Gardening by Mistake

I’ve been spending a lot of time weeding the tall grass prairie that took over my garden. (That is, if a tall grass prairie was made of invasive, non-native grasses). I did a great job of staying on top of the weeds until about mid-July. Then we had unbelievable heat and humidity and I hid inside. The weeds kept growing with abandon.

I’ve been noticing what is still growing and what is no longer in evidence from what I planted. So far, aquilegia is the only thing I’ve noticed that has vanished. Oh, and one of my asclepias tuberosa plants. Everything else is still hanging on somehow. It’s been a hot and dry summer since mid-July. My viola pedatifida, WS and planted this year, were looking beautiful on Friday morning as I weeded. On Saturday evening they’d vanished, no trace that they’d ever been there. I assume the blasted rabbits got them.

As I’ve been weeding I’ve had a lot of time to think about this year’s gardening and I’ve gotten pretty bummed out about what seems like my many failures this year, the first and most noticeable of which is the current weed situation.  Another item high on the list is my failure to get as many plants added as I’d set out to. My goal was 350 plants. Last year I added 170 or so. So far this year, I’m at a measly 123. I still have winter sown plants sitting around waiting to be planted, so it’s possible (I don’t know that it’s likely, though) that I could make it to 170 this fall. I’ve just got to get more planted next year. And that might sound like a lot of plants, but I have (stupidly) 1,000 square feet of garden to fill in. 170 is a drop in a very large bucket. Added to my list of disappointments are the failure to get my prairie rain garden in and my front border done. Both of those go on my list for next year.

Maybe by the end of the growing season I’ll have gotten more planted and everything will be nicely weeded and maybe even mulched and I’ll feel better about things. For now, though, I’d have to say that this growing season was a real disappointment and failure.

I’m slow getting this last batch of pics up, but better late than never.

It was so hot the day we were there that this guy couldn’t be bothered even when the flash went off in his face.

After having left the feeders empty all summer, I put food out about 2 weeks ago. Although the birds have visited the feeders since then, today it seems the entire neighborhood has stopped by. In the past hour I’ve had a feisty Carolina wren, a house wren, a male house finch and two of his chicks, a female cardinal and her female chick, a blue jay (juvenile, I believe), a male goldfinch, and a Carolina black-capped chickadee stop by. And a downy woodpecker was checking out the apples on the tree nearby.  And these are just the birds I know of!

Out in the garden, the dogwood shrub is hosting a great many birds who find its berries to be irresistible.

When I checked the yard, I found even more activity: a wren family, a robin family, a grackle family, and a brown thrasher were all busily moving around my back yard.

Update: not long after, a hummingbird dropped by the feeding station to check it out. I don’t have any hummingbird feeders. He investigated a tube feeder out there that has maroon perches. I was sorry I didn’t have something for him.

I’ve got to clear up something that drives me absolutely nuts. Many people refer to “worm tea” but they are actually talking about leachate. The two are not the same thing and are not interchangeable. So what’s the difference?

Worm “tea” is better called “vermicompost tea” because we’re brewing the vermicompost and not the worms themselves. It is made from finished vermicompost or worm castings.

Leachate, on the other hand, is that liquid which may drip from your stackable worm bin system. That tells you that your bin has more liquid in it than it needs. A worm bin that is too wet can easily become anaerobic. It’s important to know that the leachate likely contains harmful compounds as well as helpful. For instance, anaerobic decomposition produces alcohols and other things which are toxic to your plants. These can be present in the leachate. The problem with the leachate is that you just simply do not know what you are pouring onto your plants. Some people use it and like their results. My guess is that those people have systems which are well run and perhaps use the same inputs most of the time so that they get pretty much the same leachate each time, a leachate that happens to not be full of harmful compounds. There’s no way to know for sure, however, until you’ve poured it onto some plants. You won’t know if there are harmful compounds in it until your plants crisp up and die or show other signs of damage. Why risk it? If you do risk it, you’d be wise to dilute it a lot first or pour some of it onto a weed and see how it reacts before applying it to plants you value.

With vermicompost tea, you can be much more confident about what you are pouring onto your plants if you are using finished VC. The one exception I can think of to this would be a vermicompost high in salts. This might happen, for instance, if chicken feed containing salts was used as the primary food source. Over time, that salt content is going to built in the VC and it’s possible it could end up at a high enough level that the tea could be too salty for the plants.

