Midnight Buffet for the Creepy-crawlies in the Garden

I’ve got some very tasty sunflowers in my garden.  I know this because over the weekend something came by and ate pretty much every single leaf on the stalk of my last good sunflower.  Boy are my chickens going to be disappointed.  I was growing these sunflowers as a special treat for them.  It seems that sunflowers are one of those plants that will just never make it all the way to maturity in my garden no matter how hard I try to coax them along.  It’s not as though they don’t start off growing well in the garden, they just never seem to survive until I can harvest the seeds.

Even my daughter got into the act a few weeks ago.  I came out to the garden and found the other sunflowers had been decapitated.  My daughter thought the flowers were pretty and had picked them.

It’s hard to teach her about patience at times when she’s in the garden and wants to pick everything in sight.  I always lose a few green tomatoes due to my daughter’s exuberance, and I can recall last year when my little apple tree was just starting to grow a few apples on a branch, only to come home one evening to my daughter showing me how she had reached up and broken the branch off the tree so she could eat the apples.

“And your apples were really good daddy!”

I’m guessing they would have been even better if the were bigger than two inches in diameter.  On the positive side though, she’s loving the garden and yesterday we stopped by Lowes and picked up a 6 pack of pink impatiens.  She planted two of them in the flower box of her playhouse, and we planted the other four around our garden gnomes who have had heaps of abuse piled on them by our chickens.

It’s hard to tell from the picture above, but right behind them is where I filled in a big hole the chickens had dug out to use for their daily dust baths.  I’ve been using poultry netting to keep them out of the gardens, but they still seem to be able to find a few chinks in the armor.  However, I’ve refused to let a chicken outsmart me and I will keep at it through trial and error until my garden is chicken-proof.  That being said, I’ve pretty much resigned myself to just spending this year defending the garden and anything I actually get out of it is just a bonus.

At least the solar chicken coop seems to be harvesting power, and it should be rather difficult for the chickens, bugs, or pink tornado to mess that up once it’s fully operational.  I’m testing the best placement for the solar panel and the battery, so I was out there at various times of the day this weekend with my multimeter checking out the amps and volts being generated from the panel and what was being stored in the battery.

I’m hoping that when it’s all set up, I’ll be able to run not only my cooling fans and the extra 120V outlet, but some floodlights as well for when I want to  go out there and find out just what the heck has been eating my sunflowers at midnight.

 

Virtual Gardening Video Games

I’m a big fantasy and sci-fi geek.  Slowly but surely my four year old daughter is becoming one too.  We have a Star Wars piggy bank, she asked for a dragon sword for Christmas last year, and she loves dressing up as a princess.  She’s also becoming very good with the computer.  She plays games like Elmo’s keyboard-o-rama, watches online movies from netflicks, and enjoys crawling into my lap while I’m working on the computer.

We’re also setting up home-schooling lessons for her as she expresses an interest in various things.  This has involved building a chicken coop, getting an ant farm (more about that later – let’s just say it didn’t turn out well), and our most recent purchase was a butterfly farm with 10 baby caterpillars that will hopefully become beautiful butterflies.

So, I recently started my garden seeds for the spring.  I was really excited about going to the store with her and picking out seeds and getting them started in a little seedling greenhouse.  She was excited about getting the seeds – and I also picked up a 72 disk seed starting kit greenhouse for around $7.

The concept is pretty simple – you have bunch of compressed disks of peat in a plastic container.  You pour water in, plant the seeds and put the cover on.  Seeds sprout in a couple of weeks and you put it in sunlight until they are big enough to plant outside.

Unfortunately, her interest in planting seedlings got about as far as opening the seed packets and discovering that the seeds inside looked nothing like the picture on the outside of the packet.

She loves the garden – loves to pick tomatoes straight off the vine in the spring and summer and helps pick peas and beans in the fall.  But I think there was just too much disconnect between the seeds and having them grow into plants for a 4 year old.  So I was left at the kitchen table finishing up the planting while she wandered off.

It got me to thinking about how I could teach her about the planting process and gardening and somehow compress the time-to-gratification into something more manageable for a 4 year old.  And as a computer geek, my mind naturally turned to computers.

With all the simulation games out there – maybe there was something I could use to help teach her the fun and exciting world of essentially watching grass grow.  I vaguely recalled a SimFarm game from years ago.  With a little digging, I even found a site where abandoned titles go to have a second life.  You can download the game here.  Unfortunately, it’s probably a bit much for a 4 year old to handle screens like these…

 

 

So – What else is out there?  I have to say that it was a little difficult to find kid friendly games about gardening, composting, and plants.  Guess there’s not that much money in making things you can’t blow up.  However, here’s a short list of games I thought were interesting and kid-friendly:

• Compost 4 Fun : Bravekidgames.com is a great website for kid friendly games.  This particular game is a bit hard to control with the mouse (the screen sort of bounces around) but it’s a great way to start a dialogue about what can be composted.
• Garden Dreams : Well, I wasn’t able to get the online version to work for me because I’m behind a firewall – but it looks like fun.
• Alice Greenfingers: Graphics aren’t great and you only get an hour of free play before you have to purchase it, but what it lacks in graphics it makes up for in playability.
• Garden War: Ok, it is a war/strategy game – but it’s with garden gnomes.  Doesn’t use timers and teaches strategy so kids can probably get the hang of it pretty quickly.  Don’t know how kid-friendly tanks are though.

