Looking forward to the next grow year

The mild winter in Mississippi has got me antsy to get going toward this years growing season. I have been looking into different options for vegetables and fruits, I have expanded into two worm bins, and started composting leaves to make my own potting soil. Alicia and I have been rooting around different home stores and garden web sites with consideration over this years crop.

I believe the biggest change of pace we are making is actually putting things in the ground, for any who might not know there isn't much sun in our back yard, and the yard is sloped so during heavy rain it is a waterfall, however the house is surrounded by bushes and Crepe Myrtles. The plan as of now is to replace some Crepe Myrtles with Mississippi friendly fruit trees, and replace some Azaleas with blue berries. The areas where these plants already exist are sun heavy so they should be fine. And for kicks we are going to try and grow some grapes.

Having said all of that, I understand that I have a ticking clock behind me, it is about time to start putting fruit trees in the ground and planting grapes. To do that i will have to get a chain saw, cut down some Crepe Myrtles and build and arbor for grape vines.

We have also decided to start some of our more traditional plants from seeds, so I will start the tomatoes and peppers in our little portable greenhouse. I also thought it might be fun to start some container corn, if everything goes right we MIGHT get 12 ears. This year I will start the lettuce in starter pots as to give them a 1-up.

We have also decided to try and grow as many heirloom varieties as possible. Last year was exciting and I can't wait to start uploading pictures for this year

organzation 004

organzation 004, a photo by heptide on Flickr.

Made some simple shelves out of cinder blocks and wooden planks.

Composting 2

Currently I am managing 3 compost bins. This will have to increase over time but right now 3 is enough.

The first bin was the leaf composting bin to handle the leaves from the fall. If you want to check it out, my first post on this process was here: , since beginning, the leaf pile has dropped over a foot in height and is now mostly broken down and ready to use. At one point I sifted out about 10 gallons of compost, sanitized it and used it in my potting soil.  I set this bin up and let it go, giving it a good turn weekly.

This is what it looks like now!!!

The second bin was for lawn waste, I used the cheapest 32 gallon garbage can I could find, drilled a bunch of 3/4 in holes.

The bin is about as full as I can get it right now, I think it will be fine for a while, I don't foresee having to add a lot of waste to it in the future more than kitchen waste. 

This bin had some leaves, pine needles, kitchen waste, lawn clippings, and dead plants. The bin is made to turn on it side and roll to help mix it up.

I still have to use the fork to make sure food waste stays covered but It is easy to mix. I add kitchen waste to this bin when it won't go well into the worm bin.

So the worm bin, I have used worm bins in the past and found them very useful and fun. My first bin can be found here. I give all my instructions there. I use the same basic system only I have done away with the deep 18 gallon bin. I really only ever used the bottom 6 inches anyway. 

The shortened bin helps me guard against flies. This bin is also kept outside. So far that is not a problem though I will have to find something to do with it the two weeks we get cold weather in the winter. The bin started slowly after I overfed it but time, dry material, and some crushed egg shells helped with my beginning mold problems. So now, the bin is going extremely well.

I covered the top with two pieces of corrugated cardboard, I have noticed the worms will come more frequently to the top layer if they are still covered by something. It think it helps break down the stuff under faster. 

Nice and sloppy. 

Anyway, everything is breaking down exceedingly well. I find it exciting. 

AE 2

AE 2, a set on Flickr.

This is just a picture update from 5/2/11

The View From the Back Door

AE_1, a photo by heptide on Flickr.

This is, what I said it was up top.

Composting 1

Well Spring is here in Mississippi. Ha ha, it's just February. However the temperatures in the 60's and 70's have given me the opportunity to take care of the yard work I put off in the fall. For avid readers of my blog (I think there are sometimes two of you) it is important to notice how my life has changed. Without going into details, I have completely relocated to Jackson Mississippi, and have some extra time on my hands.

Now that I live in Jackson nothing keeps me from doing my girlfriends yard work. Some of you might be thinking, “Wow, that sucks.” but if you have read about my vermicomposting or looked at pictures of the patio outside of my old apartment in Southaven Mississippi, you will probably not be surprised when I tell you that I look forward to the space to work more closely with nature. I feel blessed with a Girlfriend who supports my eco-habits.

