Posted by wilde on September 20th, 2008 — Posted in Animal, Food, Vegetable
Here’s my little bean pot. It even has a lid! I use it to collect a few days of coffee grinds, tea bags and vegetable scraps from the kitchen.
Bean pot with a lid for saving food scraps to feed my worms.
The occasional cutting of a houseplant, bits of string, egg shells, just about anything that’s organic can go in there. Red wiggler worms are not particular about the rotting organic foods that we offer to them in our little worm bins. They’ll even eat the paper bedding.
The only types of foods that are recommended NOT to be fed to your worms are oil-based foods, like meats, cheeses or oils. Any dinner plate scraps go to the dogs while food preparation scraps go to the worms.
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Posted by wilde on September 17th, 2008 — Posted in Animal, Food, Vegetable
Worms are our friends. They convert lots of organic material as part of Nature’s food webs. We can take advantage of this fact by farming with worms, where the desired product is compost, a source of available nutrients for plants.
Recycling food waste and house plant clippings into compost is very desirable. We can save on the expense to haul the waste away and get a beneficial product in return for a few moments of our attention. It takes only a few minutes to separate food wastes or plant clippings into a separate container for feeding your worms.
Feeding your worms can be as easy as opening the cupboard under your kitchen sink, raising the lid on the worm bin and throwing in the scraps - no meat, cheese, or oils, please. Ours is in the garage, so we place kitchen scraps in an old bean pot that sits on the counter by the sink. It took me forever and many a flea market to find one with a lid, but persistence pays off!
There are more modern-looking solutions to the bean pot. Just make sure you get a compost bucket with a lid!
It’s easy to get started recycling your kitchen waste into compost gold.
Six steps to recycling kitchen waste:
- Get worms. Use Red Wiggler worms. Can mail order worms arbico earthworms 1000 or get from a friend.
- Set up bin. Large plastic container with lid and tray or spigot to remove excess liquid and air holes for the worms.
- Get crock. Pail with a lid or arbico compost container for holding kitchen waste.
- Tear up newspaper. Any paper will do fine for bedding. Newspaper, envelopes, junk mail, old bills, any paper, colored or not.
- Add worms to moist bedding and empty food waste crock into bin.
- Keep moist. Use a spray bottle to keep moist or soak paper in water before adding to bin.
Compost has been shown to be a rich source of nutrients for plants. The nutrients in worm castings, as their poop is called, are highly available, which means that the nutrients in compost are more easily absorbed or used by the plants as compared to the nutrients in chemical fertilizers.
If you need to get worms, try Arbico Organics - they have a sale going on now - Get 5% Off all products! Use code MC50!
Arbico carries a 3 tray and a 5 tray version of the Factory of Worms, which is a fast way to set up your worm bin and great if you just don’t want to mess with anything! This is the kind of company I like to support. Arbico supports organic farmers and like-minded folks who enjoy using natural products.
It feels good to recycle materials that otherwise become part of our collective waste stream. Our plants benefit from it and we do too, by being surrounded with the beauty of nature and enjoying all her bounty.
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Posted by wilde on September 12th, 2008 — Posted in Vegetable
Driving along a country road here in Pennsylvania you’re likely to see many a roadside weed. Weeds like Queen Anne’s Lace or wild carrot, chicory and goldenrods are flowering everywhere. These weeds are wildflowers to me, but to others they are nothing more than weeds in a field.
My definition of a weed is a plant that grows where you don’t want it to grow. So, by definition, a rose bush could be a weed. These roadside “weeds” are growing right where they’re supposed to grow.
A new wildflower for me is a pretty, four-petaled white blossom called Virgin’s Bower. It’s a vine that grows alongside of Jewelweed, New York Ironweed, Joe-Pye weeds, brambles and thistles.
Virgin’s Bower flowering along a country road in Pennsylvania.
Compound leaves of Virgin’s Bower, Clematis virginiana, are strongly toothed, in threes and may have purple stems.
Classified as a non-woody vine Virgin’s Bower climbs over brush and, in sunny moist locations, it practically coats roadside vegetation with clusters of white flowers.
Virgin’s Bower grows like a vine over and on top of other vegetation.
Flowers consist of 4 white, petal-like sepals and many white stamens in clusters in the leaf axils.
Young flowers of Virgin’s Bower just starting to open up.
As with most members of the Buttercup family, Ranunculaceae, Virgin’s Bower contains toxic compounds. Be careful handling Virgin’s Bower as contact can be highly irritating to skin and mucous membranes. Even though the whole plant was used in liniments in the past, some people are sensitive to it. Consuming it may produce upper and lower gastrointestinal upsets and even convulsions.
Anyone having Clematis plants in their garden may recognize the fruit of this native clematis species. Virgin’s Bower fruit has the creative name of ‘Old Man’s Beard’ due to the scraggly appearance of gray, feathery plumes which are attached to the seeds of the female plant.
What do the seeds of the male plant look like? How can you tell the female plants from the male plants at other times of the year?
Keep observing and we’ll learn about it - all in due time, My Pretty!
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