Worms

The worm lady (I do not think she would appreciate me calling her that)called on Sunday for me to pick up my worms and I was so excited. I went to her home in Lancaster and she gave me a coffee container with little hole on top of it filled with 500 worms. I couldn’t wait to get home to put in the worm factory. I shredded some lettuce so they would have some food for when I brought them home. I get home open the coffee can and put the worms in… that was it…. There was no excitement and there hasn’t been any since. The worms eat very little. I am not ever sure if they are eating the lettuce because they the lettuce looks like the shredded newspaper. The worm lady did give me some food – it looks like wood shavings – she told me it is a left over product from some type of sprits that someone made. The directions did say put the food in the corner and I didn’t put the lettuce there, I guess the reason might be so you can identify the food to see if they are eating. I check the worms every other day, I see a few of them move and that is pretty much it. It will be a week tomorrow… I promise I will keep you posted of any changes.

Composting ?

I have thought about composting through the years, but last year I have been thinking about it much more. Three reasons have me thinking so much about composting…. 1. The Community garden where I volunteer.2. The Buffalo garden walk.3. I do not have lot of money keep on buying good compost and soil. The Community garden has beautiful, unbelievable, great compost that they purchase each year and the gardeners all have beautiful gardens that produce much better than my garden. My dad also has a very nice garden that has a ton a produce and treats his garden with good soil and other items each years. I want my garden to produce like both my dad’s garden and the community garden. The garden walk as been around since 1995 and last year was my first time visiting these beautiful gardens. The gardens were extremely motivating to me. Once again my gardens do not like any of the gardens from the garden walk. I am pretty sure by now it sounds as my gardens look terrible, they don’t. My gardens are not bad… that are a work in progress and I am a novice and I have higher expectations. I do know another way to achieve this goal would be to retire from my full time job and cut back of my many projects, unfortunately early retirement is not an option. The other reason is I just do not have the money to buy great soil and compost… If I owned my home- I would considered it an investment, but I do not, and I do have to share some of the garden space. I have bought soil and mulch at this point, but I wanted to find a cheaper way of doing this and I want to make sure I have the good stuff. So that brings us to composting…. So far a bought a few items and have read a lot on the subject and yet I feel like I know nothing. This past summer I bought a little stainless steel compost bucket from Bath Body and beyond for about $30.00. You keep this on your cupboard or underneath and put your non oil and non meat kitchen scraps in the bucket. The bucket doesn’t smell, it has some type of filter on it. So I thought I would save my scraps and dig a hole in the ground and start composting that way. This is a very good way of composting but the problem I ran into was you really can’t plant anything where you dig the hole for the season as everything needs to break down. Since my yard is not that big, this is not that great of an option for me. I did do this method three times but I run out of space to put the kitchen scraps. You also have dig a hole 12 inches deep so you do not end up with rodents and other animals including pets digging up the scraps. Twelve inches deep didn’t seem that deep but when I was digging holes on hot summer days I was not loving it. After that experience I read that I could make a compost bin with a garbage can. So I ran to the store and bought a $10.00 outside garbage can to dill holes in it. The season was coming to an end, so this never did happen. I am not sure that I am going to go that route yet…. . I did find a place to put it , if I decide to do go this way. In the meantime I have been looking at worm factory composting. They run about $100. And are found in many of the garden catalogs and on Amazon. I was going to wait until after Christmas maybe after the income tax refund comes back to buy this. I decided that I really wanted to do this. After telling my garden friends about this at the Christmas party, my friend Joe said you can have mine. He got a bad case of fruit flies and when he first bought it about 4 years ago the worms escaped. So last week I went to his house to pick it up. I also met a woman who sells red worms in Lancaster, so I called her on Monday to order 500 worms. She is supposed to call today so I can pick up the worms. I feel that she might not call because I think it might be to cold for the worms. She was telling me that her worms do not really eat this time of year because it is cold. At first was so happy about this the Worm Factory but the more I read these worms are going to be more like pets and pets require work. Do not get me wrong pets are great but I can barely maintain my two gold fish Shit and Crap that I have for about two years. So since I have a previous used Worm Factory it didn’t come with a direction manual. So I have done research on the internet. Today I have started to prepare my worms’ home. Based on my research I have put some wet news paper on the bottom of the first tray and then I have covered with shredded junk mail. I have not put any food inside because if the worms are not going to eat there is no need to have rotting food around. When I was dreaming of this worm factory, I thought I was just going to throw in my kitchen scraps, but the more I read the worms like their food cut up into small pieces, REALLY ! See the worms are going to be more like pets . So now the wait, is the worm lady going to call me this weekend? Or do I need to wait until March… Or to I bring back the Worm Factory to my friend Joe? The photo's above are of one of my gardens and the tops of the Worm Factory.

Back on Track I Hope.....

December also brought me a terrible stomach flu which lasted a little bit longer than a week and knocked me off my A game for about two- three weeks. I had getting sick and having to slow down, but often I think it is the universe speaking or maybe yelling at me to slow down. It like if you do not want to slow down on your own I am going to knock you on your ass and make you slow down. So far 2012 has been great, I feel I have slowed down – but maybe that’s because it is January….. It is my goal to start working smarter and not harder…. I will keep you posted. I have been doing a bit of shopping these days… I keep finding all of these bargains and I have been spending my hard earned money, today I was in Springville and I stopped at the Tractor Supply Co, it is a place that I have always wanted to stop by and check out. I do like the place; I guess they have a lot of canning supplies in season. I found these great boots to work the garden. The boots will be great for spring when it is very muddy. My parents bought me garden shoe for the summer months.

A great gift!

It has been almost two months or longer since I have last blogged… I guess the Christmas Season just got away from me. I had a few parties at my house to celebrate: Garden Committee, Friends, and Grider Market Friends. At my Market pantry, my farm family made and gave me a beautiful wreath. I loved it. It was very fresh and smelled like pine. It was so much nicer than the ones from Home Depot or Tops. I still have it up, but I did take the Christmas decorations off.