I found the opportunity to try my hand at something exciting that I have always wanted to try, composting. Not just with the worms or something small like I had done but real live composting. As “The Boyfriend,” I figured it was my duty to rake and bag the leaves from the four gigantic Oak Trees, and the many many little trees in her backyard.

So at the halfway mark I ended up with 20 full garbage bags of leaves.

While I was bagging I couldn't help but think about the wonderful process God has set forward to take care of this issue naturally, and I couldn't help but consider how avidly I was trying to ignore that process. So I did a little research. I found this webpage from the University of Missouri: http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/displaypub.aspx?p=g6957 and since I believe that Eco-friendly should also be fiscal-friendly I went for the cheapest enclosed bin (Enclosed because of how close the property is to woods and the family dog Gizmo that would probably enjoy the pile as it heated up)

I started with four posts and some hard plastic construction netting, stuff.

The plastic, is also from recycled materials.

Some little helpers and I fashioned the net into a circle. And if I was thinking in advance I would have taken a picture of the bin empty, but I was not, so all I have is bin, two layers within.

Then I found this webpage from the University of Illinois: http://web.extension.illinois.edu/homecompost/building.html This page taught me the basic idea of green, brown, green, brown.

Everything on the internet has mentioned that chopping leaves make them compost better, in later pics you will see that I didn't always follow this, however as a general rule I thought it was a good idea. I chopped the leaves with my Girlfriend's mulching mower. I collected them in the bag and dumped them into the bin. This made up most of my brown sections. For green I went to a small tree that had to be removed and at first by hand removed the leaves, I realized later that I could just run it over with the mulching mower and it would actually chop the leaves up, and save me a lot of time.

Each layer of organic material was separated by composted manure (I bought it cheap because that's how I roll) and old potting soil, from last years container garden. I am sure there are many nay sayers that will tell me it was wrong to use the leftovers from the container garden and then tell my I chose the wrong fertilizer as a starter, to them I say, “Hey, I am new at this, so back and and lets see how it goes.”

Regardless I am sure most of you are wonderfully happy readers to give me credit so lets move on.

I completed the pile to about 2 inches from the top, with about 4 organic layers, as I said each separated by a layer of composted manure and garden soil. I tried to follow a 4:1 brown to green ratio. I have read it exactly opposite too, however, in the opposite version I notice they weren't using a nitrogen starter.

Oh yeah for people who don't know what I mean by brown and green. Brown represents things like dead leaves that are full of carbon, and green represents things, in this case like green leaves, that represent nitrogen. I also have some kitchen scraps in there. This might work and it might not, but if it does not I will just start over, the plastic netting was 12 dollars, the posts were $2.20 a piece, and 3 bags of composted manure were $1.30 each, and if it doesn't work I will empty it and start over or add what I need to get it to work.

My goal as always is to help facilitate the natural process, in this case it is a process of decomposition.

And this is a Lizard I saw later that day.

Update for the beginning of June

I walked out to my patio this afternoon, looked around, took a wiff and though, it looks like a rain forest out here. I caught a rather pungent oder near the hottest point of the day, which in Mississippi is the latter part of the day when the sun is in the west. Of course the days will come when the morning yields high humidity and temperatures over 100. It is also that time of year when the ducks are taking their little ones to school, teaching them to crap in my breeze way... wait, I have a pic.

I saw them on the way in from taking my recycling to the drop off centers, got my camera and took a picture. The adults were rather angry I came back out, but then they are Muskovies, they have tiny brains and lets face it, they are the ugliest ducks in the world. 

Ok, so my Marigolds are looking a little raggid. It would do well for me to dead head them and let the plants start over, because the plants themselves are very strong. The reason I don't dead head them is because I don't have a pruner for it, and let me tell you, the smell of a marigold sticks around on hands forever.

My peppers take the heat in a much different way. The Jalapeños take the heat and sun well, but the bells tend to shrivel under direct sun and once the light is no longer direct they pop right back out. The soil is nice and moist the container is watering itself appropriately, the top has maybe a centimeter of dry soil and under that is a dark cool soil. 

They are still too small to support fruit but look like they are doing well so far, even though they only get 3 hours of sun at best. 

These are my potatoes, I tried to keep them up and straight, but now they are tangled up and growing all together into a knot, that is fine, they help each other. 

