First Harvest

Sunday was an exciting day. We arrived home from a fun weekend away, then decided we should check on our garden. Things are looking really good and I'm happy to announce that we actually picked a small handful of leaf lettuce. It was only half an ounce, and it's gone already, but it was a wonderful beginning to what I hope will be a productive growing season!

Why I Garden

As I've probably mentioned, my husband and I live in a third story condo without an inch of soil to call our own. Knowing that, growing a garden doesn't seem like the most logical thing to do. So why the heck are we doing it?

First off, how are we doing it? Well, the Parks and Recreation department of our city has a Community Gardening program. After a short time on the waiting list, we were assigned an 8-foot by 12-foot plot. The garden is about a 15 minute drive from the suburbs, so we make a trip downtown several times a week to tend to our little patch of growing space.

But why? There's plenty of food at the grocery store, right? Of course there is. There is no shortage of produce. It doesn't matter if it's completely out of season or if it's some tropical crop that could never grow in Iowa. There it sits in the produce case, just waiting for us to take it to our kitchen.

If you start examining the stickers on that produce, you'll see that there are some rather well-traveled fruits and veggies out there. Did you know that Chile is over 5,000 miles away from here? Compared to that, driving to a garden downtown doesn't seem so troublesome.

Nothing against Chile, but we've got great soil right here in Iowa! It's capable of producing so much more than grass and commodity crops. So I'm happy that we are able to take 96 square feet of space that used to be covered with grass and turn it into beans, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, spinach, and so much more fresh, local food for our own kitchen.

I can't say that we never purchase produce from the grocery store. But armed with a tiny garden of our own, a great local farmer's market, a pressure canner, and a chest freezer, maybe we'll be able to change that sometime soon.

What I've been up to...

Wow, time has really flown by since my last post! Let's see what I've been doing.

Work: Too much. We were already short staffed, and then another person quit. Fortunately we'll have a new intern start in a couple of weeks. Until then, I'll be just trying to keep my head above water.

School: My class this semester hasn't been terribly demanding. In fact, the class that I'm taking is down right easy. This is a wonderful thing considering my crazy work schedule. I'm taking the final exam this week, then starting a summer class in early June.

PE Exam: Getting ready to reapply for the October exam date. Then I'll start the stressing out and studying all over again.

Knitting: Mostly socks. Don't really have the attention span for larger projects at the moment. I had some big plans for the state fair, but I'm not sure how much I'll actually get done.

Gardening: We have planted several cool weather crops already. The garden is filling up with tiny radishes, spinach, kale, chard, peas, onions, carrots, and lettuce. Loving the opportunity to go get my hands dirty for non-construction related reasons.

Vermicomposting: My worms are doing exactly what worms are supposed to do. They've been eating, pooping, and making more worms. I've just started filling up my next tier with food scraps and allowing the lower tier to finish decomposing. The worms should start slowly migrating to the upper tier and leave the finished compost behind. These guys have been thankfully low maintenance.

Geocaching: Greg and I have been getting outside to collect a few geocaches a couple of times a week. We're really having fun and getting some exercise at the same time! We're even doing some biking again.

So, as you can see, there hasn't been much time for blogging. Oh well, you all understand, right? ;)

Geocaching!

So, I’m super excited about a new hobby. Greg and I are geocaching! For a full explanation of what the heck we’re doing, I recommend you go here: www.geocaching.com If you’d rather have the three sentence version, here it is.

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Geocaching is a GPS “treasure hunt” taking place all over the world. People hide containers called “caches” anywhere they like, and post the GPS coordinates on a website for others to go find it. The contents of the caches aren’t actually valuable, but the real treasure is the experience of hunting for it.

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Anyhow, it’s a really neat way to get outside and see some places you haven’t seen before. We actually bought our handheld GPS unit late last fall, but winter arrived before we had much opportunity to use it. We’ve found about a dozen caches so far this spring and I’m sure we’ll be finding lots more in the months to come. This is so much fun!

Worm Bin Tour

This is my vermicomposting bin. It sits in our kitchen right next to the trash can. The bin is about 18 inches by 18 inches square and about 16 inches tall, but the tray with the worms is only about 6 inches deep.

The lid on the top is meant to keep light out of the bin. Even without the lid the worms will stay in the bin, because they are much happier inside than they would be if they crawled out. The lid doesn't snap on, so air can easily flow in and out of the bin. When I lift off the lid, here's what you see. That is a pile of moistened shredded newspaper. It helps keep the bin moist enough, and eventually the worms will eat all of this paper.

If I pull the paper back, you can see the layer of food scraps. Here you can see some slices of an apple and a couple of coffee filters. There were some worms crawling around this stuff, but most of them hid as soon as I pulled back the newspaper.

And here is one of the residents of the bin. These worms are called red wrigglers. These are surface dwelling worms, not soil dwelling worms. They are much smaller than a typical earthworm. In nature, you'd usually find these worms in piles of manure or decaying leaves. These worms are ideal for indoor vermicomposting because they are comfortable between 60 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit, they reproduce quickly, and they don't mind living in confined spaces.

Things are continuing to go well in the compost bin. I found something that I think is a worm cocoon. If I'm right, one or two baby worms will hatch in a couple of weeks. And I saw some worm behavior this morning that indicates I may have more cocoons fairly soon.

Vermicomposting: Update 2

The worms seem to be settled into their new home. They spend most of their time amongst the oldest food scraps in the bin. We added some more food scraps, but they’re still pretty fresh. I suspect the worms will let them age a bit before they start moving toward the new food. So far it seems like we produce more food scraps than the bin can handle. As the worms reproduce, we should be able to give them more food.

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I’m sure that we lost some of them from their cross-country trip, but the ones that survived look pretty healthy. They’ve rehydrated and I’ve seen them munching on the food scraps. We haven’t had any try to escape the bin, so we must have given them a satisfactory home. Now I just hope that they are happy enough to make some baby worms!

Vermicomposting: Update 1

Today is my first day of truly vermicomposting! My husband and I purchased a Worm Factory 360 which arrived in our home one week ago. We ordered 1 pound of red wriggler composting worms (roughly 1,000 worms) from a worm farm in Pennsylvania and started saving up our produce scraps. Two days ago we filled the Worm Factory with our food scraps and plenty of moist bedding (mostly shredded newspaper). Then today our worms arrived. We placed them in our bin, and TADA, it's vermicomposting!

It will take a little while for the worms to get used to their new home. They were shipped in some dry moss, so they looked pretty dehydrated. When we placed them in the bin this morning, some were moving around more than others. We gave them a spritzing of water and I'm hoping that they can all perk up and start exploring the bin today.

Their first meal consists of a variety of goodies. There's some broccoli stalk, carrot peels, bell pepper stems, celery trimmings, orange peels, egg shells, used coffee grounds (with the filters), and used tea leaves (with the tea bags). That's all organic waste that would normally end up inside a plastic trash bag then dumped into a landfill. Landfills don't aerate, so the food takes longer to decompose, and the trash bag takes much longer to break down. Inside the compost bin, the worms should turn it into soil in just a few months.

In case you can't tell, I'm really excited about this project! I'll be sure to check in with more updates soon.