worm farming is what keeps my head working in the winter about the gardens and how nature processes debris. i actually have a whole ecology going on in the worm bins as i also have pill bugs and many other creatures. the types of squash you call pattypans are what are often called summer squash here like zucchini or the yellow thin skinned kind. we don't grow those, but do like cucumbers. all wood used here is for gardens/soil/rotting, we only burn propane for heat. neither of us can tolerate wood smoke. it really is a shame because i do like fires and would love to have a wood stove and to have fires outside once in a while to cook and make biochar and to have a rocket stove and i would also have fun learning about wood gas fuels. i can't cope with sawdust very well either. i tried doing furniture restoration work and paid dearly for it. we had our first hard freeze last night (down to -4.5C). the rest of the week will be a little warmer at night. may stay in the 10-15C range for daytimes. good digging weather if i can get outside.
end of season, this pic from the beginning of November and the garden i took the pathway out this past spring had some leaves and other woody debris buried under it. a perched garden to avoid some flash flooding (you can compare this to the pic of the same garden earlier in the spring that is further down the page): [ed. image removed, not very interesting...] in the above garden i found two worms while double digging. next spring i will innoculate it with more as i plant. this has been the typical experience with any garden here that has been perennial for many years and then turned into a veggie garden. the heavy clay is so devoid of organic material that the worms have nothing to feed on. the top surface is often covered with a ground fabric which then is mulched with wood chips. there may be worms up there, but they have no access to the deeper soil due to the fabric. yes, it works great for keeping weeds out, but it also isolates the subsoil from the surface. a good example of an unintended consequence. well anyways, now it has about 40 bags of leaves and other woody stuff under there and the worms will have plenty of fuel once they get going. the beets are in and pickled (22quarts) and the rest of the gardens are all ready for winter. whatever else i can do now is getting ahead for the spring time and getting some areas repurposed from invasive grasses towards mixed food gardens. the worms (inside worm farm) are doing well as usual. plenty of cooked squash skins and all the rest of the food scraps keep them perking right along. this week a few bins got the dried beet goodies and plenty of banana peels. i am always amazed by how the simple soil organisms and some of the higher creatures can eventually break down pretty much anything i put in there. some bones from cooking i've been watching for a while and some of those millipedes made a home inside and now it's soft enough to crumble and fall apart. after a few years. no other work needed to digest it, no hot compost heap either - just dirt, worms, water and some other creatures.
winter certainly arrived this week. had to do some shovelling and temperatures are going to be below zero (both in C and in F ) i won't post pictures. i have other snow pictures already on the website. good to see California getting some good rains and snows in the mountains (in both CA and the Rockies). we were disappointed in how the frozen strawberries turned out. when i put them up they were over-ripe and starting to ferment a little. i was hoping the freezer would stop them from going further. no, instead they slow fermented in the freezer and weren't very good (texture) when i thawed them. we ate some of them that weren't too bad, but the rest i ended up feeding to the worms. i have heard no parties or complaints so i would guess all is well for them. next summer i hope to put some up starting from a much better condition. the strawberry jam is ok, it was made from a different batch. cheers,
warm snap, rains, sunshine, nice to be able to get out for a few walks without having to feel like we were being frozen but it would have been much nicer to have the snows remain and keep the earth blanketed. the deer have trimmed up most of the cedars. when spring comes around closer i'll get pictures because they've really done a great job. except perhaps on the one cedar tree that we really do need them to trim. the winter is still young so i will hope they'll figure it out by spring... in my system i believe in keeping it very simple with few expenses. in fact if we spend more than $100/yr on seeds, hoses, tools, plants, etc. it is pretty rare. instead i put some money into a paper shredder which as long as six years ago wasn't a bad investment for $100 or so, but it was not a very good one, but i made sure when i bought it to get an extended warantee so if it did fail it could be replaced. and sure enough the first one did fail. the smaller units are not made to be run as much as i did. and the replacement lasted a few years longer but also failed. this time a few weeks after the extended plan time was up. so i went most of last year without one and waited until i could save up enough for a larger and more capable shredder. that should now be delivered within a few days and i can return to getting my winter chores going (getting rid of old college papers, and a lot of other more recent paper work which is best used as worm fodder instead of taking up room here in my tiny spot). other than that, it's winter, just pretty much puttering around and waiting for warmer weather so i can get back out into the gardens.
