Heap o Worms - Update

Stick a fork in it; it's done. (Guardian caiman at left.)

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I abandoned the bin, and experimented with freestyle vermiposting. Having had a wooden bin that succumbed to rat raids or some unknown catastrophe, I just started tossing kitchen scraps and the neighbor's juice-machine pulp in a heap, aiming for an old-school compost, but thwarted by the cool wet NW winter. Then I noticed that worms migrated in, and the compost was just not heating up, so I took to tossing on dirt from molehills to aid the vermiferous digestive process, and turning it all with a fork from time to time.

Even in January, it seemed to be working just fine. I never added worms, but there they were. No idea whether they were heeding the dinner bell and crawling in from elsewhere, or if I had a breeding population, but each time I turned over the heap, scads of red wriggling worms appeared. The color and activity makes me think they are "red wigglers," the favored variety for composting, but again, I have no idea if that's true; my curiosity tends to take a nap when things are working fine (unlike those missing scapes, what the hell?).

On the initial worm heap, I would put fresh material on one side, followed with some brown matter (dead leaves and twigs, mostly, the idea being to get some partially decomposed material with it's microbiota to balance the fresh "green" stuff), finally dusted with some soil (I mostly used backdirt from molehills, which around here is the glacially deposited, mostly inorganic, sandy clay substrate). Then I'd flip the other side on top. Back and forth.

That worked fine. Yielding this:

Heap #1, cross section.

So yeah. Update: It worked. A few months turned all my kitchen waste and the neigbor's juice pulp into fine black loam. Because of the addition of sandy soil, it actually has more structure than typical worm castings, although it may not be quite so potent. Better yet, the soil for a couple of feet around the heap is spongy-soft; even after I harvest the good stuff, the network of worm-tunnels full o castings will make this a good spot to garden.

Hell yeah, I'll take that.

 
In May, I stopped adding material to Worm Heap #1, figuring I'd let the worms work their way through the last of the fresh scraps and make for a harvest that had only the good stuff (and presumably, fewer worms, wh would have moved on in search of food.

The new heap took shape about 10 yards away, beginning with a layer of dead leaves, poplar and spruce buds (thank you, windfall), and whatever. By now, my juice-fiend neighbor was keeping his pulp to himself, but it being Spring now, there was a supply of garden thinnings.

Heap # 2, cross section.

To augment the thinnings, I also tossed on weeds, unless they were the kind that would take root too easily, or were full of seed.

As if haphazard weed-tossing is not lazy enough, I decided this time to forego the periodic turning with a pitchfork. Not having giant clumps of carrot-pulp that need aerating to prevent slimy non-decomposition, it didn't seem so crucial, and an experiment in the name of finding an easier way is one gamble I'll usually take.

So far, so good. With drier weather, I pay a bit more attention to watering the heap, but no turning. After adding a decent amount of green material, I'll rake the garden paths toward the heap to give it an influx of brown matter, or shovel on some molehill dirt. Not quite so systematic, but still there is a good mix of green, brown, and grit. Maybe not as pretty as Heap #1, and to the untrained eye it may appear haphazard, but if it works, it's a refinement of technique from the standpoint of energy input (according to my back). More to the point, the worms are there in droves, and the green and brown stuff is turning into dirt.

Toss it, and they will come.

Maybe I'll do another update, but if not, just assume this is working. At this point, I cannot see the sense in trying real composting again. Or even making another worm bin. I have yet to sort Heap #1 (I'll sift it through 1/2-inch mesh to remove the sticks and avocado pits, which are apparently indestructable), but there must be at least 20 gallons of black gold there, and I should be able to do this twice a year. The sandy glacial soil in this yard should improve.

Open a Heap o Worms

 

I've never been the best composter, but even so the Northwest is the most difficult place by far that I've ever tried to do it. People talk about it a lot, blogs and newspapers run articles about composting, hell, even the county will subsidize your purchase of a bin. But some of the best gardeners I know, when pressed, will admit that our cool wet Winters (and Falls and Springs--let's be honest) make it a challenge at best. Sure, selectivity of materials, great diligence, and willingness to have multiple composts in the works at any given time can cook up some fine black gold, but it ain't easy.

