The wonderful world of compost

Every farmer, irregardless of the size of the farm, must do some sort of composting. I am sure even Luke Skywalkers uncle did some sort of composting for his moisture farm. I also imagine the garbage compactor in the Death Star was really just a big compost bin and I am pretty sure that there is a garrison of storm troopers assigned to weed and hoe on the gardening level.

Composting is a great way to recycle old items into garden feed. Over time kitchen scraps and other things will decompose and look a lot like dirt. Its pretty amazing.

Here is my original compost pile

Really it's just a big pile of dirt where I would dump my grass clippings. I recently got a really great pitch fork and when I tried to turn the dirt I found that the tree had grown lots of roots into the pile making it pretty useless. Oh well.

It turns out there is a lot of science that takes place in a compost pile. It takes the right amount of wet and dry ingredients plus heat and air flow to break down the waste. 

There are three primary phases in the composting process.

1. The active or thermophilic phase - In this phase the material is broken down most rapidly. Aerobic bacteria alter the chemical makeup causing the pile to heat up. This phase can take from 1-4 months depending on conditions.
2. The curing or mesophilic phase - After the initial phase the temperatures stabilize and lower. Bacteria that prefer a lower temperature take over the decomposition process and turning of the pile is not needed. At this point the material is not recognizable as its original form. Curing usually takes less than 3 months.
3. The maturing phase - In this phase the pile transitions to materials that are less prone to microbial breakdown. If you have a male compost pile maturation may take longer but will eventually occur.

I am trying two things for my compost piles. 

For my first I took a plastic bin and drilled holes for aeration and drainage.

This has worked really well as I can role the tub around the yard to mix things up. It also heats in the sun to speed up the process of decomposition.

Here is me throwing a worm into the bin:

Worms and bugs help with the process of breaking down matter. My compost started out like this:

Really just a pile of grass clippings and kitchen waste. After a month or two it looks like this:

You can still make out the egg shells but it now looks like dirt. This is good stuff and will be good for the plants.

I am also trying out another bin. Old paletts are readily available so I took four and joined them:

I am going to start dumping my clippings here and adding leaves and kitchen waste to a proper ratio of wets items and dry items. I have read that a proper ratio is 5 parts dry to 1-2 parts wet.

The pallet should work well as it will provide excellent ventilation and I can dump things in easily. Here is the inside:

I will keep you, my avid readers, updated on the progress of these exciting projects.

Here are some general pictures of the garden this week:

A tall sunflower:

A pallet to keep my melons off of the ground:

They are growing like crazy.
My son, Edison, pulled this broccoli yesterday while he was helping me weed. I stuck it back in but it doesn't look good:

Some other random pictures:

This tomato doesn't look good. I don't know why.

Mr Bean:

Happy Weeding

Friends of the Jedi Gardener

One thing that I love about gardening is all of the friends that I have met. The many comments on this blog are great and it also seems that gardeners are very helpful and willing to share their experiences.

I have had some really great advice about many things but recently I have received advice about how to control garden weeds.

I used to not mind weeds so much. They add nice greenery to any garden and provide shelter for numerous bugs.

Weeds have always been a problem for me because I just figured I didn't have the time to keep weeding day in and day out and would have to wait to retire before I had a weed free garden. Every time I weed the pesky weeds keep coming back even after using the amazing stirrup hoe.

A good gardening friend said that she adds her grass clippings to her garden. This does two things. First, it acts as a mulch helping the soil not to dry out so quickly and second, as it decomposes, it releases nutrients into the soil. I am pretty sure this will be solid gold for the garden.

Here is a picture with a few layers of clippings:

Here are the clippings after they sit for a few weeks:

It looks much better after weeding and adding the clippings. I am hoping that this will prevent the weeds from coming back.

I also have a few neighbors who are very helpful with the garden:

Those are Skinks.

I also have a number of worms that I will be adding to my compost bin:

I will be writing about the bin soon. Its very exciting.

On a carrot note I have a carrot that has grown rather large. Here is a picture:

Who knew that carrots eventually grew flowers? I didn't.

I am concerned about pulling this Carrot as I don't want it to turn out like the last short carrot and I am considering leaving this as Schrodinger's Carrot! It currently exists as both a short and log carrot. This is a great vegetable paradox joke (Schrodinger's Cat). Ha ha.

Here are some random pictures of the garden in its current state. I think I will be picking some items soon:

These are Leak flowers. Pretty cool.

These are a few tomatoes:

These are squashes and cucumbers:

Here are some beans:

Below is a cucumber almost ready to pickle:

Vegetable garden the prequel

Here is a picture of my garden at the end of last season:

Its a mess as you can see. The cucumber trellis on the left has no cucumbers, the little string trellis I made provided a house for spiders and nothing else and the rest of the plants are a nightmare of weeds and droopy leaves. Disgusting.

I love to water and I am pretty sure that the plants like it too. Unfortunately last year I think that I over watered and caused the plants to rot away.

Well this year I am turning things around. My goals this year were to really plan my garden out, plant from seed if possible and organize my garden into rows. I also expanded the garden. Here is how it looked after the expansion before planting my plants.

I used the plastic to try and heat up the weeds. I think it would have worked better in the hot summer but it did an ok job.

Here is a picture of it now after planting for a few  months.

I have had to deviate from some of the well defined rows because of the lack of sun. I have a large tree to the left of my garden that has now sprung to life and is now blocking the sun for part of the day. Shady vegetables like lettuce are being moved over to the right shadier side of the garden. My cucumber trellis is also quite large and my rows have become a bit disorganized because of that. I will plan better next year.

