Sunday, March 7, 2010

What a load of crap!

My lovely wife came home from running errands yesterday morning and told me she had a present for me in the trunk.  When I went to claim my prize, I found out it was a 30 lb bag of cow manure!  If ever there were a symbol of love :).  A few short hours later (and after a run to Target to get a 20 gallon Rubbermaid tote), I have a compost box set up!  I put about half the manure in the tote, and added a gallon ice-cream container's worth of food scraps from the kitchen.  I haven't added worms yet, I want to wait a few weeks and see how it does without them.  From what I've read, this setup may be a bit small, and thus may not produce the heat needed to properly compost.  But, its the best I can do at the moment, considering I don't have the space for anything bigger, or the yard waste to build it up.

In other news, most every plant is springing forth quite nicely.  My experimental garlic clove has produced a nice, green stem above ground, and is growing quite fast.  No sign of growth from the pepper yet, but I'll give it time to see what happens.  I pulled out some onions that had died (I still have more than enough left), and replaced them with some carrot seeds, which I have in abundance.

I checked the forecast for the next month, and only saw two or three days that are supposed to drop down below freezing!  I'm playing it safe for now, and keeping everything (except the compost) inside on the window-sills.  But if our beautiful weather continues, I may move things out on the deck within a month or so!

Ahh, the joy of manure under my finger nails :)

The second-story gardener 

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Pictures

Here is the space I'm working with!  I had grand plans for hanging homemade wooden planters over the railings, but after checking Craigslist and the ReStore for used wood, I opted for cheep/free planters and pots instead.  Always room to build up the collection later!


This is next to the sliding glass door that leads out to the deck.  It's south facing and is a great place to put planters to catch the morning and early afternoon sun.  Here we have two snake plants that used to reside in one small pot, a future pepper plant, future garlic, and the bottom planter is onions.  No, I haven't seen that much growth yet, I got them already started.


This window is directly above the sliding glass door, and is another great place to catch the sun (and keep the planters safely out of reach of my overly-curious cat.

And here's the first proof of success!!  Ok, it may be a bit early to declare victory, but I was quite excited to see green!  This is the thyme, which only took a week to start appearing.  Since then, I've seen growth from the basil, carrots, tomatoes, the onions that I transplanted.

Hope this gives you an idea of how it's going!

The Second-Story Gardener