Spring Work Out

It feels so good to be outside in the sunshine and I'm already feeling my muscles growing too!

My easiest compost ever bin last summer

Remember my post about the easiest compost ever?  I swear by this method!  Everything from fern fronds & grass clippings to egg shells & cilantro stems make it into my compost bin and magically with no mixing or moving, I get a tube full of black gold each spring! 

Now that my tube of compost is ready for use, I just pulled off the wire frame to harvest my black gold. Theres always a layer at the top that is only partially decomposed, but that's ok.  This layer along with all the worms inside of it is removed and placed in the bottom of the empty wire bin where it will jumpstart this years compost.  All the enzymes and microbes that aide in decomposition are already in that partially done layer.

I'm thrilled that I wound up with a lot of ready to use compost!  It was about 8 wheel barrows full of 100% free organic soil amendment! And with no backbreaking work or constant turning.  I just stack it in, water it when it's dry and let mother nature do her thing.  You just can't beat that! Composting is the epitome of the old saying "waste not, want not".

Beautiful black and rich.  Last years waste will

feed the plants that will feed us this year!

If you've been following my spring garden frenzy, then you know that I've run out of room in my garden beds for planting anything else.  Soon Ben will be building me some more recycled beds and bringing home a few yards of 4 way organic soil to fill them, but the sun is shining and I just can't wait.  So I took a look around the yard to see what I might repurpose for planting in some odd shaped areas of my garden where buiding beds would be difficult.

First I found the top half of an old plastic compost bin.  The bottom section had split open and was not really good for anything (that's why I'm not using plastic for my bins).  It seemed like a great candidate for a garden container.  I drug it down to the garden and found a spot for it, next to my ugly but useful recycled laundry bin planter.  I filled it with compost, leveled it out and planted another type of carrots inside.  It might not be pretty now, but it will be gorgeous when those carrots come up!

 

You never know what might make a good garden bed. 
This container lived it's first life as a compost bin,
now it will get a second life as a carrot planter!

I still had loads of compost, so I took the wire mesh tubes from last years failed potato tower experiment and carefully cut them in 1/2 to form 6 good sized containers.  These would fit perfect in the sloped corner of my garden.

 

This wire tube tower for potatoes was too tall last year.

 

That's more like it!  Now these shorter tubes I can work with. 

Each tube became 2 - 18" tall planters.  These are perfect for this spot because I can mold the shape a little bit before filling them.  Then I found some old plastic woven bird seed bags I've been saving for a project and cut those down to line the bottom of each of these new planters.  I cut drainage slashes in the lining and got to work filling each plant tube with compost.

8  loads full!  I highly recommend a 2

wheeled barrow like mine for ease of use.

Eight trips to the back yard with my wheelbarrow and I had created a whole new planting area from recycled and repurposed items I already had!  I love recycling in the garden!  

The mesh planters are full and ready
for seeding.  And now a wasted space in my
garden is going to be a productive.  Yay! 

I decided to go ahead and try potatoes in these again now that they are a bit smaller.  I have several different types of spuds that have sprouted in my cupboards that should work. I placed 3 little papita starts in each tube.  I don't know if they'll all grow, but at least some of them should.  I know potatoes grow in compost bins all the time.

Red, white & russet potatoes from the kitchen get

replanted here  along with an onion and some garlic

centers that need planting.

Oh I almost forgot, each day when the sun is out I'm opening up my boat/greenhouse to get some direct sun on the soil and the plants.  I've also placed my jugs of water strategically throughout to absorb the heat of the sun durring the day.  In the evening I'll recover the boat and those recycled containers of water will radiate the warmth back into the greenhouse. 

Those empty jugs from our ceasars and screwdrivers

become passive heaters in the greenhouse

I bumped into my neighbor Leslie as I was out enjoying the sun. She's also been hard at work cutting back her fern fronds and generously offered them to me for my garden mulch. Thank you Leslie! I think I may have enough fronds to fully line the non-growing areas of the garden now! It sure makes the garden area look nice too. A few hours of work in the sunshine and what a payoff!  I love it! 

Of Gardens, Garbage & Goo!

 

What's up with those worms? 

I've had bloggers block. I try to post a new blog each day (sort of cheating a couple days a week with simply a photo). Today I'm back. :0)

I'm taking a break in the midst of my Monday chores to share a bit more about my dirty life as an organic gardener. We've been really lucky with a mild winter this year and I've been working in my garden for the last few weeks when the weather is dry enough. Today is a day like that. High cloud cover but no rain so far. It seemed like a good time to check in on my worm bin. 

