Gardening by Mistake

Back in early January I posted about the mistake I made with one of my worm bins when I put an entire, huge pumpkin in the bin. (The pumpkin was so large, I had to have DH bash it into pieces that would fit. That should have clued me in, but I blithely continued in my plan). The results were predictable: goopy, wet, gunk in the worm bin instead of nice vermicompost. Sewage smell instead of that lovely fresh dirt smell. I really screwed up on that one. I suppose everyone has to prove it to themselves once. I’d never done something like this to a bin before.

At any rate, in January I decided that there was no way I was going to be able to add enough dry materials (bedding and food like dried horse manure) to soak up the liquid there. I drained as much liquid as I could and then I started the process of drying the bin out by airing it. Once the surface of the bin was relatively dry, I turned it over and exposed some of the still sodden vermicompost. I’d quickly slam the bin lid back on, though, because the sewage smell was awful. (The first time it was so bad I ended up opening windows in the house while there was snow on the ground!)

I only turned it over a few times a couple days apart before leaving it to sit. I was absolutely astonished last night when I opened the bin and saw the entire surface of it covered in fluffy castings and almost all of the bedding gone! Wow! I’m going to have to finally feed that bin. When I dug down I could still find a nasty section, but only a small one and that is now airing. In just 24 hours, I expect that smell has already disappeared as the aerobic bacteria regain control. The main thing I need to do now is just continue to let the castings in the bin dry out. I’ll do that by leaving the lid off for the foreseeable future. I have to say that I have seen a lot of healthy looking worms in that bin. It’s not the recommended method for vermicomposting, but it doesn’t seemed to have hurt the herd any.

Overnight and this morning we got a layer of ice and during the day that was topped off with some snow. The weather this winter has been unbelievable.  The gray dreariness of the day has gotten to me. I almost laughed a while ago when I checked on my rudbeckias to see if they were finally blooming. They are… but they are Charlie Brown blooms. Kind of pitiful, really, and pretty fitting for the day overall.

I’ve got a new worry: my City of York climbing rose. It has “climbed” enough that it covers about 60% of my arbor. It covers more every year. At least until now. I’m not worried about the rose dying but I am worried about it dying back to the ground, or even part way. If it does that, my arbor will be uncovered and, worst of all, my traffic-stopping display of roses in May, like this one, will not happen:

That rose has always laughed at winter before now, but this winter has been a whole different beast and, frankly, I’ll be surprised if City of York doesn’t die back severely. I’ll be worrying about this until the roses leaf out. Judging by our weather so far, that’s going to be late this year, so I’ll remain in suspense longer.

The woodpeckers don’t seem impressed but the starlings love it. Darn it.

Update:

Not long after I posted this a female downy woodpecker stopped at that feeder and helped herself to the suet mix from multiple spots on the feeder. She, at least, seemed to like it. I probably just need to give the others more time. Interestingly, once she left, a chickadee who’d been watching her went over and investigated for himself.

I added a new bird feeder to my feeding station. That’s #9. I’ve been wanting to add it for a couple months. It’s a piece of tree branch from a pruning job on one of our trees.  DH carved out nice quarter-sized areas around the branch and added a hook for me. I filled the holes with a peanut butter/suet mix/bird seed mix.

This is my first attempt with making any kind of recipe for bird food. We had some bacon last night and that’s waht started the whole thing. I didn’t want to just toss out the bacon fat, so I decided I’d mix up a batch of the suet/peanut butter stuff to make a log or cake out of.  While I did that, though, I was thinking about how I’d like to put some in the log. DH had the misfortune of walking by at that moment and voila! I now have my log feeder. I also have a ton of the peanut butter mix left over, so I’ll also be making a cake out of it by adding more seed and corn meal until it’s thick enough to be shaped. My plan then is to put it into my other currently empty suet cage.

Now I have to wait for one of my woodpeckers or flickers to discover it, I guess. The starlings get aggressive around the suet, but I think they’ll be out of luck with this feeder.

