EARLY spring garden events

Am finding more and more developments out in the gardens: delphinium and catmint way up out of the ground, allium bulbs sticking about an inch out of the still-cool ground, and as mentioned earlier, the garlic is shooting up. Golden currant bush (Ribes aureum) is looking like it wants to start budding out, and probably will do so since it's usually one of the really early ones.

I began some seeds inside yesterday - several types of peppers, several types of tomatoes, parsley, lavender, and cosmos. I may be starting the latter too early, but couldn't resist. I love it when those seeds start popping their little green shoots up! They're all sitting on their warming mat while I hover over them, waiting, waiting, waiting.....

I ordered some more raspberry plants - everbearing this time, since I've concluded that summer-bearing raspberries just don't work here, at least for me. I'm going to be giving my summer-bearing plants away on our local Freecycle group. I'm finished wasting water on them!

We're due to have a well-below freezing night tonight, then a number of warmish, sunny days are on the menu, yippee!!!!!! It's getting to the seasonal point where my mind is constantly wandering to the garden, whether I'm at work, or lying awake in bed, or elsewhere.

Last evening I turned my first batch of compost in my Earth Machine composter. I must have started the current batch in autumn, because it really didn't look like it had heated up at all. Nothing frozen was uncovered, which was surprising. But this unit does get lots of sun, even this time of year, so I suppose that's why it was totally thawed out. I added two buckets of new compostables that I'd stored over winter, and a bunch of last year's leaves, and will need to remember to stick the thermometer in it. I'm not sure its composition is of the quality that will heat up well; usually I can sort of tell when I'm going to get a good batch or not, and this one didn't ring any bells for me. Will see later.

Ice on Home Lake is nearly gone. Sandhill cranes and Canada geese are still around, feeding in the fields. Wind has been horrendous; visibility yesterday afternoon was akin to what I imagine the 1930's Dust Bowl era to be like; brown and sand-blasted atmosphere, soil & dried Russian thistles flying everywhere.

Dry, old snow & gardening catalogs

The snow here needs to be replenished with a new supply. We're getting drier & drier; soon I'll have to go out and water some shrubs and an evergreen or two. Haven't had new snow for about a month or so. Even the mountains around us have been mostly missed by storms.

The 2010 gardening catalogs have been trickling in - High Country Gardens, Burpee, Territorial Seed Company, Fedco, several more. Very soon I want to take an inventory of my vegetable & flower seeds to find out what needs replacing or adding to for the upcoming season.

The kitchen scraps both from home & work are beginning to pile up a little; during the winter I store everything in "Trugs" & five-gallon buckets until the compost heaps outside thaw and allow me to turn their contents over. Of course, in the meantime, the mostly-outside sunroom starts to smell a bit "aromatic", especially on those warmish days that we've had lately (upper 30s).

Twice in the past week we've spotted the lone great blue heron that hangs out around the patches of open water in the Empire Canal nearby. Ice-skaters have been taking advantage of the cold nights we've had to do some skating on Home Lake.

Found: Old, frozen, Canada Goose eggs

On our morning dog walk today, we passed by a nesting platform at the Rio Grande State Wildlife Area. Likely designed for Canada geese (maybe other birds also), the flat nesting platform is attached to a roughly 6'-high post, and the platform itself is surrounded by a fence-like barricade - maybe to keep the eggs & mother from rolling or falling off to the ground?

As we walked by the platform, Bruce noticed that there were three lone goose eggs sitting on the otherwise-empty platform. Since I'd never had the opportunity to hold a goose egg, I instructed him to gather all three of the eggs so I could pocket them for the walk home, to examine later. We surmised that something had happened to the mother goose during the spring '09 nesting period, thus leaving her eggs bare & unprotected. What was surprising is that the eggs were still completely intact - no cracks or anything. Why had no opportunistic predator come for this protein-filled treasure?

(The photo above shows a brown chicken egg--for scale--along with the three goose eggs.)

Once I returned home, I lightly rapped one of the eggs with a stick of wood, and it cracked open with a sound like gunshot! Since the contents were frozen, the shell was under some pressure. Sadly, in the one egg that I opened, evidence of an interrupted incubation was found by the presence of an incompletely-formed gosling.

These unfortunate eggs and their contents will become organic matter in one of my several compost bins, so their death won't be a total waste.

New alpaca poop

Buckets & buckets of alpaca poop to nourish my compost and gardens! I made a trip today to the corral of co-workers who raise alpacas. It had been a while since I'd been there, and there's an addition of a couple more poop-producing critters since my last visit.