I found this interesting. Fungus. I have looked into whether or not I should remove the tiny toadstools. Most forums seem to go with leaving them, since all they really do is represent a good ecosystem. The one thing I will do is lessen my watering to every other day, since the containers themselves are not in direct sun. The stalk is very thick and healthy if it begins to look bad I will alter my plan. 

My impatiens are really sort of funny. When they get full sun they look like me after getting out of my car with no AC, wilted and sad. Thirty minutes later, just like me, they are happy again. Impatiens are pretty tough, they were a good idea. 

Had this visitor today, that is a potato leaf he is visiting.

If you look closely you can see a white tube in this jar. I am steeping some compost tea with my vermicompost. I wrapped some of the compost in paper towels, look like a very large and special cigarette. I wonder if the smell is coming from there in the heat of the day? Well it had gone away later, at worst I imagine something crawled under one of my containers and died. I get a few critters using my patio as a walk way. Saw a mouse one day and a lizard another. If it continues to get bad, I will do better look but right now, it is fine. 

I love that I can see my patio flowers from Airways Blvd driving north past the hospital. Keep growing folks. 

Vermicomposting: Harvest time!!!

It has been just over two months for my worm bin. A week ago I noticed there wasn't much material left other than castings, so I stopped feeding it for a week and decided I would take this day to harvest. I wanted to see the yield of castings, but more importantly I wanted to see if I had facilitated a healthy ecosystem, so critters and worms seemed more important to me.

My bin was in the same place it had always been. Before showing pics of the harvest I have a few things to report. I kept the bin behind my couch the entire time, and it never had an odor. If I took the top off, I smelled earth, and sometimes if I dug around there was a putrid smell. In my bin, bad smells often followed the addition of too much rice, and it isn't hard to add too much, a handful is easily too much.

I also had critters. The critters stayed in the bin, there was nothing for them on the outside, until I left it unfed for a week, they started to get a little more aggressive to leave when I opened the top. It still wasn't more than one or two. I also began getting fruit flies, though they weren't bad. They weren't bad enough for me to feel like I needed to do anything with them. As I looked at the little crawlers, I saw mainly millipedes and spring tails, both never leaving the bin (well one millipede tried after I stopped feeding).

 The steel tub was my sorting area, the orange bucket was for organic waste that needed more time, and the white cat litter bucket was for separated castings. I lined the tub with a white garbage bag and a piece of news paper. As I got closer to the end the news paper was less and less useful. The little white bowl is the basket for my scale.

This was what I found in my bin. As soon as I dumped the bin I could tell I had facilitated a wonderful ecosystem, I could move casting without finding tiny little worms and eggs. Of course then I realized why the method I was using was always described as a slow process. I had to separate less than a handful at a time. It started moving quicker as I corralled the worms to the center. I found I could scrape around the edges with my fingers and separate casting, organic material, and worm much easier.

This is what a lot of my casting looked like if I dug even a quarter inch under the surface. The bloggers were right though, as I disturbed soil the worms began to move down and later to the center to come together.

I would find these dense pockets of worms and by excavating around them, continue to drive the worms to the center. It was along process, but very calming once I resolved to the fact I was going to be there for a while. It was quite Zen.

Now, what you can't tell from the picture is that you can feel the worms in this pile if you place your hand on top, and as soon as you reach a finger in it is very soft and slimy. I continued to excavate all I could until the worms could no longer stay under the pile. I then weighed the pile, 2 1/4 lbs. This is not counting the babies lost in the separation of castings, the eggs I couldn't dig through without finding a half dozen per handful, and worms that I moved because they were attached in some way to organic waste that I was moving. Oh and the smell of the castings... earth. 

Look at them... Now I will let them sit for a little while, a week or so the little fellers left will continue to eat until they die and the crawlers will move off when there is nothing left to eat. There isn't a whole lot, the cat littler bucket is half full. but that is okay, I will convert a lot of it to worm tea anyway and give most of that away. 

Is is a nice handful of casting. Look how pretty!!!

But this is not the end, every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end. 

I thought I would use a lot more corrugated card board this time. They seem to love it. The bedding beneath is news paper though. I might have to add a little water later, I will look in on it again tonight. I didn't add any excess soil this time, I figured I already had a microbial picnic in the castings that came with the worm I already have inside. 

or

I will be posting again soon about why my bin worked. I read up on a lot of indoor vermicomposting horror stories, so I am proud that my bin worked so well. More on that later. Keep growing!!!