Sowing the seeds

The weather this year has been quite strange. It's mid May and the past few weeks have been chilly. Luckily it is just starting to warm up. The rain has also been constant. Every day is dreary and rainy.

While this weather is depressing to me I am pretty sure it is good for plants. I haven't had to water much at all and I have tried seeding some new plants in the hope that it is not to late to start. Previously I had direct seeded in the ground.

This turned out badly in most cases:

Poor little plant. Some of the plants have done ok but I have decided that it is much more difficult to control conditions when direct seeding and that planting in pots and then transplanting might produce better results.

Here is what I do to plant my seeds. First my dog Kramer helps me arrange my little pots. He is especially interested because he needs to decide what to trample after I plant them. I reuse pots that used to contain store bought plants. 

For small seeds like lettuce or the onions below I put them in a little container rather than pouring them from the packet:

I use organic soil with some peat mixed in Then I press the seeds into the soil at the recommended depth. 

After seeding I cover them with a clear plastic cover to keep the moisture in. I am pretty sure this has really helped the seeds grow and the soil not dry out.

As one would imagine, waiting for the seeds to grow is very exciting. It is great when they start to pop out of the soil. I am still waiting for the onions to emerge but here are some pictures of a few melons after two weeks:

Here they are after a few more weeks:

And this is how they looked this weekend:

Now I need to figure out how to keep the melons from rotting after they grow. I have seen some interesting trellis' to keep them off the ground but need to build one I suppose.

On another note here is a carrot I pulled out of the ground this weekend. What is wrong with that carrot? It had been growing for months. Its a good thing I am not a carrot farmer.

A Jedi's weapon

Every Jedi Gardener needs a weapon against unwanted weeds. My favorite is called the stirrup hoe. 

It makes short work of getting rid of weeds and other things that you don't want growing in with your good plants. Moving it back and forth with the stirrup under the dirt dislodges the weeds from the roots.

It is not as clumsy as a blaster against weeds. Its an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Here is a picture of mine against my red shed.

A second gadget I am trying this year is a water timer. In previous years I would water when I got home from work. I think this contributed to some of my problems as I think that I should be watering in the morning rather than in the evening. 

With the water timer I can set it to water early in the morning for a certain amount and time. It will repeat either a few times a day or every few days depending on how its configured. Currently I have it setup with a sprinkler. After my plants get a little bigger I will run it with soaker hoses to reach the roots rather than sprinkling the leaves. I am pretty sure this is a good idea. We will see how it works out.

I bought the Orbit 91213 single spout timer from amazon. In the future I might get a two spout timer so I can set two different programs. I am not sure if my well has enough pressure to run my whole soaker hose setup at once.

Even with the stirrup hoe I have a ton of weeds that have started to take over. I have had some recommendations of a spikey claw tool to take dig out the weeds among other things.

I would be interested to find out how you take care of your garden weeds?

Here is my most recent picture of the garden. My dog is busy protecting the plants from the squirrels. Important work.

A New Hope

Vegetable gardening has now become a competition with my mother in law. Every year her garden produces boatloads of vegetables. Armfuls of tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers are picked on a daily basis. She says that she doesn't use miracle grow but i've never been sure. The kicker is that she doesn't even like vegetables but mostly enjoys lining them up on her countertop so the everyone who visits can see them.

This year might just be my year. Last week, after my seedlings drooped and my little pipe cleaner sticks no longer had anything to support, I was pretty down on the garden. But today was a new day. I have noticed a lot of things have started to sprout that I had given up on.

Here is a little corn sprout:

I also planted some bush beans two weeks ago and thought that my always happy dog had bounded through them one too many times. But they seem to have survived:

Plants are pretty amazing. Sometimes its hard to pick out the vegetables sprouts from the weed sprouts but these are pretty obvious.

I also broke down and bought some tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers from a local nursery to supplement the little seedlings that I think survived the transition outdoors.

Here is a pepper:

The cage is to protect it from the happy dog.

Here is a panoramic picture of the garden. Because its a panoramic its kind of distorted but I still like it. I am going to try and take one every week to see how things change.

Thanks for reading.

The dark side gains strength

Spring is a very exciting time. When it starts to get warm outside I can just imagine all of the tomatoes, carrots and peppers that my garden will produce. I also am sure that no weeds will sprout as I have cleared them all during the cold winter days.

Of course the harsh reality has hit. Around mid January I planted pods of seeds indoors in preparation for a crazy growing season. The seeds started out great; sprouting in just a few days.

Here is a picture:

Don't they look great? And they looked even better as time went by.

Here they are now:

(That's just dirt where the tomato used to be with a knocked over support stick)

That's a squished cucumber. Croaked pretty soon after I planted it.

I am not sure what went wrong but I think they got really stretched out by bending this way and that with the lack of light. I rigged up a grow light much too late in the growing cycle. We tried helping them out with little pipe cleaner supports but it didn't really help. My dog, Kramer, may have stepped on a few also. Stupid plants.

Hello,
This is my first post to my first blog. I have always wanted to blog about something but I never thought I had anything interesting enough to write about. I am still not sure but decided to start a vegetable gardening blog anyway.

I am a suburban gardener in Virginia. I have been casually growing vegetables for about 6 years and it seems like my gardens get progressively worse from year to year. I am not sure why this is.

This year I have decided to take my garden much more seriously. I spent the fall and winter expanding my garden and rowing new rows. I built some raised beds (which are really great) and bought a lot of new tools that are sure to make my vegetables shoot up.

It seems like everybody else's blog is about how great they are at this or that or how they built something great. Its quite depressing.

My goal with this blog is two fold. First I would like to track my gardens progress through the season and through the years. Second I hope that my blog is encouraging to others who might have stinky gardens like mine.