Seperating the trays 

So the way this system works is the worms should be actively eating in the top trays of the bin and the finished compost should be in the bottom trays.  First I removed the top few trays and set them aside.

Then I'll take the bottom few trays down to my veggie plot to amend my soil in an empty bed.

These worms will ride in style in my custom garden wagon! 

No one said this would be pretty! 

Now I'm going to drain the "worm juice" or "worm tea" into a watering can.  When I get down to the garden I'm going to water my celery plants with this nutrient rich, all be it, smelly juice. 

This bed will be ready to plant after a small resting period.

A quick trip to the garden and I added the worm compost to my only currently empty vegetable bed.  I just dump the trays in and pull out any "clumps" of worms that are in the mix.  I'll return them to my worm bin.  Any others that don't make it back to the bin will be just fine in my garden bed.  They'll continue to work for me by aerating the soil.  I then mixed in the new compost into the soil and I'll let this bed sit for at least 1 week before adding any seeds or new plants.

I noticed this new shoot coming up in the garden. 

It's either a garlic or onion?

After a quick look around the veggie patch, I'll returned to the worm bin to finish this project.  I replace the trays from the top.  They will now be at the bottom of the stack. Reserving the very top bin to the side.  I'll add one of my now empty trays to the top of the stack.  This is a good time to add some bedding for the worms and I've saved just the thing inside.

A pressed paper egg carton is great for worm bedding

To use a paper egg carton for bedding material in the worm bin, I'll first wet it down from the top and bottom side so it absorbs some moisture.  This helps to tear it up and makes it more appealing for the worms in my bin.

Tearing the carton into smaller pieces will allow it to break down faster.

I return to the wormbin and tear up the egg carton into the top (now empty) tray.  Then I'll add in the worms that I pulled out in the garden.

OOOwey Gooey!  That's a whole can o worms!

Yuck!  This ugly garbage will become beautiful soil amendment in no

time thanks to my hard working worm bin!

Now I add the "orignal" top trays contents to my new top tray.  These little worms have been munching away in my bins for 2 years!  They breed when there's enough food (which is always the case in my bins) and any that die are eaten by the living worms and turned into great compost too! 

Here's the bin after the project is complete with 3 working trays

3 empty trays ready for the next run of kitchen waste

So that's it!  That's really all there is to running and maintaining a worm bin.  It's so easy and the reward of "free" soil amendment and fertilizer is great in my organic garden.  My yeilds are up and my plants grow quickly and healthy.  Another plus, it's as green as you can get and keeps all those lettuce centers, broccoli stems, cabbage hearts and other scraps out of my trash can and out of the landfill.  Yes they will decompose there too, but this way they get a second life, from a single resource as a natural organic garden additive!

No one said gardening was for the squeemish!  It's a dirty job, but I love it!  I enjoy the time outdoors and love growing my own produce knowing that no chemicals have been added.  Joy, dirty joy!

Don't waste your waste! Become a Worm Wrangler.

Ok gardeners and other green people are you still throwing your food waste in the garbage?  Stop that!  Don't waste your waste!  Become a Worm Wrangler.

Do you know that the average American household produces about 5lbs of garbage everyday?  I wonder how much we could reduce that by simply composting our food waste.  It might even lower your garbage bill!

I started coralling crawlies last fall when I set up my wonderful Worm Factory Worm Bin.  I love this company for making their worm bins from  post consumer recycled materials and they're here in my local area. Also the lifespan of these bins is supposed to be about 70 years and it comes with a 5 year warranty!

Worm Factory Worm bins rock!!!

Here's some fun facts about worms:

• Wrangling Red Wiggler Worms is called Vermiculture
• Worms eat up to 1/2 of their body weight eachday, so if you've got a pound of worms they'll eat a 1/2 pound of your food waste everyday!
• Worms in bins should receive a mix of 1/2 food waste and 1/2 fiber, so worms can eat your junk mail and shredded documents!
• Worms process your compost much faster in a worm bin than in a regular compost bin and takes a lot less work than turning a compost pile.
• Garden plants grow faster and fuller when fertilized with worm tea!
• You can use worm bins indoors or out! So even apartment dwellers can raise red wigglers.
• Mixing finished worm compost into your potting soil makes houseplants healthy and happy
• Worms will reproduce in your worm bin but they'll regulate themselves based on the environment and amount of available food and space!  Watch this short film from Isabella Rosellini to learn more about worm reproduction

Here's a peek at my healthy happy worms.