I’m going to have to try a couple of these over the weekend with my daughter and see if they’re really as kid friendly and interesting as I think they are.  I liked them and I thought they were fun, but as they say the proof is in the pudding…

 

Organic Jack o’Lantern from the Garden

This Halloween, I carved my first organic pumpkin from my garden. This pumpkin was a ‘volunteer’ from the compost from last year where the seeds didn’t quite cook enough and still had their ability to grow. It started off as a seedling around another tree and we transplanted it to it’s own space.

I have to admit that it was a lot of fun watching it grow from a little plant into a nice 16 pound pumpkin. My daughter and I harvested it the day before Halloween and scooped out the ‘guts’. what was interesting is that as we were scooping out the seeds we noticed several of them had actually sprouted inside the shell. these are definitely some hardy seeds!

Now, we could have done some of the cool designs that I see every year where people spend way too much time creating works that Michael Angelo would be proud of, but as I am lucky to even get around to carving the pumpkin in the first place, I figured simple was better. We didn’t use any fancy tools like you’ll find here:

• Essential Pumpkin Carving Tools
• Pumpkin Carving Design Inspirations

What we did do, was put down newspaper and used a sharp knife. That was easy, quick, and we still had a lot of fun!

 

Giant Organic Pumpkins from Compost

Every year around this time, the great pumpkins come out. I’m not talking about THE Great Pumpkin from the Charlie Brown Halloween Specials, but instead the gargantuan pumpkins that people grow in various vegetable growing competitions.

Pumpkin Contest

HowToCompost.org has a contest every year for the largest pumpkin grown worldwide without the use of chemical fertilizers. Now my little pumpkin won’t win anything this year (especially as I didn’t actually enter the contest and it probably tops out at 20 pounds), but I think I’ll have to see if I have what it takes for 2008. The rules for growing the pumpkin are pretty simple.

1. Use only compost to prepare your soil (no chemical fertilizers/supplements allowed).
2. No force feeding of nutrients through the vines.
3. The pumpkin must be grown outdoors. (Seeds can be germinated inside and transplanted outside in the early spring.

Composting

Composting is an important way to recycle and can be done at home. It is an easy way to reduce the amount of household garbage by about one third. As well, it produces a valuable soil amendment for use in gardening and landscaping.

We have been using a Mantis twin barrel composter for about 2 years. It was a gift from both sets of parents for Christmas (it’s fairly expensive for what it is, but convenient and it actually looks good in the side yard). I absolutely love the idea of having our own compost right there and of the reduced footprint we have on our landfills. Until we got the barrel composter we were using the used tire method of composting. This was a good method, but was fairly labor intensive and we piled everything on from the top, so we had some problems with aeration.

Remember that compost is not just decayed organic matter. Composting is applied microbiology. Literally thousands upon thousands of different species of microorganisms (2 million individuals per gram) in a highly complex ecosystem.

I think one way of maintaining a sustainable lifestyle is that it must be as easy or easier than the more conventional approach. When collecting our kitchen scraps for compost, we keep a bucket under our sink next to the cutting board. Instead of taking scraps to the regular trash, they go there, when it’s full we take it out to the composter. This is just as easy as if we were tossing it into the trash can for pick-up. Yard scraps work just as well since we pile everything in and if it’s full we put the waste under the barrel and in a couple of days the compost has “cooked” down to where we can stuff more in. It is an easy way to reduce the amount of household garbage by about one third.

Now the website says that you should turn the composter every day – in reality we only turn it when we are dumping in our scraps and that works just as well. And of course the advantage of the twin barrel is that we can just keep filling and filling one chamber while the compost spends several weeks cooking in the other.

Producing quality compost is the most important job on the organic farm. A lot of the problems I see on farms I visit could be solved by making better compost.

– Elliott Coleman, The New Organic Grower

How to Compost

Here’s some great tips for what to compost and how to compost in your back yard. You don’t need to go out and buy a big barrel composter like we’ve got, but you should definitely try it out and see if it’s something you enjoy!

What to Include

• From the Garden
  • Leaves (chopped – to speed their breakdown)
  • Grass (not wet)
  • Plants & Weeds (without ripe seeds)
  • Old potting soil
  • Soft plant stems
• From the Kitchen
  • Fruit scraps
  • Vegetable trimmings
  • Egg shells (crushed)
  • Tea bags
  • Coffee grounds with filters
  • Shredded paper

DO NOT include…

• • Meat, fish and bones
  • Plastics
  • Metals
  • Fats and oils
  • Dairy products
  • Pet waste
  • Cheese, meat or other sauces

Clues on Composting

• The composting process works best when the organic pieces are small. Weeds and trimmings should be shredded.
• Don’t add thick layers of any one kind of waste. Grass should not be more than 6 cm deep, leaves up to 15 cm deep (cut or chop or dry and crumble them). If you can, let grass dry first or mix it with dry, coarse material such as leaves to prevent compacting.
• The composter contents should be moist like a wrung-out sponge. If the contents are too dry, it will take overly long to compost; and if too wet, the contents may begin to smell.
• Turn or mix the compost every couple of weeks or each time you add new material. This keeps the compost well aerated.
• Composting can be done in the winter. You can add materials to your composter all winter long. The breakdown process slows down or stops when the pile is frozen, but it will start up again in the spring. Thorough turning in the spring will reactivate the pile. Empty the composter in the fall to make plenty of room.

