Soil, compost, fertilizer

Easier chicken poo cleanup
 
Using alfalfa meal as fertilizer

Coffee grounds as fertilizer

Preparing My Planting Beds

Soil improving

Comfrey tea--by Allotment Vegetable Gardening

Urine as fertilizer--by The Science Development Network

Preparing my planting beds

Today I transplanted a bunch of cabbage seedlings and I thought I would share with you the simplest method I've come up with to prepare planting beds.

First I start by raking up the loose material, such as what you see here. Rocks, sticks, moss, weeds. Then I loosened the ground with my new tiller.

Then I grab a scrap of mesh and pull the soil over it.

Or rake the soil on top.

Roll it back and forth a few times.

And toss the rocks and whatnot into a bucket. The rocks will be integrated into the rock paths.

Then I went back over the area with my tiller and added fertilizers. Today I transplanted cabbage seedlings into the bed but this would be especially suited to making  a fine seedbed.

Soil improving

My front yard has horrible clay problems. I decided to import soil from Boring Bark. It was a small fortune but I think that it will be worth it in the end. I've ordered a 4 way soil mix and a large amount of cow manure (for the nitrogen loving plants).

Steve Solomon says tht at his remedy for clay soil is just to import more soil on top and consider the clay the subsoil. So that is what I am trying to do.

I'm not sure what to do about the fruit trees that I've planted. Most of the collars of the trees are well above ground, so I think I will just put soil up to the collars and hope that the worms will mix the soil in for me. I don't want to dig them up and damage the roots.

I've decided that since so much soil needs to be imported I will be growing most of my potatoes where the other crops have failed. I placed the potatoes right on top of the clay and put the soil on top. As they grow, I will hill up more of the soil mix around the potatoes. I've got a lot more potatoes to plant, so most of this half of the yard will have potatoes and large amounts of soil planted on top. Hopefully the worms will work on getting some of the soil mixed in for me.

The other nitrogen loving plants (garlic and kales and such) will be getting a much higher dose of the cow manure. Hopefully it won't be too much, but I'm worried that my garlic hasn't grown enough to bulb out much once that time comes. It really hasn't gotten much energy stored yet. I think I will take a pitchfork and poke drainage/oxygen holes around.

My new redworms

Well, I ordered some redworms a couple weeks ago. They are very expensive but I think it is worth it. The least expensive place I found to buy them was Peaceful Valley, for $29, including shipping.

I made a homemade worm bin but unfortunately it didn't work out very well. I put a lot of thought into the homemade design too. The trouble is getting the moisture level right without creating an anaerobic environment which I ended up doing, even with all of the holes that I drilled into the bin. It ended up stinking and smelling like mildew very quickly. I used cardboard and garden soil, as many sites recommend. But cardboard repels water while the garden soil likes to soak it up. So it seems near impossible to get the moisture level right with two very different mediums. If I water water water the cardboard to try to get it to soak, the soil ends up way too wet. Frustrating.

I've tried to do worms once before, but I got them from a person on craigslist who I don't think really knew what they were doing. And my heart just wasn't into it.

So I bought the "worm factory" from a local landscape store for $69. That is the cheapest I've seen it. It is really much smaller than it appears in all of the photos. For many reasons I thought this would help with my issues.

Unfortunately, last time I checked my worms were dying. I bet that this is probably from the anaerobic environment that they were living in. But many did appear to be doing well, so I am hopeful. I combed through the worm factory manual to see if there was any other reason they might be dying. The manual says never ever give the worms pine needles because it will kill the worms, which I had done with my homemade bin. Of course there isn't any way for me to pick out all of the pine needles now, so I may just be sitting back and watching them die. I combed the internet to see what others had to say about pine needles. Most have no mention of it and several sites recommend it as a good medium. To me, not giving redworms some pine needles seems counterintuitive. But what do I know.

Needless to say I am frustrated. I am afraid to look in the bin now and wonder if I should just leave them alone for awhile and not mess with them. I am also contemplating contacting Peaceful Valley and asking for a replacement since their instructions have no mention of pine needles. We will see. $30 is a lot of money to spend on vermin, not to mention the investment I made in the worm bin.

Oregon giant earthworm

Cool info!

http://www.xerces.org/oregon-giant-earthworm/