I love my worm bin so much I even made my own video about it this summer.

Here's Fat Red Worms

There are a few things that worms won't eat and should not be placed in your worm bin.  They're not too picky, but worms will not eat onions, citrus rinds, and jalepenos or other hot peppers.

October garden: what's growing on?

With the bulk of my food preservation behind me, my thoughts turn back to my organic vegetable garden.  There are still a few veggies out there that will do fine up through the first frost.

 Now that the garden is sufficiently surrounded by netting, my carrots are starting to recover from their battle with the grazing deer. I hope to harvest them in November. 

I planted a new batch of lettuce about 3 weeks ago. Without the constant pruning by hungry deer this too is thriving!  It's going to be ready for a nice tender salad next week if the frost will hold off.

Tender tasty lettuce, the deer love it, but this batch is for me!

Some garden plants, like my everbearing strawberries, are self propigating.  I've got a nice patch growing in the bow of my boat garden.  With this years runners, there are about 12 new plants for next years berry season! The plants need very little coaxing to produce new plants.  All I had to do was arrange the runners so that the new florettes rooted in a suitable location.

Running on, these berries propigate themselves

The boat garden earlier this summer

Now that the weather has turned cool, it's time to get my spring bulbs in the ground.  I'm planning on a planting of daffodils and snow drops along with a  pot or 2 of tulips that will have to be protected from those deer.  I'll head into the nursery on Monday and pick them out.  Hopefully I can get my hands on some daffodil bulbs from Skagit Valley.

Skagit Valley daffodils spring 2009

 Flowers aren't the only bulbs that benefit from a fall planting.  It's also a good time to get next years garlic crop in the ground.  Garlic planted in autumn usually is ready for harvest a little earlier in the summer than spring planted cloves.

I have a basket full of garlic that I harvested in early September.  Because I use a frugal garden technique of planting the inner cloves of my kitchen garlic, some of the harvest was still a bit to small to use.  It was time to get those back in the ground where they will benefit from another couple seasons of growth.

A tisket a tasket a garlic bulb filled basket

Planting garlic cloves is just like planting any small bulb flower.  You'll want to pick a spot in your garden with nice loamy soil.  Space them 4-6" apart and about 2-3" deep.

small garden, no problem! Found enough room for 30 garlics!

I chose this nearly empty bed for my planting.  At the far end you can see I still have some celery growing here that I plan to over winter.  I use a square foot garden method because I have limited garden beds.  Using this technique, I planted some garlic amid the celery plants.

Garlic will grow well interplanted with many other veggies

I dug out 3 rows deep across my 18" wide beds.  This allowed me to get the most plants per square foot. 

It's easy to dig in this nice loamy garden soil

I chose my heartiest bulbs from the basket and set them in the holes.  It's important to plant them with the rooting side down!  Then I covered them with about 2" of soil and packed it down with my hands.  No need to add extra compost this time because this bed was already amended when I harvested the beans that had been growing here.  On that note, be sure to rotate your garden plants from year to year.  This will help reduce the chances of transfering any diseases that may be soil born.

From this tiny bulb I look forward to salsas stews and pestos for next year

Normally at this step I would water the bulbs in, but there was no need with a rainy weekend in the forecast.

Echo the eco-dog came to lend a paw.

Or maybe he just needed a hand with that toy?

That was easy!  Now I'll just let mother nature do her work.  The bulbs will start to root immediately and grow throughout the fall, winter and spring.  They should be ready to harvest at the start of next summer!

I'm sure going to miss my garden over the winter, but I'll get through those dreary months knowing that is still some action just below the soil.

Last chance tomatoes - fall garden clean up

I've been a mad pruner this week!  It's fall and time to clean up the garden before it gets too soggy out there.  I've got garden beds running around our house, throughout the backyard and of course my new organic vegetable garden too.  There's no shortage of work to be done. And no small amount of pruned vegetation to deal with.