Troubleshooting

Composting is not difficult but sometimes the process requires a little extra attention. Here are some easy solutions to correct certain situations which might occur.

• If the pile does not decrease in size or generate heat, composting may need a boost. If the pile is dry, add water – mixing thoroughly. If the pile is wet and muddy, spread it in the sun and add dry material. Remember to save “old” compost to mix with incoming material.
• If the center of the pile is damp and warm, but the rest is cold, the pile may be too small. Try to keep your composter as full as possible. Mix new with old, dry with wet, breaking up mats and clumps.
• If the pile is damp and sweet smelling but not heating, it may need nitrogen. Add grass clippings, table scraps or a sprinkling of organic fertilizer from the garden centre.
• If the compost pile develops a foul odour, it may not be getting enough air. Loosen up the pile, break up clumps, unblock vents and perhaps add some wood chips to help the pile “breathe”. Turning the pile always helps aeration.
• Compost in a container with a cover to prevent animals from getting into the composting materials. A wire mesh around the base can help to prevent pests from digging under the pile. Dig in or cover food waste immediately.

Is It Finished Yet?

The composting process can take from 2 months to 2 years, depending on the materials used and the effort involved. To accelerate the process, the pile must be a balance between wet and dry material, turn it frequently and make sure the waste is shredded or in small pieces.
Compost is ready to be used when it is dark in color, crumbly and has an “earthy” smell.

Put Compost to Good Use

Composting can benefit your soil and plants in many ways. It increases the soil’s organic matter content and its moisture-holding capacity. Compost improves soil porosity and helps to control soil erosion. It also enhances plant and flower growth and helps plants develop a sound root structure.
Use it on your lawn, in your garden, around trees or combine it with potting soil for your plants.

 

Gnomes back in the Garden Thanks to J-B Weld

For some time, I’ve always loved gnomes. Growing up I had a book that described gnomes in detail. It wasn’t really a children’s book per say, but I enjoyed it none the less.

Gnomes 30th Anniversary Edition by Wil HuygenRead more about this title…

I thought this was one of the greatest books ever, and so naturally, when I started my own garden, I wanted gnomes as well.

The word gnome is derived from the New Latin gnomus. It is often claimed to descend from the Greek gnosis, “knowledge”, but more likely comes from genomos “earth-dweller”.

In the Harry Potter series, gnomes are considered garden pests and appear to be more akin to animals than intelligent beings, and there is a scene in the movies where they are busy “de-gnoming” the garden.

So, knowing my love of gnomes, and in an effort to head off the invasion of plastic pink flamingo lawn ornaments, my lovely wife bought me some gnomes a while ago. The first one I received was of a gnome sleeping, with his but sticking up in the air.

[Insert picture here]

This particular gnome was named “Lucky Butt” and has wandered throughout my backyard, from the back slope, to my daughter’s Barbie play house (bought used off of eBay), and finally to the garden just below the kitchen window.

Earlier this year for father’s day, he got a friend and some more landscape in the form of a couple of mushroom statues.

All was well with this happy little band until tragedy struck last month. A roof tile fell from about 20 feet, right on top of my happy gnome. Splitting the cast iron gnome from head to toe (and shattering the roof tile of course).

I’m happy to say that last night I was finally able to get out the JB Weld and put my little guy back together and he’ll be installed in his place of honor again tonight.

For those of you not familiar with JB Weld, let’s just say that it is almost as useful as duct tape. The stuff is described on their site as:

Our flagship product, J-B WELD is the world’s finest cold-weld compound. It’s a remarkably easy, convenient, and inexpensive alternative to welding, soldering, and brazing. J-B WELD is the smart way to repair something … and for literally pennies per use. When welding or soldering is out of the question due to cost, down time for repairs, or technical/environmental considerations, J-B WELD is the answer.

Like metal, J-B WELD can be formed, drilled, ground, tapped, machined, filled, sanded, and painted. It stays pliable for about 30 minutes after mixing, sets in 4-6 hours, and cures fully in 15-24 hours. It’s water-proof; petroleum-, chemical-, and acid-resistant; resists shock, vibration, and extreme temperature fluctuations, and withstands temperatures up to 500° F. J-B WELD is super strong, non-toxic, and safe to use. Before it sets, you can clean up with soap and water.

And I have yet to disagree with this statement. I would heartily recommend the use of this product above and beyond any other bonding agent out there.

Lucky Butt is happy to have our newly repaired gnome back in the garden tonight and maybe in the future he’ll have a few more friends as well…