Today I did a little indoor gardening. The onions have been growing like blazes and all separating out into bunches of green onions:



After taking this picture I harvested all the leaves that were getting long enough to fall over. They're great chopped up in salads. I also took 2 more onions that had sprouted in storage and planted those as well.



The parsley has continued to grow. I think they are still too small to harvest any safely but they are about 5" tall and have many leaves apiece. At some point I ought to be able to take off 1 leaf at a time as needed for cooking.



Today I recovered these tiny sprouts from the vermiculture bin where they had grown vigorously from chopped carrot ends in the rich compost.



I went ahead and planted them to see if they'd thrive... no reason to expect they wouldn't, but I admit I'm curious as to whether they'll produce 1 carrot apiece and whether these would technically be the same carrot as before.....



15 carrots in all! Hopefully they will survive until summer. I still have a lot of sprouted potatoes sitting around that I hope will survive until spring as well. I don't want to plant those indoors I can avoid it. LOL

My grandmother emailed me this story recently, in response to my LJ postings about vermiculture:


LOL! One reason I picked Red Wrigglers out of several possible choices for vermiculture is they supposedly don't try to escape very much. Even so, the worm bin is designed to prevent escapees by having a top that fits closely inside the bin sides. The layer of damp newspaper just under the lid gives them something to gnaw on if they were thinking of escaping to find more food. I haven't had any escapees from the bin at all and if I find one it's usually my fault (such as when adding food or cleaning) so I just place it back inside.

This story reminds me of one though. About 20 years ago (egads!) I was living in Albany, California in a house with a number of roommates. My room had its own door to an enclosed backyard so I'd leave it open so my cats and dog could come and go at will. My dog was technically not mine, but being fostered for a small private humane society that had none of its own holding facilities. It was inevitable I'd have to give the dog up, and once that happened a very strange phenomenon developed. Every time it rained, I'd come home at night and find my bedspread covered with dead and dying worms. Some were big nightcrawlers and others medium ones. Some culprit among my cats was bringing a worm in to play with, then going to fetch another when that one stopped being fun. There would be as many as 15-20 at a time by the time I came home. By why did it start only after the dog left? The logical explanation was that it had actually been going on the whole time, but when the dog was around she had gobbled up the used worms before I could find them. Yuuuck!

Today was my first day of shoveling snow. It wasn't really enough to justify tackling the huge crusty dinosaur of a snowblower we bought this summer for my first time, as only about an inch and a half fell. So instead I shoveled and then came back in and took a nice 4 hour nap. So much for getting much done today.

I did preserve this pair of squashes that came in that last CSA load. Although they are different in shape I think they were actually 2 of the same kind.



When I cut them open they had the same inside. The narrow necked one looked like the narrow end had been damaged in some way. That end was kind of dried out and seeds had not developed.



I decided to cut those ends off since I didn't like the looks of them and the dried part was too tough to scoop out with the seeds.



The cut ones seemed to bake up just fine despite not being completely sealed in by skin. 1 hour later at 325° F they were done. Together all the squashes produced about 2 and a half cups of "squish" which I divided into three small ziplocs for freezing. I tasted some and they were a bit buttery or peanutty tasting, not incredibly sweet. They'd be good in soup I think!

The skins are soft when they're still hot after baking, so after scraping the flesh out I chopped them finely and put them in the fridge for worm food. They'll eat the innards too, but I am going to keep the seeds out and roast those tomorrow. Seeds that get into the worm bin tend to grow frantically in the rich compost, and push up the lid causing it to dry out inside. I had apples, squash, pumpkins and even tomatoes go nuts in there before I learned better. LOL

Hello,

One of the projects I did in the last several days was that I did a "spring cleaning" of sorts on my vermicomposting farm. This is a small compost bin in which worms that eat rotting vegetable matter (red wrigglers are the breed in this case) are allowed to breed and thrive on kitchen scraps. It can be done outdoors all year round in climates that do not get below freezing, or in the basement in cold climates. My worm bin is an expandable worm tower which really isn't as scary as it sounds.



There are various different styles of bins. The idea with this type is that there are several layers, each with a mesh bottom. As the compostables in the lower layers are completely consumed, the worms migrate upward leaving pure compost in the lower bins to be harvested. Therefore the top tray is always the "working tray" and a new one is added periodically. My bin is about 1 year old and I still only have one layer on top. This is because I screwed up and underfed them at one point and they consumed all the newspaper lining the bottom of their tray, causing the finished compost to fall into the worm tea collection trough underneath. Er... don't ask about worm tea. You don't want to know. At any rate, that means my first harvest of compost came out of there instead of from an actual tray, so I opted to simply clean up the existing tray and put it back on over the emptied trough.



Here's a tray of fresh clean bedding. It lies on top of a layer of newspaper as mentioned above. The bedding itself consists mainly of fiber (shredded paper in this case but it can also be coir fiber, coconut husk shreds or whatever is cheap and available). Mixed in with the shreds is some black soil or other grit for their digestion (and to contribute needed microorganisms). It has to be exactly the right level of dampness. I use a pump sprayer to add water evenly, then mix it and feel it with my hand to make sure it's perfect.



I keep this cookie jar of pre-prepared dirt. It is used potting soil mixed with crushed dead leaves and some dryer lint. The lint is to provide fiber because I also include this mixture when I feed the worms their dead vegetables.



There is also a smaller jar of lint that is just the spare lint for making more dirt mix later.



On the new bedding I place some nice black soil containing my worms. Then when I feed them I scoop a hole in the dirt and bury about a handful of rotten or wilted veggies at a time. There is no odor really, though part of that is being clever about what kind of veggies go in. Broccoli is not suggested! After a few weeks the dirt will have expanded to hide a lot of the bedding. Once the dirt has filled the tray, but before the worms have resorted to eating the newspaper underneath it, I place another new tray on top for them to migrate to and stop putting food in the lower tray. This is the part where I messed up this last time... have to add new tray a lot more quickly next time. LOL



This was my first black dirt harvest... my worms made this and it is incredibly fertile, good for spooning into house plants or indoor grown vegetables. The mixing bowls shown are about medium size.



Here's what one of the trays looks like after the dirt is harvested out of it. It's ready for a good scrubbing with a stiff brush in the utility sink.



All done for now!