A convenient feature of alpacas & llamas is that they concentrate their poop versus scattering it all over the corral, so it's fairly easy to fill up a few wheelbarrow loads in a short time span. The poop was mixed with a little straw (great addition), and I think was also wetted by the animals' urine. That too is a good additive for the compost-heating process.

To mark the acquisition of fresh manure, I turned the contents of my Earth Machine, and added some new manure mixed with old grass clippings and a bunch of leaves. With the addition of water & time, I should see a pretty good jump in temperature in a few days. I also emptied the contents of my tumbler composter since it was mostly finished, sifted it, and then put it on my rearranged raised beds and the tomato bed. Then I added a bunch of alpaca poop, old grass clippings, leaves, and water and spun it a few times.

Alpaca/llama manure is not extremely high in nitrogen; its carbon/nitrogen ratio is between 15/1 to 25/1. Compare that to poultry and rabbit manure which can have a ratio of 4/1; it's extremely high in N and can really heat up a compost pile when mixed with a bunch of carbon, or brown, items. But my experience both in Wisconsin and here is that it's not as easy to acquire quantities of poultry and rabbit manure, as it is that from larger, hooved animals like horses, cows, and llamas/alpacas. Alpaca/llama manure can also be directly mixed in with garden soil with little concern for harming plants; this practice is not recommended for higher N manures.

Vegetable garden rearrangement

Though growing & harvesting seasons are over, the work is not yet! Yesterday & today were spent doing some moving around of the raised beds I've put in place over the last few summers. The shadow cast by the 6'-high fence is visible in the image, and three out of my four beds were in the shaded part of the garden from October through April or so. Cold & usually frozen soil would be the result; in fact, when I started this moving process yesterday I encountered already-frozen soil. Lots of energy was spent moving huge chunks of frozen dirt out into the sun where they will eventually thaw, hopefully before the next round of low temperatures arrive. What was nice to see in all of these big chunks of dirt were dozens of little worm holes; looks like I have a healthy population of worms working on my soil texture & organic matter.

Surprisingly, my compost containers that are in the shade haven't frozen yet. I also started another batch of compost in my Home Composter unit. I doubt that it'll get hot but maybe it'll warm up a little.

Not so fast with the brusselsprouts.....

I'm still able to squeeze a few more brusselsprouts out of my plants - picked probably about a pound or so today. I think the slight purple hue that some of the little sprouts have is due to the frosty temperatures we've had some nights.

We got a great moisture-filled snowfall & rain storm a few days ago - over 1.25" of moisture sank into the dry-as-bone ground. All of the snow still hasn't melted.

Leaves are now off the trees; they were helped by the wet snow. I've raked up most of them & stored them in my several leaf bins, ready to be used for the next compost session!

One winter or late fall task is to move three of my raised beds in the vegetable garden away from the 6'-high-tall privacy fence that separates my garden from the neighbor to the south. The fence keeps those three raised beds snow covered and full of cold or frozen soil into late April & early May, which is too late when I could be planting seeds/lings in them. Moving them means I'll have to rearrange my drip irrigation tubing that spends the summer out in the garden.

Garlic is growing, seedlings are up too

The garlic I planted last fall is getting bigger & bigger. Since it's in the raised bed on the south side of a white wall, the soil it's planted in really heats up quickly and early. Our nighttime temperatures have ranged from 16 to the upper 20's, and I haven't covered the garlic yet. It seems pretty hardy.
Indoors, the pepper & tomato seeds I planted within the past two weeks are germinating. I don't have true leaves on the seedlings yet, but that should be any day now. They're all under 16-hour-on lights now that I set up in a mostly-unused room.
My compost container contents have mostly thawed now, so I'm starting new batches and renewing the old ones. There is still one big bucket of winter-storage kitchen scraps to deal with as soon as I have space in one of the bins. I hope to have some finished compost within a month or so, and I'll probably add it to the vegetable garden or raspberry area.

Pepper & tomato seeds now planted

Today I planted seeds for seven varieties of tomatoes. Don't know how I ever think I'll have room for all the plants I expect to come up. Peppers haven't germinated yet; planted them one week ago. More and more green stuff coming up outside due to warmth. Today I began clearing all of last growing season's old growth out of the vegetable garden; should have done it in the fall I suppose. Still traces of compacted snow/ice in deeply shaded parts of the yard & garden. The compost is slowly thawing, and every couple of days I peel away another layer from the still-frozen core. I still have one compost bin that is likely totally frozen since it's sitting in the shade. The dog poops in the backyard like she never gets a poop walk; we'd be knee-deep in poop if she were only a backyard-dog (i.e., no walks).

Guess it's warm enough in the house for bugs; there's one walking across the monitor as I type.

