Compost vs. Vermicompost

When we moved a few months back, I was really into the prospect of starting a compost bin. Cut back on green waste? Imporve my garden soil? Healthier, happier plants? Sign me up. So I did a little digging and found that there are 2 common ways to compost - traditional pile composting and vermicomposting.  Pile composting is basically a system where you put your green waste outside and add some browns, making sure to turn the pile often to aerate. "Browns" are materials that are high in carbon, while "greens" are high in nitrogen. The ideal ratio for compost is 25-30:1, carbon to nitrogen.

Browns

• Fall leaves
• Hay & straw, cornstalks
• Shredded cardboard & newspaper, plain copy paper
• Paper plates, bags, towels
• Sticks, twigs, branches, bark
• Sawdust
• Pine needles (but not more than 10% of the pile)

Greens

• Veggie & fruit wastes
• Clean, dry eggshells
• Coffee grounds, filters, & teabags
• Seaweed (soak first to remove excess salts)
• Horse, cow, rabbit, chicken, gerbil, goat, sheep, rabbit, pig manure
• Weeds that have not yet gone to seed
• Garden clippings

Usually people have two or three different stages of compost separated out, so conventional composting can require a good amount of space. This is probably why some people opt for a compost tumbler. It can take a lot of time (3-12 months) for the compost to break down enough to be considered finished compost, depending on the temperature, carbon to nitrogen ratio. You can tell it is finished when you can't identify any of the items and the compost smells sweet. If it is stringy or smells bad, it's not done yet.

The other common way to compost is with worms. Vermicomposting seems to be a bit more flexible. All you really need is wiggler worms, a bin (to contain them), food scraps (for them to eat) and bedding (for them to live in). There are ready made worm towers that can be purchased, and vermicompost can be successfully completed indoors. Oh and it should be noted that the point of this is worm poop (castings). Sweet, sweet, nutrient-rich worm poop. Which only comes from the wriggly kinds of worms, not the beige-ish earthworms.

Red wigglers.

A rather large regular ass earthworm discovered in my garden.

  The tower systems are usually plastic and have 3 or more trays. You put the worms and bedding on the bottom tray and feed them there. Then you put the 2nd tray on top filled with more bedding. The idea is that when the worms run out of food, they will climb up to the second tray in search of more, leaving behind the castings. Once you harvest the castings from the bottom tray for your garden, move that tray to the top of the tower. This my friends, is the circle of life. Or something.

Anyway, as I have probably mentioned in previous posts, I am both lazy and cheap. Both the towers and tumblers cost at least a benjamin, and I have no available benjamins to speak of. I also have no interest in building a compost system from scratch in a rental property. When we moved in April, I... uhhh... liberated a green waste bin from the old apartment as a means of bringing some extra dirt with us. It was the heaviest thing ever known to man and when we were failing at moving it, I wondered if I should have just left it behind. But I didn't, and that my friends, is the start of a beautiful worm poop filled story: The Tale of the Vermi-Ghetto Compost. Probably coming relatively soon.

Pomegranate Blossoms: Dropping Like Flies

I don't like this one bit. I was all sorts of excited about the pomegranate plant I bought last summer. I gave it a nice big pot and lots of water and sun and it produced about 15 flowers this spring.

The buds have been growing, and 3 opened recently. Which got me EVEN MORE EXCITED. The blooms are just beautiful.

Alas, my joy was short lived. The flowers are opening one by one and then dropping all of their petals before falling of the branch. The first time it happened when I was watering, and I was so upset with myself for knocking off the bloom. When I realized a few days later that it wasn't my fault, I felt somewhat relieved that it wasn't preventable. And also seriously bummed out about the same fact. I've had 3 blooms drop now, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. My gardening lady friend, Annie, tells me this is fairly common in young pomegranate plants. All of my online research says the same thing. Womp womp. A couple of the flowers are looking a little more plump at the base, so I'm hoping I get at least one pom this season.

Project Update!

We've been wrapping up some of the larger garden projects recently, now that we have more daylight to work with. Since a lot of what we do is foolhardy experimentation, I figured it was time to update as to our progress:

Lazy Potatoes
The potatoes are hip-high and starting to flower, and as of last night have been hilled up to the hilt. The plants all seem very healthy, but it remains to be seen what kind of yeild we will get. If it works out well, I have a feeling that's how we'll plant next years sunchokes. 

Tomatoes From Seed
We had a couple of casualties, but most of the tomato seedlings made it to transplant. (Actually now that I think about it, the only post-germination casualties were the Evergreens). In the Re-Up Backyard Garden we have 1 Black Krim, 1 Super Snow White, 1 Riviera, 1 Flamme and 1Pink Ping Pong. These were the strongest of all of the seedlings and were able to be planted about a week ahead of the others. And what a difference a week makes.

The six transplants in containers are about half the size of the garden guys. Fingers crossed they catch up (doubt it). I ended up putting 3 seedlings each in a large clear storage bin from the Container Store and a hideous pink keg bucket I bought for $7 at Target. Poked some holes in the bottom and voila! Here's hoping they are deep enough though.

Companion/Antagonist Planting
So the master plan, after I realized my faux-pas in planting the kohlrabi near the tomatoes and peppers, was to plant a barrier of carrots to separate the kohlrabi from its nemeses. I even got so far as planting said barrier. But in the time it takes for carrots to germinate, the kohlrabi seedlings started to develop their first true leaves and it occured to me that I could just transplant them somewhere else. So I did. There are now 4 happy kohlrabi seedlings tucked in by the onions and basil and two more in containers with mint and scallions.