So a couple of years ago, I figured I'd try worm composting, but again, I was not so good at it. Ultimately, I did not have enough bedding and space to accomodate the volume of kitchen and garden waste I produce. In the meantime, I am pretty sure, rats gobbled up many of the specially purchased red wiggler worms alleged to be master casters (although I've had no luck to date finding reliable information on vermipredation).

Now I live alone, and don't have as many daily food scraps, but since I press cider, pickle, and can in bursts, I produce occasional heaps of peels and pulp. Add to this a helpful neighbor who makes a lot of juice and gifts me with bins of finely ground veggie and fruit every week or so, and I have so much fresh material that any compost or worm bin is bound to be overwhelmed.

Until I gave up. 

At least, I stopped trying to go the usual routes, like paying for special worms or compost bins. Taking the DIY ethic to it's sometimes backbreaking and stubborn extreme, I resolved to make due with the tools, soil, and critters I have. 

Over the carrot and kale pulp, a layer of old leaves.

I pushed my failed compost into a heap. The humble heap (a word of Anglo-Saxon origin, more faithful to the spirit of a shapeless mass of rotting vegetables than the Latin-derived "pile," which is a bit too prissy and upright for what this is). Somehow I got it into my head that I could coax the local earthworms up into it. The up-side of our cool wet climate is that it is rarely outright freezing, and worms are often close to the surface throughout Winter. In fact, I knew from my compost failures over the years that they would migrate into a heap if it weren't burning up at proper compost temperatures. [You may not be a big worm fan, but they probably beat my similar cannot-compost-adaptation/rationalization involving rats.]

So I decided to set the table a bit more to their liking. When I go on a cooking binge, or the juicaholic neighbor has one of his own, the debris goes on half the heap, as in the opening photo. Then I scrounge up some old dead leaves for variety and anti-bird cover, and toss them on, like in the second photo. Finally, I layer on some mineral soil. Luckily for me, moles are constantly kicking up backdirt from their endless tunneling under the lawn, and all I have to do is scoop up a few shovels of that nicely broken up soil and toss them on. Like in the last of this most un-photogenic series, here:

Yep, that there's a dirt-covered heap. One of the internet's finest photos.

The dirt is something earthworms like, even need, giving their guts the grit to digest the vegetative matter. According to my reasoning, which lies somewhere between superstitious hunch and scientific hypothesis, the combination of new scraps with old microbe-laden duff and mineral soil should be a balanced meal that lets the worms thrive and make more worms. Lately, as I turn the heap, the number of worms suggests that I am onto something.

Speaking of turning, my hunch/hypothesis is that this is the crucial activity on the part of me, the human steward of this worm mountain. Earthworms are good aerators, but the frequent addition of more fresh vegetable peels and pulp, of wet leaves and often sodden soil, is enough to compact the heap into a stanking anaerobic mess that will never decompose fully. Turning the pile loosens the material, creates new air pockets, and facilitates migration of interior to exterior and vice versa.

This is why, in the first photo, you see carrot pulp on only one side. In a week or so, I'll dig in deep to the other side with the fork, and turn it over on top of the left before depositing a new load of scraps, leaves, and soil onto the right. If I see any slimy clumps, I'll break them up. Maybe toss on more leaves or soil, or just pull out a few twigs; I respond to the moment. In time lapse photography, you would see the heap shift from one side to the other. 

This hypothesis/hunch has yet to run through the test. The look and smell of the heap, not to mention the burgeoning worm population, suggest it is working. As time passes, I imagine that I'll be able to harvest shovel-fuls of fertile dirt-compost-castings, as the pile continues its slow swaying dance and the worms shimmy inside. I may set up a half-inch screen box nearby and harvest the fine fallout that way, tossing the rest back into the pile. Or maybe, some other idea will occur to me. In the meantime, I toss dinner scraps on every day or so, a pile of pulp every week or so, and engage in a burst of heavy labor now and then. And the worms eat and make more worms.

