Adventures in Mama-Land

Most people, when they’re getting excited about Pesach, probably don’t think about all the beautiful COMPOST it creates.  And they certainly don’t think about all the WORMS they’re feeding over the Yom Tov. But think about it – you’re eating basically vegetables, for eight days, along with thousands and thousands (well, maybe it just seemed like it) of eggshells.  Peel, peel, peel… crack, crack, crack – and every peel and every shell is making my garden happier and healthier than it would be otherwise. I got so mad two years ago when I saw somebody tossing Pesach eggshells into the city compost bin.  My standard line is, “we already pay taxes; do we have to give them our compost , too???!?”  The (somewhat rabidly-made) point being, it’s perfectly good stuff.  And the worms (a few pictured at right) are the very best kind of Pesach guests – the ones that stay on afterwards and help you with your gardening all year round. In other, less delightful, more rot-ful...

On Friday, the kids and I went out back and, in shame, I dismantled the garden.  It was a time for confessions :  I didn’t do enough, I didn’t care enough, I didn’t water enough, I didn’t chase the bad guys away (weeds and bugs).  I let stuff go see that really shouldn’t.  I let the brutes (bee balm, perennial sunflowers) take more than their allotted space.  I let beloved plants die through neglect while I baked breads and cared for my family instead. It was also a time for catharsis :  sure, I didn’t do enough all summer, but I’m not going to take this Fall thing lying down!  I tore out the pathetic, bitter-tasting tomatoes, the shrivelled, aphid-infested kale and rampaged at the weeds that had dared encroach on the square foot beds. And finally, it was a time for hope .  I emptied one composter; dumped rich finished compost on all three beds and all around the garden.  The little kids seeded the square foot beds with a birdseed cove...

    This summer’s experiment in compost promises to be a thrilling one:  GRINDING the compost up before dumping it out back! I did try this once last summer in the big food processor, with some success (but a bit of a mess as well).  I found this mini unit at Value Village on Sunday (ominously marked “as is”) for $4.99, and decided that once again I’d give it a whirl… GET IT???  Whirl?  Like the spinning scary sharp steel blade of a food processor? Okay! So I just tried it now with a small sample load – a couple of onion peels and kiwi / veg scraps, and it did a decent job.  Not fully puréed, more like really teeny chunks but then, the stuff wasn’t cooked at all and I wasn’t expecting much anyway.  When I added a bit of water, it made quite a respectable slurry, which I then went outside and poured directly on the compost pile. Benefits of “pre-digesting” compost include: Faster time to break down in the pile Takes up less spa...

Hum along to that Beatles song; how does it go?  “I fed the worms today; oh, boy…” So!  With much apprehension (quite warranted, given that I have not even looked at the worms in the worm bin downstairs since maybe November), I armed myself today to face the worm bin. Worm Feeding Supplies:  orange peel, cut-up pear, gloves, shredded newspaper. As with most things, the reality was not as scary as I had feared.  Yes, the box is full of material that is mostly  broken down and requires sorting.  But it can probably wait ‘till spring. The box is definitely not running optimally anymore, but then, these conditions have been far from optimal.  There are not as many worms as there should be, and the range of sizes is not as great as it should be (in a happy worm bin, you should see worms of all different sizes, ie ages). But there are still worms.  Hundreds and hundreds of them, I’m sure.  All you need is a few to ramp  back up to...

The Bulbs Bulbs in – some 200-something of them, by my estimation.  That includes teeny-tiny bulbs like squill and muscari, though, some of which I just dumped into holes, set upright, and covered over again. Frugal gardener tip:  in late spring, buy pots of wilted daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths, whatever (just not paperwhites or tulips).  Home Despot usually has a cart of them for $1 or something.  Choose the pots that have the most flowers sticking up.  Don’t worry what the flowers look like… they will look horrible ; that’s why they’re $1.  (but do choose colours you can live with!) Now just leave the plants to die.  Not total neglect:  I kind of set them out in the backyard so they can get some rain and sun, but eventually, the foliage dies back and dries out and then the bulbs are ready to pull up. Yank them out of the dirt – toss the dirt part on the composter.  Gather all the bulbs.  If you’re lucky, the pots have tags...

Even as the garden falls slowly into autumn disrepair (and my neighbour’s with the great garden does not, a reminder that disrepair is not inevitable), there is almost always one thing going right – decay. I do realize that things will pretty inevitably decay in a garden with or without my help… however, I did help the contents of the full right-hand compost bin along in two ways.  One, I grew a cover crop on it for a few weeks… which may or may not have done any good, but it felt good to do it.  Plus, I have lots of extra seed, so hopefully can cover-crop the SFG beds if I have time before frost.  (what with Sukkos coming, maybe not!) And two, earlier in the summer (July?), I introduced some “spare” red wigglers from the worm bin .  Just a few, mind you.  And then, the other day when I turned over the almost-finished compost, I found a bazillion of them!  YouTube video here – not for the squeamish. To be entirely fair and honest, I ALSO foun...