Damn Songbird, that end-of-season photo is spectacular! (as I sit here in zero degree F weather glad that the 30mph winds have died down ....)
thanks you guys. not bad for a quick snap from the camera. no filter on that either. just the natural late sun/red from the sunset shining on that tree line. we have gone back to cold again, no snow to speak of, some rains, then cold, now this week back to a few days of mixed weather, perhaps some snow or rain. average is about freezing or slightly colder now and we've been well below that. i liked it much better with snow cover. today we replaced 23 lights with new LED bulbs. taking out 60 watt bulbs. the power company subsidized the price at the store to make it so they only cost us $0.33 each. a very nice find when we saw it i thought for sure the price was wrong, but a guy explained what was up. there was a limit of two packs per transaction, but i had a card along with Ma's so we were able to get enough. so now our place is very well lit up. the thing that is funny is that we'd just talked a few days before about replacing all those bulbs but the price was too expensive and we didn't use all these lights that often to make it worth the expense. at 1/10th the regular price it became worth it. i needed to replace a few bulbs anyways. after dark today i went around and turned all the lights in the house on just to see what it was all like. lol then i turned them off again. we don't normally need that many on at a time. that's four 4ft shop lights and 25 bulbs and the total watts would now be around 390 watts [vs 1740 watts before]. we usually light the whole place with about 22 watts if we are not needing the shop lights for anything. i'm sure the tv and this computer burn more juice. i'm quite glad to get rid of all those bulbs but also some mixed CFLs which were ok, but i like these new ones more as they are all more natural/yellow like what i'm used to having. it is also nice to have them all uniform in color so the various track lights don't appear different when they're on. ok, enough about the new lights. the new shredder has gotten a good test the other day. i worked through some of the papers that had been piling up. more to go, plenty more... cheers, must get some sleep... i hope you get some rains from this storm Bill! nite Missychief.
lol Mischief [ed. note - test site gone now] ok. i've been busy redoing my website, i have two parts left to go, but the preview can be found at https://www.anthive.com/test/ eventually it all gets swapped out for the main site. the last few times i tried to do the conversion i didn't like the tools or the process and gave up. this time it looks like i'll finish some version of it. may be a few more days/weeks yet before i get those two parts done. for the moment i'm taking a break and thinking about what i might do. the last two bits are mostly pictures and so i'm thinking of how i might group them to break them down (into projects and/or blog posts). i also spent a lot of time trying to find a gallery generator type program that was usable and acceptable to me. no luck so far. which is why i gave up for now and am just moving everything using projects and posts. nothing too new going on for me. the worms are pretty happy with all the squash i cooked up and a leftover turkey carcass. i'll have fun watching that get digested by the soil community over the next few years. the weather has been all over the place. not much snow. Ma was out driving to visit my brothers and an oncoming truck dropped a wheelbarrow in front of her car. luckily she was not hurt but it did make a mess of her car. i have a few houseplants to repot. yes, this is scattered and disorganized, haha, it's all the brain i have left at the moment. peace, hugs and happy trails...
Your new website layout looks great! I really like your "From the roof" photos ... shows the extent of your systems, lots of hard work. Glad your mother is ok ... imagine a head-on with a wheelbarrow messed up her car pretty good.
thanks! i didn't think i had any of those up yet. i am live now, so the test part is now gone and it is just https://www.anthive.com/ i decide the last two parts i could brute copy and see how they went, and it was ok. i'll edit and regroup and redo now as i get time. just wanted it to be in and going. after so many years...
Wow songbird !! That looks great, I have bookmarked it!! People keep telling me that I should get a worm farm too, but I dont really have much leftovers or waste to keep them well fed so I leave them in the ground and mulch the hell out of everything instead. (I'm no good with plants in pots, they just die, I dont want to kill my worms too).
thank you mischief they are very tolerant of being ignored, i've found... as long as they don't get too hot or too cold (inside here it doesn't too hot and rarely ever gets close to freezing). the buckets seem to not lose much water with the way i do it. depending upon how wet the scraps are going in i might add water as i'm feeding them. they are tolerant of the bucket being nearly saturated with water and down to where it is close to being dry (but obviously them being mostly water themselves (like us) the do better if it is at least moist in there. in my rotation it may be two or three months before i get back to some bins for feeding. they downsize and upsize based upon available food. if i didn't have Ma's feeding many people scraps i could get by on many fewer bins/buckets. it's just that i never know what is coming next so i need some extra capacity to spread out the large amounts. and, well it is fun and keeps me thinking of dirt and gardening even in the middle of winter when outside is frozen. the thing with doing this same process outside is that then you have all the predators which feed on them who want to get them. i want to encourage a large population outside but i'd be fighting off raccoons, etc... so to get some at least a chance inside really does seem to help. i'm downsizing next spring by two bins/buckets, i started them because Ma wanted to give them to a friend for her garden, but because they are going to be moving and likely won't be gardening any more it is better for me to take those two buckets back out of rotation and concentrat the nutrients and efforts a little more. it is getting a bit tight in here and those two extra make it a little bit more cramped than i'd like. not that it is very hard to start a new one if i need to. i have plenty of containers and now since it is late winter i have a pretty good population of worms built back up. it is a nice cycle to work with. very easy. i think they are much easier than any other animal. ok, well, a favorite topic... hahaha...
ok, still chunking along on the webpages and got the water stuff done: https://www.anthive.com/project/water/ don't die of excessive verbiages... 20C today on the forecast. too warm too early for here.
