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The Backyard Science group regularly features the Daily Bucket. Tomatoes not ripening? Did you pocket a interesting looking pebble? Extra-pretty moths flitting around the parsley? Please add your own observations in a comment. Insects, weather, meteorites, climate, birds, and more are all worthy additions to the Bucket. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, your location. Your impressions will provide additional viewpoints of the life around us.
Like most of the Bucket readers, I practically worship fertile soil for the yard. As an hippy, I also recycle. So I have a couple of compost heaps where my kitchen scraps, garden wastes, grass clippings, and most of my sticks and twigs go, to re-enter the cycle of life. Composting recycles your organic matter and adds beneficial organisms and nutrients to your soil.
Now a real high-class professional compost heaper organizes their pile so that the heaps’ interior reaches 150 degrees. That supposedly kills all the weed seeds in the pile. That requires diligent attention to the compost heap.
For an alternative approach, please proceed below the wrestling orange worms.
You are also supposed to aim at a mix of 30 parts carbon (sticks, leaves, grass clippings) to one part of nitrogen (kitchen wastes).
For me, I’m afraid that monitoring the compost pile heat levels and mixture ratios is way down on my list of priorities, especially during weeks when 20 pears a day are falling from the trees. I probably maintain about a 10 to 1 carbon/nitrogen ratio.
Having failed to meet the textbook standards, I’ve invented a different approach, which I term “worm farming.”
In NW Oregon, we may get 4 feet of rain from October to May. This means that massive amounts of worms infiltrate the soaking wet compost pile to devour the kitchen scraps. I’ve even picked up worms off of the golf course, put them in a plastic bag and brought them home, for release on the compost heap. I don’t create a steaming compost pile. I try to create a happy place for lots of worms.
If it doesn't rain that much where you live, famished red wriggler worms are sold in the internet, and just try and dump water on your heap every couple of days.
Here are my two heaps, and since this is a Daily Bucket, a bucket also.
Then when I shovel the compost onto the garden spot in the Spring, every shovel full looks like it is half worms and half dirt. I feel happy. The compost-recipient plants surge from the earth. Look at that basil!
Unfortunately, some unapproved plants also surge from the earth, since my imitation compost heap didn’t heat up and kill all of the seeds.
Here are some pictures of the recent “volunteers” from application of about a half-cubic-yard of wormy compost onto double-dug ground.
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Some of the volunteers are welcome; please note the tomatoes to the right. And the cukes, on the left, which have already produced edible progeny, in record time. Ms. 6 tells me that the original tomatoes and cukes were hybrids, and these second growth seedlings have regressed to produce the features of one of their parents. For instance, the former Roma tomatoes are now growing in as round, rather than pear shaped fruit. The volunteer cukes feature a variety of shapes and sizes.
Unhappily, I am also pulling up tall specimens of California brome (Bromus carinatus), a broad-leaf grass, and Amaranthus powellii (Powell’s Amaranth). I'm not picturing those, I don't want to encourage them.
I don’t know how those weed seeds got into the compost mix, or how they survived. I suspect squirrels had a role. But I always suspect squirrels. If I can’t find my glasses, I figure the squirrels got inside and hid them.
So before I spout any more about squirrels, please take a turn yourself, and tell us about your corner of the world.
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