clay so we could bring in some decent growing soil. We also needed to level the grade in order to have a nice flat growing surface. Luckily the Vice President of Operations at Guilford knows his way around a Bobcat.

Next the team brought in some top soil, and topped it off with some humus. We think it’s created a pretty good palate for growing. Only thyme will tell, pun intended.

We’re building a picket fence and putting in a flastone walkway. All the postholes have been dug and four posts have been set. Picked up the flastone today, which is pictured below.

Stay tuned for more updates as we finish construction and start planting. Hope to raise the fence tomorrow and start setting the stone. Also Earthtub arrives on Friday!

Check out our Community Garden!

This past weekend we broke ground on our new community garden here at Guilford. The garden consists of 20 raised beds located in the Guilford College meadows across from New Garden Friends School. The beds are now raised thanks to a great work day this past Saturday led by Guilford’s Environmental Sustainability Coordinator Jim Dees. We had a great group of Guilford students as well as alumni come and help build the beds. All that’s left to do now is raise the deer fence and fill in the beds with top soil. Yours truely will be tending at least one plot for the dining hall as well as one for myself. We hope to get our feet wet at the community garden and use what we learn there for a larger scale production garden to grow food for the dining hall. Check out the pictures below couresty Guilford Sustainability Intern alum Gabriela Spang, and stay tuned to Guilford Green for more news on the community garden, and information about how to obtain your own plot.

Things are Happening!

Founders Hall has gone through big changes since our students left here in early May. Between the end of spring semester and the start of the Eastern Music Festival, the Facilities staff worked very hard to complete a complete renovation of the dining hall’s seating area. Along with the Founders renovation came a great new water and energy saving dishwasher. Not only did we get a new dishwasher, but our old garbage disposal has been replaced with a state of the art in-sink-erator and a food waste pulper. The pulper is pictured below:

The pulper is a huge part of our new compost program. The Waste Express Food Pulper decreases the volume of organic waste by about 70%. It essentially takes the majority of the water out of the food left over at the end of each day. What it will allow us to do is fit the great majority of the organic waste produced here in the kitchen and in the dining hall into our new on-site in-vessel composter. As many of you know our Earth Tub has been ordered and will be here sometime in early August. Then the composting will begin in earnest. Everyone here on campus is very excited about this huge step toward zero waste.

Another very exciting sustainability project that will shortly follow the arrival of our Earth tub is the construction of a fairly large herb garden that will surround the Earth Tub. The Earth tub is going to be located right behind our loading dock, and the herb garden will be in great proximity to the kitchen for easy picking of fresh herbs. Stay tuned to Guilford Green for more information on this exciting new project.

How Green Is My Bottle?

I thought some of you Guilfordians might find this interesting.  It’s an op-ed piece from the New York Times that examines the life cycle analysis of a stainless steel reusable water bottle, like the ones manufactured by SIGG and Klean Kanteen. I see lots of these around campus and actually use one myself.  I like this piece because it takes into account an aspect of sustainability that many people ignore: externalities.  But don’t worry, you can still feel good about drinking out of that nifty stainless steel bottle.  Just don’t loose the top.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/04/19/opinion/20090419bottle.html

Meriwether Godsey celebrates Earth Day with Breakfast for Dinner on 4/22

Everyone loves breakfast for dinner, and we’ll be doing it up local style with local bacon and sausgage from Neese’s right here in Greensboro, locally milled cheese grits from Booneville Flour and Feed, and scrambled and fried cage free eggs. We’ll also be offering some other local, non breakfast items, like local goat cheese salad with local greens and tomatoes. Local chicken salad and chicken marsala from our new poultry provider out of Brown Summit, NC who features all NC grown chicken.

We’ll also be featuring some delicous local ice cream from Homeland Creamery for desert.  So come out and help us celebrate our love for Planet Earth.