[Oh yeah, it worked great! See the Update, and Round 2 experiment here.] 

Tidal Beds

Low Tide

Back in March, I briefly referenced sunken garden beds, and just the other day I railed against the false wisdom of raised beds. The more I think about it, the more it seems like the garden wisdom takes a while to play out, and favors an oscillation, an ebb and flow, rather than zealous favoring of one level or another.

If you read the raised bed rant, you may have figured out that many of the problems stem from inflexibility: the unchanging, unyielding perimeter with a static elevation. Horizontal extent of a garden bed may be constrained by your available space, but still the bed (or at least the weeded portion thereof) should be able to grow over the summer, and perhaps retreat during winter.

Rising Tide

You can play around with elevation a lot more, though. Some plants like to be in mounds to begin with. You've heard of a 'hill of beans," right? My cukes start out in ringed hills worthy of Celtic chieftans. Then of course there are the potatoes and other plants that benefit from having more and more soil piled up around them as the season progresses. Meanwhile, blueberries and mints like the low wet ground, sopping up whatever water runs from the hills. Within a given bed, highs and lows occur across space and through time.

This attitude is especially well suited to my local soil, which is a fairly sandy loam borne of glacial retreat. It's easy to work. I dig out lawn and sculpt to the levels I want. Or give the bed a tilt. Banking a bed high to the north and low to the south creates a small advantage to crops in northern climes, bringing the ground a bit closer to perpendicular to the lines of photons coming from the sun, fooling seeds and starts into thinking they're a few weeks closer to summer. The same aspect that makes Washington's Columbia wines more famous than Oregon's--a southerly slope to the river--can be replicated on a small scale in my yard with just a shovel and garden rake.

The plants themselves add to the effect, and so planning is important. Put the raspberries and pole beans to the north, and work your way down to the ground-huggers at the south. A big plant at the south snags the photons, relegating anything north to a dank dark pit. Fine if you want ginseng and miners lettuce, but not so good for your garden variety plants. Knowing how early and how fast things grow matters, too; you can plant greens that rise early or late in the shadow of a mid-summer monster, since the don't much care for solstitial high noons anyway. Knowing when and how quickly each plant will grow and fade allows a gardener to overlap to a degree, getting more out of every inch of garden space.

Any one variety of plant ebbs and flows, and likes to be high and drained or low and sodden. Your whole bed may start small and grow over summer, flooding south, toward that that photosynthetic sunbilical, only to retreat again. I use this knowledge to be a little lazier, dispensing first with those heavy, labor intensive (and pestiferous, don't forget) walls. I may be still digging bigger well after the solstice if some plant or transplant could use the ground; no need to cram a Summer's worth of work in March. Go with the flow.

And don't fight the flow. Why would you want boards or bricks or railroad ties blocking your garden's roots? A single-level bed works fine for a monoculture, but not much more. Roto-tilling a big bed for a few tiny starts and seeds invites a flood of weeds. A rectangle of introduced 'soil' intensively cultivated, watered, and fertilized year after year is great, if your aim is to create pest habitat.


Summer's tide pulls high only once a year. Long northern days feed photons aplenty to the plants that ride this one big wave. Growth crests, and drops off when the clouds show up or the days just get too short. It's a good ride, and sooner than you'd like you slide into Winter, where there's time to reflect and maybe even think ahead.

Railing Against Raised Bed Orthodoxy

Earlier this year, I said something about un-raised beds. At the time, no allusions were made to the religious overtones--phoenix, messiah, or otherwise-- of the "raised" bed, and there will be no comment here other than to say I like the bumper sticker, rarely and courageously displayed in Born Again counties, that says "No thanks, I was born OK the first time."