When I was raking yesterday in a corner of the yard, I found evidence of bird mortality; wonder if one of the hawks was visiting the bird feeder? Bet so; not the first time they've found lunch here! In fact, while on a raptor tour at the Monte Vista Crane Festival yesterday, the tour guide said some bird-watchers feed birds for the express purpose of attracting raptors to the backyard for viewing!

Little green things popping up!

I'm a little taken aback by all the growth that's taken place on the south side of the house over the past few days. The plant in the image is catmint, which grows as prolifically as kudzu.
The garlic I planted last fall is also coming up, along with dianthus from last year, a volunteer hollyhock, and delphinium. I'm also seeing chives poking through last year's debris.
I started messing with my compost bins today while the temperature was in the upper 40s (but felt much warmer). Compost, however, is still frozen so not much can be done there yet.
Lots of kitchen scraps from our house and my office have piled up over the winter; I'm itchin' to start taking care of it! Plus I have so many leaves that I need to use. I REFUSE to put them out in the garbage.

Green Cone composting unit

In yesterday's post I mentioned a Green Cone composter. I bought my first one (left image) more than 15 years ago when we were living in a rental duplex, because the landlord wasn't enthused about me having a stand-alone, open compost pile out in the common yard. The Green Cone (also known as a Solar Digester) seemed like a perfect solution.

The part of the composter that holds the composting materials is actually underground. The photo to the left shows the laundry basket-like black section - this is the part that is put in the ground, and the green part attaches to it, above ground.

All of the moisture in the materials leaches into the ground through the holey basket, and the effect of the sun hitting the double-walled green part and creating air circulation eventually converts the organic materials into compost. Getting the compost out can be a difficult project, but fortunately it's not necessary to do it very often (less than once a year, depending on volume). Obviously, this unit is more designed to deal with organic materials in an environmentally sound way (i.e., not landfilling them), and has only a minor focus on producing useable compost.

Worms slowly adjust to "remodeled" home

The worms always seem to take a while to adjust to their new, poop-free digs. Of course, I don't know what I expect them to do---jump up and down in glee, sing my praises for providing them new, clean bedding, what???? How in the heck can I tell if they're adjusting slowly or quickly, they're worms, for gosh sakes! Okay, enough anthropomorphising.
Today was a spectacular day, 41 degrees F, clear, blue sky, sandhill cranes & Canada geese flying all around, more snow melting. The yard is still about half covered with snow, but it is dwindling rapidly.
I inventoried my vegetable seeds today to see what I need to purchase. Many of the packets are fairly old (two to six years) so I need to check my seed-starting book on germination rates for these guys. I also started a list that contained many gardening-related entries, but I guess since the ground is still frozen and we're going to get at least a couple of snow storms, I should calm down a bit. Last fall Bruce happened to come across a Green Cone composter unit that was being sold down the street from us at a garage sale ($7, WHAT A DEAL). I had hoped to get the hole dug for it prior to freeze, but didn't happen, so now I want to get that done this spring. Just one of the many tasks I want to do......

Compost worms' home "redecorated"

It's the time of year when I separate the compost worms from their castings (poop) and put the little critters in new bedding. For the health and longevity of the worms, this process should happen more than once a year, but I don't seem to get around to it.
The image above shows some baby worms that must have just hatched. This is the first time I've found so many baby worms; this group is a sample of the many I observed.
The other stuff in the image is castings (dark & moist-looking) and uncomposted kitchen scraps.
This periodic process of separating the worms from their poop is fairly tedious, especially because I believe that all of the worms should get a fair shot at life in a new, (briefly) poop-free home. Thus, I painstakingly fork gently through all of the castings, bunch by bunch, to make sure I don't consign any worms to freezing to death out on the porch where I store their castings until spring. This usually takes me a minimum of ten hours; last week I completed the task in two evenings, part of two Sunday afternoons, and one morning. Dedication is essential!

It should be obvious that it'd be difficult to be squeamish and be a worm composter at the same time . . .

Late-autumn composting

I'd hoped to have time to turn the contents of my Home Composter once more before severe cold set in. Alas, such was not to be. With temperatures in the single digits the last three nights, and daytime temperatures in the shade in the 40s, I suspect my compost containers that are in the shade have already begun to harden a little. If I had confidence in my wintertime composting ability (i.e., actually make a "hot" compost pile), I'd probably go ahead and turn it and try to heat it up again. But I'm not convinced it's worth the effort.

So with the little remaining space available inside the composter, I'll continue dumping the contents my kitchen containers into it, separated by layers of dried fall leaves. When the bin reaches its limit, I'll consider it full and save any turning activity for the spring. Granted, I'll have some gross soggy stuff to look at come spring, but it won't be the first time! And I love thinking about what that gross soggy stuff will turn into within a couple of months!