So long crappy retaining wall!

That ain't right

Harvest!

I got worms!

Howdy all,

We decided a while back to start a worm composting bin. Some of the best compost you can get it from worms, and we decided to do it after talking to my (M's) sister Chris, who has had worms in her garden for a long time. A lot of cities have programs where you take an hour or so long class, and then they give you a discount on worm composting bin with worms. My wife and I are both graduate students, and so have little time to spare, and decided to try and make our own! A friend of mine named Tony has been giving me his worm castings, and we decided to copy his set up, using a bit of the worms left over. Here you can see Nicky going through the castings from Tony, looking for some worms:

She turned out to be very good at it, and filled half of that red cup with worms!

Here you see the makings of our worm composting bin. We used two large rubbermaid plastic containers in which we drilled lots and lots of holes so that the worms could breath. We also used lots of recycled paper, which I shredded in a paper shredder. I am a graduate student, as I said before, so it was fun feeding old graded labs to the worms.

Here you can see a bunch of N's rescued worms, hanging out of the shredded paper. I **should** have soaked the paper in water first, but that was quickly fixed with a hose.

I forgot to take a photo, but we then put in some kitchen scraps and some mature compost (to get the ecology set up). We set up the worm bin in May, so here is a photo of the current set up in March.

We have a large tub on the bottom of the worm bin to collect the compost tea, and to prevent ants from getting into the bin, and killing our worms. The hose runs the excess compost tea into a smaller tub, that I then use in the garden (or I feed to my duckweed). 

The bins worked great, except for one huge problem. They were impossible to flip! The bin was just too heavy after 10 months, and I couldn't manage to pull the bottom container out from the upper container! Eventually, we broke down and bought a real worm bin.

Each foot was placed into a coffee container, filled with water to keep ants away. Unfortunately these eventually got mosquito larva in the them, so we placed broken up pieces of "Mosquito Dunks" into each which seem to be doing the trick. The rectangular bin shows the compost tea.

Happy gardening!

M&N&G

Repurposed baby gate

Howdy All!

Quick blog post today. N made a nice little baby gate on our deck, to prevent our little boy from taking a tumble down the stairs. We had an extra crib (thanks Peter and Erika!), which we tried to donate to Goodwill. Unfortunately they don't take baby gear, so we decided to repurpose parts of the crib into this cool baby gate! We also have one in the house we liked it so much.

The top is a 2 x 4, while the side are 2 x 3 pine. We had to cut down the crib a little bit to make it fit. N is going to seal it tomorrow to protect the pine.

Happy farming!

M & N & G

She works !

Removal of the front Lawn: Part 2 Full Swale ahead!

Howdy All!

Bye bye lawn, hello beautiful California natives! After three weeks, our grass is dead! Here is an awesome photo of the grass after the 3 weeks:

Here is our original front yard plan: Lots of California natives! We changed things up slightly, for instance we put some stepping stones from the sidewalk to the front hose.

You only get so far with a plan, so in the end we needed to buy the plants. We have a local native nursery that both fortunately and unfortunately went out of business. Fortunately because we got all of our plants on sale. Unfortunately because now we can never go back!

We planted these native plants:

Front yard plants - right side from side walk

Bee's bliss Sage x2

White monkeyflower x1

Pink monkeyflower x3

Artemisia x3

Dymondia mixed in with pavers

Purple needle-grass x2

Grass (can't remember which kind) x2

Cleveland sage x1

Front yard plants - left side from side walk

Ceanothus 'yankee point' x1

blue-eyed grass x2

showy blue penstemon x4

purple rock cress x4

red buckwheat x1

cleveland sage x1

We first started by making a swell swale to catch the run off from our roof. N dug the trench first:

The bottom of the swale we covered with weed cloth to prevent weeds from growing up from below. We placed "All purpose gravel" on the bottom, to maybe an inch. You can see it here holding the weed cloth down:

On top of the "All Purpose Gravel" we put "River Rock" which has a better look to it and is a bit bigger than the other rock

We then laid out all of the plant and where we were going to plant them.

After that, N got to planting. It was kind of hard to dig through the cardboard. You can see G in the background, giving moral support as he worked on his crawling.

Here you can see the detail of our front drain, which will be going into the swell. We may be in a drought, but it is supposed to rain in a couple of days, so I'll try to get a picture of it in action!

Here is a photo of the lay out of the plants on the left side of the the front yard:

A picture of the far left side of the front yard, showing the existing rose bush, and some plantings:

Here is a photo of the front "lawn" about 3 weeks after we did all the plantings. All of the plants are a bit small still, but hopefully in a year we will have a beautiful front yard! So far we are seeing a lot more butterflies and hummingbirds in the front, which before we only saw in our back yard!

Happy plantings!

M & N

Harvest !

The new chick integration is going well

Our three chicks have gotten big !

Plantings from seed this year

Howdy All,

We did alot of plantings this year. Given that we have another mouth to feed, we decided to go big in the garden so that we have lots of veggies available to grind up into baby food. We have a grow light in our garage, which also has a heater underneath it to warm up the seedlings roots. This whole contraption is placed up on wood blocks, to keep it insulated from the concrete of our garage floor.

Above, you can see our first round of plantings, which we planted in the garage in early February. All of the red cups have sunflower seeds (I might have gone a big overboard :) The larger containers are white cherry tomatoes, birdhouse/ dipper gourd, and zuchinnis.

We have an unusually warm winter (global warming), so we put them outside pretty early to harden them up, and got them into the ground about a week ago.

Here we have our second round of seeds:

Milkweed, cucumbers, bell peppers,

The third round:

Watermelon

First big harvest of the year!

Ping pong ball for scale