Because today, sisteren and brotheren, let us instead turn our eyes to the earth, humble ourselves, and ask, "What do we when we pen our gardens in raised beds?" The answers speak to the soil, the people who would control it, and to their politics. That's right, this siblinglish English seeks not to sweet-talk your sacred center, it's after your political skin, the dermal you that touches the world, what everyone else is gonna see and feel.


In this physical plane, we can be good animals who adopt and adapt, or crazy ones who try to control, and end up starving. Not you personally (maybe), but the species at some point. When human populations reach a certain density, misery ensues on the coat-tails of a flea or a leader of men or maybe just a drought. 

Before the fall, we convince ourselves that we are smart enough to avoid the fate of the desertified Fertile Crescent and pauperized Aegean soils, or the overtaxed Yucatan and raped Rapanui palms. We thing that agriculture is better than nature, and never learn that as soon as we seek to select, to replace god or evolution with human intellect, things spin out of control, and one day land at a place where we humans are screwed if we cannot go elsewhere. Especially when we reach too far; take as an example the corporate American agricultural ideal: a single genetically-modified strain drilled into fumigated soil, fed aquifers, augmented with chemical feed and protection. What could go wrong?


All of which is my long-winded, overly-dramatic, tired-as-shit, fingers-doing-whatever-they-want on the keyboard way of saying that raised beds fool a lot of gardeners with promises of miracles that will one day be ground into the dirt.


Why would I besmirch the sterling reputation of the raised bed? People love 'em, and talk about getting great production, the ease (it's getting hard to concntrate here with a Cobain crazed jam going on).

By way of answer, this list of the characteristics of raised beds that you are not likely to see in the article with all those pretty pictures urging you to get out there and raise a bed (or better yet, buy one):

• Use untreated wood, and you'll be repairing the thing every year. Seems like a waste of wood, unless you pulled it from a demolished building (in which case, watch out for the lead paint), which leads me to
• Use treated wood, and you're putting your gardening taste (and quite possibly your desire to cut corners) above the health of the soil that you are asking to feed you. And, therefore, your health. This is especially troubling because
• Most raised beds don't last more than a few seasons. I admit that this statement is not backed up with data here, but there are a lot of neglected, abandoned, and ultimately forgotten raised beds. 
• When a raised bed dies, it often becomes a nursery for invasive weeds. They spread into the driveways and roadsides, and into neighbor's gardens. The un-tended raised bed often becomes a haven for weeds because
• Very few people make raised beds using the native soil. Often as not, they dump "soil" that fails to meet the actual definition of soil, comprised hereabouts of composted wood and food, bearing no relation to the stuff under the grass in your yard. Even if it does not carry a crop of weed-seeds, it is just what the invasive weeds want. You know why a certain wine appellation or coffee estate can make genuine claim to excellence? It's the soil there, the delicate balance of microbes, worms, and arthropods that stir it up. That does not come in a dump-truck.
• Speaking of arthropods, every time you install a rectangle of cinderblock or boards, you create ant havens. By way of thanks, they will repay you by opening aphid dairies on your plants, sucking honey shit from bugs sucking your plants dry. 
• Not speaking of dry, those same boards and masonry create slug havens as well, and I'm assuming you know that that ain't good for a garden. IF slugs are a problem, it's good to lay a board down in the path and turn it over once in a while to dispatch a few slime-bellies, but don't build a freakin bed for them.
• This idea of an unchanging perimeter is hardening, not gardening. My bedds ebb and floww with the seasons. As plants grow, I dig out more grass so they can expand. If you hill up potatoes in a raised bed, you either have to bring in more fake soil or pull it away from the edges, which end up being pointless free-standing walls.
• Not only is changing the size of a raised bed difficult, so too is moving the damn thing when the neighbor's tree grows and puts the original location in shadow.
• ...  

There are plenty more reasons, but it's late and even though the music is done I am getting no better at concentrating. If you are not convinced by now, you're probably not reading this far anyway. If you are, stay tuned, because next time I'll get back to the benefits of another approach to garden beds. Much better than that March post, I promise.