Last summer I ordered some Africans (Eudrilus eugeniae) because I was curious about how they’d compare to the 3 kinds of worms I already had. One thing that was clear from the beginning was that these weren’t your “red wigglers” (eisenia fetida). These suckers were huge —about 3 times as long as an EF—and they did NOT take kindly to being bothered. Their reputation for stampeding is well deserved. I found some that traveled the entire length of my house—on carpet! I have no idea how they made it that far before drying out and turning to crispies. They are an impressive worm.

I did my usual when I got my worms: divided them into 2 bins. That’s my insurance in case of catastrophic loss of a bin, although I’d never had that problem before. That way I still have some worms left with which to build a new herd. For a variety of reasons, I ended up with two decimated herds after a couple months. I combined the two into one bin and left them alone. This time I fed them, but I tried to disturb them as little as possible; I didn’t want to cause what was left of my herd to stampede. So, for a couple months now they’ve been left alone except for food.

Today when I fed them I decided to see how they were doing. They are, in fact, GONE!  Oh, there are worms in there, probably the worms I’d caught glimpses of when adding food. But they aren’t EEs. They are EFs. There’s nothing wrong with EFs, but I did want to have the EEs, too. The EEs can produce vermicompost like mad. I just can’t figure out how the darn EFs got into that bin to begin with!  Like orphan socks in the laundry, I doubt I’ll ever know what happened.

I’ve heard the occasional titmouse sing here and there over the course of winter, which has been lovely. Last week I heard a black-capped Chickadee.  And this morning things seem to be picking up. I was greeted before it was completely light yet by cheerful Cardinal song and later this morning by some other bird. I couldn’t identify it because it was sitting in a tree in the direction of the sun, unfortunately.

I haven’t yet seen any robins, but I have to think that the increasing rates of singing and the fact that “my” goldfinches are beginning to show patches of sunny yellow are indications that, yes, spring is going to come. Someday, anyway. It’s 16 degrees here at the moment and our temperature forecast for the coming week are nowhere approaching our normal highs. But spring is coming! Now if the snow would go away, that would be easier to believe!

Last night when I went to the garage to water the plants under grow lights, I was surprised and delighted to find that a rose cutting had bloomed. It was so lovely to see on a snowy day. My rudbeckias still haven’t bloomed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a plant that takes so long to bloom from the bud. These better be spectacular; I’ve been waiting a long time to see them!

My rose seedlings of this year are still far from blooming, but I thought I’d share some from a previous year. Not all seedlings bloom this nicely. Many get tossed after the first bloom. But some are pretty right from the first.  Subsequent blooms may be even a bit better, having a few more petals or showing some fragrance but by-and-large the first bloom is a good indicator of how that rose is going to bloom. Here are a few of the prettier seedlings I’ve grown.

This is getting ridiculous. We’ve gotten (so far) about 6 inches of heavy, wet snow. The kids went out back to build snow people. I was out front, shoveling our long driveway so that my husband can actually get into it when he gets home this evening. I have yet to finish because the kids were out back for only about 5 minutes before my son popped his head over the fence and yelled, “Mom, the dogs found something and killed it!”

Are you kidding me?

Sure enough. They picked up the scent of something and started digging into the snow. It took me a couple minutes of research to identify it, but it appears Thor nailed a short-tailed shrew. Add a new species to his list. So far he’s killed 8 different species of mammals– all in our back yard, and several species of birds, as well.

Well, break time is over. Time to go shovel more snow.

Today, it looks like this here:

It’s usually in times like this that I think longingly of the years I lived in San Antonio.

There is one bright spot today. (Notice the snow is still falling):

I went on a spring break to an April from a previous year. It’s a balm to a winter-weary soul.

Blossoms from our ornamental plum tree:

A robin’s nest:

And, finally, tulips:

Some time ago I was being overrun with spam comments. I made a change to the comments and used the setting that requires a person to register before posting a comment. That stopped the spam. Unfortunately, it also stopped the real comments, too. Today someone asked me about it. I’m going to try once again allowing comments w/o registering first. Hopefully I won’t get spammed to death.