Winter Garden

We've taken all the plants out of the big garden bed now. We have had some hard freezes that killed our lettuces and chard. We did not cover the broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts or any of the greens last week for a few of those freezes and they are damaged. It's hard for these things to grow in all this freezing weather. Some of the greens survived--we'll see how long we can keep them alive.

In preparation for next year's gardening we have collected free manure and leaves. We were able to get a big truck load of composted horse manure from our friends Ben and Kristen at Five Leaves Farm. They have an agreement with some stables who dump manure at their farm on a regular basis. Ben generously loaded and delivered it to our house last week in exchange for dinner and Daniel's help on the farm.

Daniel and the girls went out last night and collected leaves from the neighborhood. The girls had so much fun playing in the leaves. They always talk about how we used to play in huge piles when we lived in Indianapolis but now we only have big piles of pine needles which are not too fun to jump in. Anyway, they took a tarp and raked huge piles of leaves into the back of our car for three loads of good compost material.

Basically we have created a huge compost pile in our garden bed. We are adding our kitchen scraps to the bed also. So, instead of having a separate small compost pile we're just mixing everything right into the bed. We will be mixing it all together either manually or with a tiller. We hope that by next year the sandy soil that we started with will be nice and fertile. At least it will be better than what we started with!

From Trash to Treasure

I have been thinking about how I can get more boxes/bins for my worms. They double in population about every month! If you leave them in the same container and keep feeding them some will eventually die off, but you can keep them in that same area for a long time. Since I've been collecting the castings and adding them to the garden (and making compost tea as a fertilizer) I've been wanting a way to be able to collect even more. I've been keeping my eyes out for bins on the side of the road (Isn't it amazing what people throw away?) since I knew I didn't want to buy any new materials for this project.

A few weeks ago, while driving to a friend's house, I spotted this big blue bin. When I stopped to take a closer look I noticed it smelled terrible--like someone was using for a garbage bin and instead of dumping the garbage out, they decided to dump the whole bin. (can you imagine how long it would take something like this to decompose in a landfill?) I almost just left it there. But I got my guts up and used a plastic bag to pick it up, dump it and put it in the back of my car. It barely fit! When I got home I hosed it off really good and cleaned it out. Since it was going to be for my worms it didn't need to be that clean, right:) I drilled air holes, loaded it with bedding (soil and moist newsprint and cardboard) and added the worms. After that I thought that it was looking a little faded and sad so I asked the girls to come out and help me make it pretty. It's so much nicer to feed the worms and collect their poo when I have the girls beautiful artwork to look at!

I didn't get a picture of the bin before cleaning, but here it is right after I loaded it with the bedding.

The girls first primed it with some leftover kilz then painted it with some acrylics.
Here are my newest 2 bins. All together I have 3 bins that I keep in the carport. Notice the new bin is bigger and has wheels. I saw a new one at Lowe's the other day priced at $16.99! Maybe others wouldn't consider this trash turned into treasure, but when you consider what a bag of worm castings or bottle of compost tea costs, plus the cost of the bin--this is surely a treasure to any gardener!

Semester over and more time spent in backyard

All of these pictures and the idea for this post actually happened last week. But, the days kept passing and I'm just now getting to it. Daniel finished up his semester last week. Congrats to him for completing his final semester of course work towards his PhD. We have been taking a little break and spending a lot of time in the yard before summer school starts next week. This first picture shows the big bed. Since it was taken last week some of the beds actually look a lot bigger already! You can't really see what's going on in each bed but I thought it was nice because it kinda gives you an idea of what's going on in the yard. We've had requests to show the whole yard. It's really not that big there's just a lot going on! So here you see the bed, the holly tree with hammock underneath, the new bean trellis in front of shot and the pomegranate on the back left of the picture. You can see a little bit of our back deck as well.
This is a close up of the potatoes that Daniel spent several hours last weekend hilling. We started the seed potatoes in trenches. Once they got to be about a foot above ground he piled up soil around the plants and created little hills to provide more room for growing the potatoes. We have russet, red and yellow potatoes coming up.
While playing around in the backyard Daniel spotted this swarm of honey bees. It was so cool. They were on one of the tree branches in the hedge along the back side of the yard. We watched in amazement for a little while. Since they were in search of a new hive they didn't stay here long. They were gone the next day.
Another thing we have been doing is keeping better watch of the compost pile. We always have a big one in the back corner of the yard. This time we started it mostly with horse manure and leaves from other people's yards. After turning and watering it we tracked the temperature every day. The first day after turning it was 80 degrees (same as temp. outside). The next day it was about 90, then the next day 100-110. The temp steadily increased and by the 4th day it was at 140. We were very excited!We will turn it again soon. I should post a more detailed description of composting or at least what we do in case anyone reading would like to start one. Here is a great article I read online (I was reading in bed on Mother's Day!) that can get anyone started turning their yard and kitchen waste into "gardener's gold." Of course you can find books all about it at your local library too :)
We've talked about our rain barrels before. We have set up 5 different ones in the back yard. Two are under down spouts of gutters next to the house. Then we have 2 that are right next to the garden. During big rains, Daniel siphons water with a hose from the ones closest to the house to the ones in the garden.
Daniel and I installed these gutters on the shed a few weeks ago and he rigged them to pour into the 5th barrel.