Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Garden Update

So, time to take a look at how the garden is doing.




This is my little corn row, nothing like Kansas but these seem to be doing well. Not too badly eaten by the earwigs! They're the Country Gentlemen Heirloom variety.




The Fiji Apple tree, looks like it will have a bumper crop.



The re-furbished strawberry bed is starting to produce. I love strawberries.



The Nasturtium Alsaka Mix is to help attrack bees and pollinating insects and keep snails away, alledgedly.



Look closely, those are the tomato seedlings. Tomatoes not doing so well this year, but there's plenty of good growing time yet!



To help with our challenge of less than 100lb of rubbish to land fill, we invested in a 60 gallon tumbling composter made by Keter Plastics. We got it for only $98 from Home Depot. So far it's been working pretty well. Garden waste and most of our food scraps go in here and also we're using some paper products too.



Inside it has some fins that help keep it aerated. Clearly it's time to take it for a tumble. It's classed as a "hot composter" which means the temperature gets pretty warm in there to help speed up the process.



We also have a more traditional compost heap, where we put a lof of the garden waste as well. I think now it is looking more "brown" we might transfer it to the hot composter, to try and keep the ratio in there of 66% "browns" to 33% "greens"

The upside down grapefruit skin you see is meant to attract garden worms.



Some of our other food scraps make it to our worm bin, shown here with some nice healthy looking wiggling worms. Its' getting time to feed them again soon and harvest the worm castings.



It sits in a shady corner of the garden so that they don't cook in the sun.



Some more bloody squirrel damage. There will be an escalation of hostilities very soon!

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