Gardening and composting

I have not paid much attention to our worms. I have not really fed them very often (I'm estimating that I give them a new tray of food about 1x/mo, if that). But they seem to have survived quite well and have done their work making the super-concentrated compost that we need to augment the incredibly poor soil we have here. In the areas that have been my parent's traditional gardens, my mom has typically bought store-bought gardening soil to add in, but we're working on expanding our edible plantings into other areas of my parents landscaping, some of which have never had any soil amendment. We're trying to get more nutrients into the soil (hence the compost), and we're also trying to help water stay in the soil rather than running off of it (it's rock hard!). So Erich's been aerating as much as possible, and we've been mulching a lot, too.

We got a free truck-full of mulch from a tree-removal company, and have been spreading it in the orchard. It's working wonderfully. The orchard is happier, we're getting some healthy groundcover, and we actually don't have to water it as much.

First a some notes on the worms:
1. Theoretically, the worms are supposed to leave the tray with the finished castings to migrate to the tray with fresh food and bedding. I haven't really found this to be how things work. This is probably due at least in part to the fact that I haven't given them a new tray and then left them for a while to migrate. But even when there are five trays in use, the oldest one still has quite a few worms in it. So I have to get them to leave the finished compost "manually." Actually, I don't have to pick them out or anything like that. What I have been doing that works GREAT is pulling out the tray I want for its compost and putting it on top of the tray that I want to worms to move to (say, the new tray full of fresh scraps and bedding). This is somewhat contrary to the directions that have the worms always migrating upwards to the fresh tray. I then expose the finished tray to bright light, and the worms scurry downward to escape the sun (this is rather fun to watch... I picture them all saying, "Run away!"). I then pull off the top layer of relatively worm-free compost, exposing them again. They scurry further down, I pull off more worm-free compost. Eventually, they scurry all the way to the next tray. Mission accomplished.
2. Previously, I had been using shredded paper as bedding for the worms. I have not been doing this as much and have been using coconut coir instead. It seems to work much better, producing a more uniform compost without weird clumps where liquid turned the paper into a papier-mache barrier that the worms can't get through. Also, I do wonder with all the chemicals that super-white paper is treated with whether the resulting compost is quite as... "healthy" as compost made with coir. I still may continue using some paper, particularly the brown paper, but I won't be using it exclusively for bedding.

3. It's really worth cutting the food up first before giving it to the worms. Thanks to my mother's newfound interest in composting (see her blog at lonimania.blogspot.com for pictures of her super indoor composter), we now have nice compost pails and are getting into the habit of cutting up our scraps before putting them into the pails because the indoor composter really needs everything to be in bite-size pieces. Well, the worms do much better with bite-size pieces, especially with fibrous stuff like corn husks. In case it's not obvious (I guess it wasn't to me, at first), cutting up the scraps BEFORE they start rotting in the pail is WAY more pleasant than waiting until you're about to add them to the composter to cut them.

4. Our worm trays have another species in them besides the eisenia foetida (red wigglers) that we bought. They're supposed to have other creatures, but this one other species has become rather prominent. I don't know what they are. I thought at first that they were maggots of some sort, but I'm changing my mind because even though they are short, whitish, and segmented, they are flat and may have feet. I'm not sure about that--I haven't taken a close look. I was worried about them going into the garden because what if they were the larval form of something that would eat our plants (or what if they themselves would eat our plants)? But they, like the worms, run from the light, so they don't end up in the compost that I put in the garden. If any fellow vermicomposters have any idea what they may be, do comment! They're about an inch long.

That's it on the composting front. In related news, erich bought a flat of strawberry plants that I'm working on getting into the ground. My parents have some ornamental strawberries as groundcover in a couple of places, and we'd love to slowly replace them with edible strawberries. I hope they survive. The blackberry plants that we recieved from a friend seem to be surviving well. I'm hoping they grow and spread and someday bear fruit. We also have an olallieberry plant that a former supervisor gave me. It's still alive, but it doesn't look as happy as the blackberries. Even though berries require a lot of water, we decided it's worth trying to grow them ourselves, because my family goes through a ton of them from trader joes and they're really quite good for you.

Our tomato plants (and we have a lot of them, what with all the volunteer plants that came up from one batch of compost) are doing well and putting on tomatoes, but when Erich planted them, he didn't think to put up supports, so we're having tomatoes sitting on the ground. I'm trying to go around and prop them up on things.

It's a joy to finally be able to attend to the garden on a weekend like this. My weekends have been swallowed in the black hole of my dissertation for so long, I'd almost forgotten what it's like to have a real weekend. It's been wonderful.