 

On-ward and Up-ward, or, An Ode to Cliches and Hyphens

Hops, hops, and away!

Vertical gardening has reached new heights (excuse the cliche, but it happens to be the direct and resonant way to say this) in the past decade, outgrowing tomato cages and trellises to climb urban walls many stories high. High concept architects and their landscape associates paint buildings with sedums and such, and occasionally recall the old Babylonian hanging gardens trick. While the web can cough up photos of these efforts without even turning its head, the search for a food garden cannot get much more than a couple of humans high without more effort than I'm willing to put forth. But if you look closely at the loftier architectural statements, of paradigm shifts to verticality and green living, you'll see that most of the images are of new installations and of high-end commercial properties maintained by professional crews; the same few places show up over and over in a single search, and many are still just conceptual drawings. Call me back when they've lasted a decade, and I'll be impressed.

Gardeners as I'm thinking of them tend to be (again, a cliche says it best) more down to earth. Our beans have always climbed cornstalks and poles and twine. Tomatoes and their friends clamber up cages like kids on the playground, branches hanging out on rungs, leaders never satisfied til they've summitted. Trellises and latticery are about as far as we go, architecturally (which we did generations before actual architects appropriated the forms).

Upward gardening's roots (am I pushing this cliche thing too far? Nevermind, it's working well enough) go even deeper than the gardeners, though. Some plant species and tribes just want to grow upward. Not just the obvious viney ascenders or even the sprawlers who can be coaxed onto a fence or frame. My Tongan mentors explained Polynesian gardening to me in this way: taro grows up and yam grows down...meaning that the big starchy corms of the aroid tribe build upward with each new leaf, while the yam tuber reaches further down into the earth with each week (the vine may rise five Tongans high, or six of an average human, but they aren't food, and therefore not the proper focus of Polynesian agronomic discourse).

Potatocage (background) and a rising sunken bed of spud-runts.

In my own Olympia garden, taro and yams are not possible (tropical species are by and large frozen out, I'd say, were I continuing the cliche theme), but potatoes are fine, and my tuberrific efforts cater to the plant's needs. The vines want to grow vertically, and must be propped up before they flop over, but with dirt or mulch instead of trellises and twine, so that they'll bear spuds. In theory, the higher you can pile the soil, the more taters you get. Northwest winters kill all manner of theories, this one included, but for a time I can fill this old cage made for tomato with it's rhyming tuber.

I love the down-to-earth climbing of soil-bound starch-balls (and hyphen-ation, clearly), but some plants do want to climb, to wrap one-tendril embraces as high as they can reach, and yield the fruit of this embrace way up high (often out of reach of tiny non-Polynesians like myself).

Last June, I wrote about hops being the upwardest of climbers, including an experiment sending them into the hazel. It worked well enough that this year I'm doing it again this sun-lap, but without the dead-hazel. Instead of a tipi of cut poles tied together, I just ran twine from the hop-sprout to the top of the biggest hazel-nut tree. Already, the vines have helixed up the line and into the tree (over twice my height, maybe even two Tongans high), with a few feet to go before they even think of budding. When the time comes, I'll cut vine and string at the base and yank it all down.

Meanwhile, the other aggro-climbers, the Himalayan blackberries, whose volume puts hops' height to shame, require restraint more than  support, or they'll eventually weave a thorny mat that begins in suburbia and ends with a net covering Puget Sound. I just now cut back a bunch of the vegetative canes, giving the flower-buds some sun and weaving a few leafy ones behind to make next year's berries; the cut tips are tender because of recent rains, and will become snacks or stir-fry or candy or pickles; I pretty much cut them just above where the thorns harden and skin toughens, so I won't have to do much peeling. I'm not even bothering with saving leaves for tea this time.

