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 April 5th, 2008 — Posted in Animal, Food, Vegetable
Yesterday the weather cooperated in the afternoon just long enough for me to get in a little gardening. The air wasn’t real warm, but a touch of sun here and there after the previous days of rain felt really good. The vegetable garden is too wet to turn over, but at least it’s cleaned up and ready for that task.
The sights and sounds of Spring are many, and here’s my list of new life stirring in the last couple weeks here in Central Pennsylvania.
- Canada geese and snow geese flying high, going back up North
- blue birds settling into a blue bird nest box
- tulips sprouting their greenery
- Snow drops Gaultheria sp. emerging and flowering
- lily vegetation growing again
- Great Horned Owl hooting to a mate just before dawn
- grass getting greener
- rabbits enjoying the returning sorrel in the garden
- giant blue hyssop sprouting up its first purple leaves
- catnip growing up from last year’s plants
- parsley and oregano greening up
- fennel regrowing from bulb left in ground
- return of a pair of nesting Eastern Kingbirds
- Crocus bulbs up and flowering
- songbirds singly loudly in the early morning
- False Indigo Baptista just now sprouting
The maple trees will be opening their buds any day now, maybe today. The last three days their buds have been getting bigger and more noticeable.
Spring is always welcoming on the long side of Winter. So far, we seen and heard quite a few stirrings of Spring.
How about you? What is your favorite Spring sighting?
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