It’s so hot outside (heat index of 115) that I’m not even worrying about getting out there. Yes, knowing the weeds are there is driving me crazy, but not so crazy that I can’t wait until it’s not 100 degrees outside. In the meantime, I’m harvesting my worm bins.  This is a good time to get it done. In a few weeks, when it’s cooler, I’ll want to be outside finally catching up on weeding, getting more of my WS plants into the ground, spraying my roses, etc. It also works out well because the bins won’t need to be harvested until winter sets in and I have little in the way of gardening tasks.

More pictures from our recent visit to Lake Shawnee.

The question is: is it okay to add pureed food to the worm bin?

The answer is: yes, but…

Pureeing the food before adding it to the worm bin is a double-edged sword. The benefit of doing this is that it helps the food decompose more quickly, becoming worm-ready more quickly. Pureeing the food opens up many times more surface area for the microbes and the worms to begin munching on. The disadvantage to pureeing is that it introduces a lot of liquid moisture at once. It’s no more moisture than the food would contain if put in the bin in an un-pureed form, but that liquid would become freed up from that food at a much slower rate. People who puree the foods before adding them to the bin often do so in conjunction with adding something else that is dry at the same time, to help soak up some of that moisture. For example, adding rolled oats or even newspaper or cardboard shreds. The idea is to keep the liquid from collecting and pooling and turning the bin into a muck. Adding dry materials to suck up that moisture keeps the bin in balance.

There was a time when I did  the pureed food. That was a long time ago. It was a hassle to make it, for one thing, and it did make moisture control a challenge.  If you happen to have food that is already pureed (say, left over baby food or some such), by all means add it to your bin. If you are wondering if it’s worth the effort to puree your scraps before putting them into the bin, well, it may not be. Maybe you’d rather spend your time and energy on something else and let the worms do the work for you.

One other consideration: many people keep worms as part of their efforts to be good stewards of the environment. For these people, it doesn’t make sense to use electricity to puree the food when the worms will do the work on their own slightly slower schedule. They see this as incompatible with being “green.” That might be the case for you, too.

I am experiencing a fruit fly infestation. Don’t think, though, that this is something that will happen to everyone who has a worm bin. It happens to me when I get careless. It can be avoided.

My son put a the remains of a banana into one bin and didn’t get all of it covered. On top of that, I didn’t cover the entire surface of VC with a several-inch thick layer of newspaper shreds. So, the fruit fly eggs on the banana peel hatched and those fruit flies found a great place for further reproduction. When the problem didn’t resolve on its own, I decided I was going to have to take action. Yesterday I filled the entire empty area of the worm bin with newspaper shreds. What isn’t full of vermicompost and material the worms are eating is full of newspaper shreds. This should prevent the adult fruit flies from getting back to the vermicompost and materials from outside the bin. They will have to penetrate a LOT of newspaper shreds, and they just won’t be able to do much of this. So they won’t be able to lay more eggs. And conversely, those eggs already present that do hatch will be prevented from leaving the bin easily. It may take a couple weeks, but the infestation should resolve with these measures. (Of course, if a person with this problem has other sources of fruit flies around a house, then the problems with them will continue until those are fixed, as well).

In addition to making sure scraps are completely covered within the bin, there is another thing you can do to reduce the odds of a fruit fly infestation: freeze your scraps before adding them to the bin. Usually, I freeze my banana skins (and other fruit) for a couple days before adding them to the bin. The freezing kills the fruit fly eggs.  Next time, I’ll tell my son to put the banana skin in the freezer, instead of the worm bin!

Last Saturday, our family spent some time at the gardens of Lake Shawnee in Topeka, Kansas. What a gem! As I understand it, these gardens were done entirely by volunteers. They did a fantastic job!

Enjoy!

Oh boy did I overdo it in the garden today (Sunday).  On the positive side, I got a LOT of weeds pulled and made a lot of progress. On the other hand, I still have tons more weeds to go and I probably won’t be able to move my legs for a few days. Ha! It figures.

While out there I made the happy discovery that I do actually have at least one snake out there. I didn’t see the snake, but I saw the skin it shed. I’m fine with keeping that as close to encountering the snake as I come. I don’t care if I ever see it/them– I just want them out there eating voles, grasshoppers and whatever else. I’d say I wish they’d eat the damn rabbits that get into the garden, but I don’t think I want my snakes that big! Vole-eating-sized is good enough for me.

Saturday we were in Topeka for the day. We spent some time at the Lake Shawnee gardens. I’m intending to get some pictures from that visit up this coming week. Maybe I’ll work on that while my legs recover from today!

The poison ivy count continues to climb. I don’t know how many of those buggers I pulled today. It had to be more than 100. And that was only in the front border and front flower bed! I haven’t even started on the back yard or the rose garden. It’s crazy.  It’s a very good thing I don’t get rashes from the stuff.