You've got 20C in winter? That is odd isnt it. We have only really just had warm nights. Up until now they have been cold. I even had the fire on one night last week cos it was so (for this time of year) cold.
Great write-up on your webpage Songbird! Oh to have your abundance of water ... your lighthouse must come in handy for warning off passing ships during heavy rains. = )
thank you Bill! yep, we have a light for those lost in the storms if needed. i really have no idea why Ma built the thing other than she wanted to have something with a copper roof that involved playing with rocks and cement... my next refresh of the website will correct two typo's for that page. the tulip page is sorta there now, crocuses in progress, worm page added a picture showing worm cocoons (100 pics to go from the old flower page to group and write up yet - i hope i get this done the next few weeks)... yes Mischief it has been too warm at times this winter for us has hardly been a winter at all. we've only had to shovel snow a few times. winter is not over yet, we'll be below freezing and chances of frosts ruining tender crops for another 90 days or so. we won't plant out the warm weather crops until towards the end of May. in the meantime i'm one of those who's glad for the return to cold and more normal weather. today was nice enough that i did get outside for a walk and then i had a bit of lunch before heading out and picking deer pellets out of the crushed limestone mulch. they belong in the gardens not in the pathways. i'll need to put up signs for the deer dumping stations to encourage them to improve their aim. you may laugh (i do ) but it is one of those things, if you leave the deer poo on the paths/mulch eventually it will help germinate weed seeds, so it is worth taking a few moments to move them to where they'll do more good than to have to keep weeding a pathway. my longer term plan (if i stay here) would be to make less limestone areas for them to poop on so i have less of this sort of non-sense (and more garden space!)...
our first weather of the spring was last week and we had a small test of the water works. everything went pretty well (check the bottom of): https://www.anthive.com/project/water/ otherwise, flowers are showing up, gardens are not quite yet ready (we still have chances of frost into mid-to-late May). i hope to get some gardens prepped and ready to go and perhaps some onions in. the worms are doing ok when i've checked them. i am also looking forwards to downsizing my number of buckets. we added several more a few years ago for some friends to use and that loss of space here in my room puts things at a limit i'm not enjoying. i think 17 containers is more than i need and it is spreading the food scraps too thin and making my checks on each bin too far apart. in about five or six weeks i'll start getting that space back (many worms go on a one way trip to the gardens). other than me being patient and waiting for spring i'm still poking at the website and getting pictures grouped and moved. only about 60 left to go. i had to stop for a week or two while i was tagging the pictures in the collection. 9000 pictures gone through and tagged and i was also able to get rid of some of them. only a first edit of them, but it really did help my next few projects to be able to find what i was looking for without having to remember what year or month i might have been thinking of... i also found out how many pictures i have of various flowers (roughly - way too many)... projects finished (for the moment): www.anthive.com/project/daffodils/ www.anthive.com/project/irises/ www.anthive.com/project/clouds/ www.anthive.com/project/sunflowers/ www.anthive.com/project/redpatch/ oy, raining again...
Hey, a fellow cloud watcher/photographer! I get such a ration for having so many cloud photos (and sunsets). Congratulations on tagging 9000 pics! What a job, but so nice to have them in order and tagged. We're still getting hard frosts every night ... but the daffodils are starting to bloom.
hi Bill, we are on about the same schedule this season, the daffodils are just coming out the past two days. i only put a few pics up (i'm trying to get things moved from another page [ed. note - this is gone now! yay!] https://www.anthive.com/project/flowers-old/ before i start putting too many other pictures on there - i'd like to be done with this at last. i keep counting down how many pictures to go - about halfway done). the few i have on that page are just a tiny selection and i already want to do a lot more... daydreaming and looking at clouds seem to go well together. there are 340 pictures tagged clouds. about half of them i can discard at some point. i should also tag them "telephonepole" as that seems to show up in many of them. one thing about living in a place with the wide-open view is that you do get to see the clouds and weather as they come. i even have some rainbow (double and maybe even a triple - i'm not sure i got those or not) pictures.