Alas, I don't get to test out how genius my carrots as a barrier plan could have been. I will have to wait til I screw the pooch on something else.

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

Happy Summer Solstice!

Screw the holidays; summertime is where it's at. We've had a delicious little heat wave here in the Bay for the last 4 or 5 days, and I never want it to end! I have been waiting ALL YEAR for how full of life and possibility the air feels during these summer months. Hopefully the harvest can't be too far down the line! :)

Operation Evil Kitty

I am not even remotely a cat person. Unfortunately, the lady across the street from me is. She has, I swear, like four thousand cats. And she feeds all of the feral cats in the neighbourhood, so we are overrun [Quick side note: she also lives with what appears to be her adult son who bears an uncanny resemblance to Randy from trailer Park Boys].  These are not adorable kittens or useful mouse catchers. These are filthy beasts (and they are filthy) that spend their days pooping in my garden, eating the leaves off my plants and giving me the evil eye from Charles' roof. All efforts against this feline invasion have been dubbed Operation Evil Kitty.

Our first attempts at OEK proved futile. I had heard that cats are particular about scents, so I loaded up our fence with diluted neem oil. I also heard that they don't like cayenne pepper, so I sprinkled that everywhere too. Add that to watering at night so the ground is too wet for any stealthy nighttime deposits, and we thought we had a pretty decent strategy. Alas, the effects of the neem/cayenne mix only lasted for a few days - less if it rained - and the cats turned out to have low standards as to the dryness of their "litter". There is nothing more frustrating than waking up to the shining sun, heading out to the garden to enjoy my morning coffee and being bombarded with smelly cat poop and the reminder of OEK's failure.

But wait! This is a triumphant tale! I woke up Saturday afternoon at 3 (we had quite the Friday night, fun and lap dances were had by all) and had an epiphany. What I needed to do was make the area of our fence that the cats use for transportation into an uninviting place. Did I mention how hungover I was? I hated life that day. Breathing was tough, so you can imagine what it took for me to put any plan at all into action. But I wandered into the garden, hammer and nails in hand, and drove ten 3-inch nails through the transportation area of the fence, at what I approximated to be kitty height. This took about thirty times longer than it should have, but now those bastards have to use the sidewalk like everyone else, or risk being poked by sharp objects. Today is the second morning in a row that I haven't found any evidence of cats in the garden. Suck on that kitties! Muahahahahaha!

Operation Evil Kitty - 1
Filthy Cats - 0

How Close is Too Close? Companion and Antagonist Planting

I really like the idea of companion planting; it makes sense to me that plants would interact with each other when planted in close proximity to other plants. Much like people, plants will do better or worse depending on the plants you surround them with. This is certainly not a new idea in organic gardening. The three sisters planting method has been around longer than the United States has been a country and I've heard that in China the practice dates back as far as 1000 years.

There are different reasons different plants get along well (or don't) - some have chemical interactions, others amend the soil in specific ways, or provide protection from the sun, wind or pests. I find that it is always helpful to know why some plants do better or worse together. Are they susceptible to the same diseases or are they both heavy feeders? The former should be avoided, but the latter can be worked with. Here's a pretty decent overview of some companion plants and their effects. It's not complete by any means, but a pretty good place to start.

My main issue in researching this topic has been determining spacing for antagonistic plants. They say not to plant brassica near tomatoes, but what is "near" exactly? 1 ft? Opposite ends of a plot? Different beds? I can't find ANY information at all on spacing, so I'm going to start compiling my own data, seeing what flourishes and what suffers due to possible antagonistic interactions. This is mostly because I don't really plan my gardens in advance and unfortunately have already sown a few sworn enemies next to each other. Fingers crossed they play nice. If not, at least I'll know better next year.

Hardening Off: Not Nearly As Fun As the Name Implies

So hardening off sucks. It takes patience and I have none, so it is not a task for which I am well suited. Add to that that I have a day job, and it gets even more tricky. But the fact is, it has to be done. Seedlings started indoors are accustomed to 14-16 hours a day of artificial light, which is considerably weaker than the sun's rays (6-8 hours is considered full sun). If you just throw those poor guys out in full sun, they will get burned beyond repair and all your hard work coaxing them to germinate and then not die will be for nothing. Because they will die. I heard somewhere that hardening off is 90% about acclimating seedlings to the sun and 10% wind/temperature.

So for the first 3 days I put the dudes out at 8am on the west side of the house, where they would get very little, if any, direct sunlight. My roommate was charged with bringing them in before he went to work in the early afternoon. After a few days it was time to get working on UV tolerance, so I placed all the seedlings in a clear plastic crate and put them in the sun with the lid mostly closed for 4 hours a day. It's been 4 days of hardening off phase two, and the seedlings are starting to look strong and happy.

I'd like to get them up to a couple of hours of direct unfiltered sunlight, but the Bay Area weather sucks balls this week. All we are getting is rain, rain and more fucking rain. And it's June. Total bullshit. So I am currently debating whether some of the plants are ready to go in the ground after a week of haphazard hardening off. There shouldn't be very much sun this next week (thanks a lot mother nature), so I'm hoping they would survive. My garden is really starting to fill up, so it's a good thing that I already planned to have 3 tomato plants in the ground. The rest will have to be planted in various containers (keg buckets, large planters, the aforementioned clear crate with holes drilled throught the bottom) or gifted away.