Once the vegetative enthusiasm is checked, what appears is a web of fruiting mini-canes, interwoven behind a few metal T-posts hammered in close to the house foundation. Instead of securing canes to a trellis (or, as some previous denizen of this house did, a 2-by-4 nailed to the siding) the idea is to pin the blackberries against the wall, which will help them ripen so that my kids can come along later in the summer and gorge on ripe berries...with only the occasional puncture wound.

As the world's population expands, land will seem to shrink, and we'll be forced to make the most of whatever patch of soil we can cultivate. I hope I never have to see the end-ish times when such things are a matter of survival. In the meantime, getting the vertical most out of horizontal space is a game I like to play.

Lil Tomato Houses

Girl in action. Lil tomato house inaction.

The first weekend in April, Olympia's Farmers Market opens (and I rejoice). That time of year around Puget Sound, even the best farmers don't have much produce, so they fill the gap with plants started in greenhouses (and all of us gardeners rejoice). 


But April, even May, can be a cruel time for plants to have their roots thrust into cold wet soil, tops shivering in the mist one day and wind the next. This is especially true for tomatoes, which might enjoy the occasional sunny days, but not the cool wet ones, and especially not the frigid nights (which tend to be even colder following a clear sunny day). They may not actually shrink, like mammalian maleparts may in such conditions, but they sure as heck don't wanna grow, and cannot summon the strength to fight blights and fend off fungal foes. 


So you either wait til it's warm, which may not happen til days are already getting shorter, or you give them shelter. Following Solomon's advice (conveniently reproduced for us moderns in Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades before he took off for Tasmania, that devil), I grew them in a hoop house (instructions here) last year, which worked out very well. Even though the Spring was long and cool, a little bit of plastic allowed me to harvest photons throughout, giving the plants a big head start by the time Summer finally arrived.


This year, I decided to grow more, and to experiment with individual tomato houses, which are basically cages with a form-fitting plastic cover. This will let each plant get about twice as big in the warm confines of its home before it starts bumping into the plastic cover, demanding release.

This shot gives you the basic idea. First, make a wire frame (what does not show up well is that if you use fence like this, you should cut out a few 2 x 2 holes in the grid so you can reach in later and harvest). Then, cut plastic wide enough to wrap completely around and tall enough to close over the top. Slide this prophylactic over the cage, and wait for juicy tomatoes to burst forth. That's about it.

But not completely it. Already, I've learned of some flows in my brilliant plan. Try not to replicate my idiocy and inexperience:

• Plant the tomato first, because it's a pain to reach inside to plant it. Literally, if your cutting left sharp wire nubs like I did.
• Stake down the cage, or it'll blow over. I used the wire I cut out to tie the cage to a rebar pounded into the ground, and it has held so far.
• Make the plastic slightly loose fitting. That way it is easier to slide up so you can water, or let the tomatoes breathe on the hot day that will inevitably follow your planting. 
• Don't depend on tape to hold the plastic together. In the photo above, I did not remove the plastic to make the cage visible; it fell off. [I am leaving a couple like that as controls to test the efficacy of the remaining lil tomato houses. Ineptitude and laziness can be recast as science.]
• Don't leave town. You can cook your plants in a hurry if you don't slide the plastic up several inches on sunny days, and make sure they are watered. 
• Try and make the roof tighter than I did. All I did was clip the top, which does not make anything even close to a sealed envelope. I am pretty sure the heat flows out by nightfall,  but again am too lazy and inept to fix it. [Sometimes they cannot be called science, although I am able to rationalize that I'm probably not baking the plants during days when I am not there to coddle them.]

No doubt, as time passes, I'll learn more. Maybe I'll follow up at the end of the season. It will be interesting to see if the covered plants outperform those left to the vagaries of the Puget Spring (as I write, they are enduring a cold rainy night). If nothing else, they are in nice cages, so I won't have to do anything more than guide a few branches through the holes to give them support. These plants won't be as crowded as their hoophouse sisters, which according to Solomon should pay off. We'll see.