Even my compost is going – nay, growing – green!!!  Yes, I’m growing a cover crop OVER the nearly-finished batch of compost while it waits to be used on the garden beds in the fall! I have been thinking about cover cropping for years.  Cover cropping, in case you’ve been living on Planet Inorganic (no shame in that; we stopped in there yesterday for paper plates and plastic cutlery for our al fresco Shabbos lunch!), is the practice in organic farming of rehabbing the soil between “real” crops by growing something fast and good for the world.  Cover crops are often a legume like clover, since legumes fix nitrogen in the soil (whatever that means, it sure sounds wholesome!), but sometimes they can be a grain like rye or millet.  They’re grown for a while and then turned back into the soil next season so more “real” crops can be planted.  Some cover crops are annual; planted late in the season, they don’t set seed and will die naturally over the winter so t...

Well, I decided my beautiful broccoli growing in Sub-I planter #1 was ready… and got outside to harvest it for quiche, only to find it looking decidedly bedraggled and coated in unappetizing shiny trails.  I suspect slugs, even though I felt like the container was pretty much slugproof.   Where can they be hiding? As cheesy as it is, I suspect Sub-I planter #3, the makeshift stuck-together one , is probably the most bug-proof and slug-proof, since it has an  open “moat” of water that may help discourage the critters. Slugs don’t seem interested in tomato foliage, luckily (unlike the beans, which are having trouble getting started), and here is one tempting morsel almost ready in Sub-I planter #2:   Hard to believe that huge tomato “tree” started out not even three months ago looking like this: Why did I even think that little cage was enough to stand up to “Early Tiny Cherry”?!? Two more garden-related points of interest as I sit here nursing a ...

Done!  The worm compost is fully sorted, and here’s what I got… Now here’s where it gets gross.  That little pile on the right-hand side contains all the worms I manually picked out of that huge pile on the left. Meaning… don’t look.  A LOT of worms are hiding there!   Ew, eww, ewwww… It is a VERY good thing that this composting thing helps the world, because I absolutely cannot stand worms.  I respect them a great deal since I have been gardening, but we have, at best, an “understanding”, the worms and I.

(caution:  pictures of worms below – not for the squeamish!!!) In a fit of procrastination over the million and one things I am supposed to be doing this week, I went out to feed the worm bin and decided it was overfull and needed a bit of emptying and refreshing.  I’ve really only fed it about once a month, and was worried that the worms might be suffering. But – never fear!  They are wormily thriving in the cool darkness of the garage (a highly recommended location that will probably work for us between March and November). Here’s some of the compost I scooped out, unsifted, so the worms are still in it:   Lots of worms still left in the bin, too!   I shoved the rest of the bin contents over to the right side, and added fresh veggies (garden cucumber peel), eggshells, and coffee grounds to the almost-empty left side.  Then covered it up with “fresh” straw (it’s been sitting since last fall) and closed up the bin.  This is the easy par...

Drat, just remembered I’m supposed to bring a snack for circle time tomorrow. Anyway.  Totally irrelevant! I have searched and searched but cannot find a single reference in this blog to last year’s astonishing sunflower that volunteered and grew all summer and into the fall – out the side of the compost bin.  How could I have failed to mention it?? To remedy that, fast, here it is:     This is the biggest, healthiest sunflower I have ever grown.  It didn’t really need staking, but I didn’t want anything to happen to it, so I drove a metal thingy down beside it just to make sure.  Absolutely pristine leaves, gigantic.  All that compost! So the reason I was searching for pictures and references to it is because… its children have taken root and are flourishing, if not directly in the composter, then in the shady pathway alongside it.  Actually, the biggest,  healthiest one is, in fact, right beside the composter. The lea...

Garbage strike?  What garbage strike?? We have no problems… :-))) This is a “pellet” of one recyclable cardboard box (garbage bag box because we’re going through so many of them!) filling up with kitchen scraps.  Pop the whole thing in the backyard composter, and 3 months later… gone! Lucky thing worms don’t go on strike!

I finally declared Composter #2 to be officially FULL.  We’ve been piling stuff in since March, and I topped it off the other day with two bags full of Starbucks grounds (they just told me to dig through the dumpster – what a privilege!). So with YM’s help, I shovelled out all the “finished” compost in Composter #1, leaving just a bit in the bottom, and have declared it the ACTIVE composter:     I’m hoping three months will be the average turn-around time, meaning (counting in my head:  “July…August…September”) that by this fall, I will have another bin full of compost to spread around the beds before winter.  That plus a carload of fresh horse manure rotting on the beds over the winter ought to do the trick nicely.  (I send Ted to pick it up at a local stable) Hmm… not sure how we will transport the manure, though, now that I’m growing stuff in just about every available bin and container.  Cross that bridge when we come to it. Here’s the ...

So many of my posts focus on things that are growing… that I haven’t spent much time updating you on what’s ROTTING in our yard! Yup, it’s our multifaceted home composting operation, and it seems to be in full-swing for 2009; yay! First of all, the worm composter , celebrating exactly one month in our family: On the left side is what’s left of the original vermicompost which the composter was mostly full of when I bought it.  Not much left; I’ve used it in most of the tomato planters and a few other areas of the garden (picking many worms out along the way – and doubtless losing some – because I was too lazy initially to sort them out). On the right is “clean” bedding – a mix of straw (hay?) and the “tushie” sections from Now Magazine, torn into strips (so it was never really clean – ha ha ha). No worms visible on the surface, but if you dig down just a bit with my trusty Trake… there!  See ’em?  They’re everywhere !!! I have been feeding the vermicomposter...