The Great Worm Escape
- On March 21, 2012
- By Meleah
- In Books, Bugs, Fertilizer, Soil, Sustainable Agriculture, Vermicomposting
- 3
I’ve read that you can always tell something is wrong with your worm bin if your worms try to escape. Too much acidity, heat from decomposing food and other organic matter, excessive dryness or moisture——there are a lot of things that make worms want to flee. I don’t know what happened in my bin, but last Wednesday morning I went down to the basement to check on the worms and was horrified to find most of them plastered to the underside of the bin’s plastic lid.
Not wanting to squish anyone, I carried the worm-covered lid upstairs to the kitchen along with the rest of the bin. Deadlines were pressing, but I couldn’t just let the worms suffer. So I made myself a cup of coffee, put on an old Smith’s CD (because nobody puts an upbeat spin on misery quite like Morrissey) and sat down on the kitchen floor to sort worms into a separate, clean container.
Read More»Let the Vermicomposting Begin
I have wanted a worm bin for years, ever since I read Amy Stewart’s great book: “And the Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievement of Earthworms,” to be exact. Yesterday, I finally bought one while attending “Burst Into Spring,” an annual lecture series put on by the Isanti County Master Gardeners.
I was invited to the event to speak about my new book, “Decoding Gardening Advice,” and over the lunch break I got to talking with Roger Welck from Princeton, Minnesota. He’d heard my talk and wanted to know why I’d discussed compost, but hadn’t covered vermicompost.
Time was the only reason, I told him. Vermicomposting is touched on in the book. But I’d removed those slides from the presentation for that day because it was kind of an involved topic, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to fit it in. “Damn you!” he joked, gesturing toward his vendor table laden with bagged vermicompost, worms in buckets and worm bins.
Read More»Fertilizer 101
- On July 17, 2010
- By Meleah
- In Fertilizer, Organic Gardening
- 0
Raise your hand if you don’t feed your plants like you know you probably should? Yeah, my hand is up, too. There’s no question that plants need nutrients to thrive but, somehow, fertilizing is always low on my list of gardening tasks.
Part of the reason for this is that the garden really doesn’t look like it’s struggling, so I put off feeding for another day. But left on their own year after year, plants will deplete the soil of primary macronutrients nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P) and potassium (K), which is why you find these most often in packaged fertilizers you buy off the shelf.
To a lesser degree, and at a much slower rate, secondary and micronutrients like sulfur, calcium, magnesium, iron, copper and manganese may also be depleted over time.
Read More»Fall Tips
Well, fall and winter are on the way, and that means there’s a lot to do outdoors. Normally, I don’t spend much time talking about lawn care. I’m just not that interested in grass and, to be honest, I’m embarrassed by the fact that I can hardly manage to start our mower by myself — all the cord yanking and lever pushing. Maybe it’s a coordination thing?
But I do realize that lots of people do care about their lawns, so here we go. Let’s talk about some things you can do to keep your grass healthy and looking good. Though it’s too late to do any more seeding, you can still lay sod for a new lawn or just use some chunks to repair damaged spots. Be sure to water enough to keep the surface of the soil moist. Once it takes root, you can start mowing and reduce watering. Keep mowing until you notice that your grass, old or new, has stopped growing.
Read More»What To Do With All Those Fall Leaves
This summer’s storms cost our neighbor a beautiful oak tree that was well over a hundred years old. Now, all they’ve got to remind them of it is a huge rotting stump in their backyard that stinks like vinegar crossed with something sickeningly sweet. They miss the tree and we miss it, too, because once it was gone we realized how our back patio now boasts a majestic view of crisscrossing power lines. I want to plant a tree near our garage to remedy the situation and my husband, Mike, agrees that’s a good idea. As long as we get one that doesn’t have any leaves.
You see, he hates to rake and, though I am not a candidate for any kind of Green Girl moniker, so far I just won’t budge on the leaf blower issue. We can’t buy one. Not even an electric one. And it’s not as if he’s griping unnecessarily. We already have three big oak trees that blanket our yard with so many leaves we both rake until our hands blister and bleed every year. But here’s where my little do-no-harm-to-the-world-by-raking plan goes awry. We bag our leaves and haul them to the curb for pick-up.
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