I try to compost everything I can so that I can use the finished compost in the spring to fertilize my planting beds, but this year I had a lot of brush that needed to be pruned back.  This amounted to 2 full burn piles!  I'm looking forward to later this weekend having some small bon fires and getting this clean up behind me.  I might even make some smores!  mmmmmmmmm

One of my pruning burn piles

My favorite thing about vegetable gardening are my vine ripe tomatoes.  I'm monitoring the temperature each night to try to harvest them before they get bitten by frost.

My tomato plants, especially the romas,  are still full of green ones.  So far I've been extremely lucky and no frost has laid down on my yard.  Most of the gardeners that I know both here on the island and over on the mainland have already experienced their first killing frost.

Today I checked on my green tomatoes.  Those that were full size I harvested along with a section of tomato plant.  I'm going to try my grandmothers method and finish ripening them indoors. 

This green beefsteak will not have enough time to ripen on the vine

To ripen season end green tomatoes like grandma did, I cut a 4 to 6" branch connected to the green tomato, place in a single layer in a cardboard box, place one ripe apple in the same box, cover with newspaper and place in a room temperature area in the house.  I'm keeping my box atop of the refridgerator. 

Here's my yellow plum tomatoes, you can see there's still a lot of green ones!

Todays harvest

Each day, check on your tomatoes.  Use them as soon as they are ripe and toss any that turn brown or become too soft into your compost bin. 

I've pruned a lot of the foliage and the tops of my tomato plants to encourage the energy of the plant to go into developing and ripening the fruits. 

One thing I never compost is tomato plant and foliage.  The reason for this, composted tomato foliage can carry blight and the blight organism is not killed in the composting process.  Instead, to be sure not to spread disease to next years tomatoes, I am placing the foliage and stems in the burn pile.  No sense in taking a chance of spreading disease from season to season.

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Compost Happens - Easiest Compost Ever

Original Posting:
June 2009
Going organic in the garden is vital to creating a healthy and thriving backyard ecosystem and the most important thing for an eco friendly organic garden is compost!

Compost happens. There is a lot of discussion in the garden community about the "right" way to make your own compost. Some say layer your green and brown material. Others say you must use specialized composting machines and expensive plastic composters. Still others talk about a constant mixing of ingredients and lots of back breaking work.

I disagree. Compost happens. Mother nature has been composting organic materials since the beginning of time. So here are my ideas for creating lush, loamy, organic FANTASTIC compost in your backyard without breaking the bank or breaking your back!

This photo on the left is my recycled composter. Very simple and very effective. I actually used a peice of wire fencing that used to be part of an old deck. So this baby is 100% recycled and may have gone to a landfill had I not asked for it at a jobsite. Not only eco friendly, but it cost me $0, so it was pocket book friendly too!

You may have this or some hardware cloth in your garden shed already. Just form the fencing into a tube by attaching one end to the other. This one was made with about 6 or 7 feet of reclaimed wire fencing. The tube, when formed is about 3 feet in diameter.

I whipped this one up in about 30 minutes and have been using it continuously for 3 years and have created quite a bit of "black gold" from my kitchen waste and yard trimmings. I imagine it will last for at least another 3 years too!

Now if you've been researching composting, you've probably heard that you must layer evenly brown and green materials to create compost. How inconvenient, since your greens (grass clippings, kitchen scraps, garden trimmings) are all readily available in the warm spring and summer months and brown (fallen leaves, fir needles etc) are only available from your yard in the fall. But I've learned through my experience that it's not true at all. Like I mentioned, Mother nature has been doing this for all time!

I layer in my compostables in no particular order, it's just what I have available at the given moment. So in the summer when I have a lot of green materials, I toss those in. In the fall when I have a lot of brown ingredients I toss those in then. Without fail every spring I have lucious black compost to add to my garden beds.

In the summertime I water my compost about once per week, and I periodically poke at it with a stick to create airflow in the center of the pile. The great thing about my fencing style composter is that it gets air and water through the holes in the fencing, but the plant matter is easily held inside the fencing.

I leave my composting material in the tube from fall through spring. When it's ready I simply pull the tube off the pile and move it over a foot or so in the same area of my yard. Then if there is a layer on top that hasn't fully decomposed, I transfer it to the moved compost bin and harvest what is ready. I shovel the finished compost into my wheelbarrow and distribute it throughout the garden.

Organic compost improves your soil quality by introducing worms and other good bugs into your garden. It feeds your plants naturally, eliminating the need for any chemical fertilizers. It improves the planet because you keep this useful waste out of the landfills.

Yes! It really is that easy!