Who’d have imagined the challenges inherent in getting to know the newest additions to my household - the red wigglers busily chomping on my kitchen scraps. Experts offer advice about helping them adjust to their new home in your compost bin, advice I’m researching with all the earnestness of expectant parents reading "What to Expect". But it’s the advice about runaways that’s gotten my attention this past week as I’ve watched my worms scrambling to escape their new home. By that I mean every time I opened the lid, the underside of the lid was covered with the little guys, and a few even escaped, much to the delight of the cats.
My reaction has been along these lines: They hate me! I’m a terrible worm-mother! Typical pangs of parental rejection, I suppose, but new to ME.
Then it occurred to me that most of this runaway action had been in the past week and it had been pretty cold out and I wondered if the compost bin resting on an unheated tile floor was such a good idea. And sure enough, after moving the worm bin to the living room the worms totally stopped trying to escape.
Wow, they’re such sensitive beings! They prefer the same temperature range that humans do, these red wigglers do. And who knows - maybe they like being with the rest of the household critters, humans included, and near the TV.
More vermicomposting reports coming soon.
Top photo by Wendy via Flickr. Bottom photo - would YOU want to live on that cold, cold floor?
Totally off-topic, enjoy watching Uncle Jay explain the news below. It’s the best year-end round-up evah! I thank my friend Joell for sending it my way.
It’s winter, so let’s stroll down garden memory lane, shall we? Here’s my back yard in the summer of 1985, soon after I’d bought the house and plopped that tiny deck on the back overlooking the woods. Notice especially the hideous cinder block wall with an opening waaay too narrow for a lawnmower to pass through it.. And DO ignore my outfit, which if I were better at Photoshop I would have deleted…somehow. Delete me entirely I mean.
And here’s a roughly equivalent shot taken about 20 years later. The new deck has been dubbed the "aircraft carrier" by a neighbor (he’s just jealous!) and the wall’s been replaced with a sloping mixed border and some large stone steps. Now I just wish I’d taken a helluva lot MORE before pictures. Don’t you, too?
Know a gardening project that’s doing something cool for the community? Whether the project is increasing community involvement, beautifying the neighborhood, making sustainable agriculture happen or educating the public about growing, send them this link about the Fiskars Project Orange Thumb Awards. Encouraged to apply are community garden groups, as well as schools, youth groups, community centers, camps, clubs, treatment facilities, etc.
The deadline is February 17.
For your reading pleasure, the Project Orange recipients blog about their projects. There’s a sampling here and all of them listed in the right-hand column.
Note the absence of "Christmas" colors because really, isn’t there enough red in our lives right now? So I present one of the many lovely sights at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden around the holidays. Sights designed to wow everyone and alienate no one. Light shows at public gardens are great that way.
Here’s wishing all your winters are bright and holidays even brighter.
Many thanks to Ken Druse and Vicki Johnson for inviting me to chat with them in today’s episode of Real Dirt Radio. They said lots of nice things!
Of particular interest here is our discussion of sustainable gardening - what does it mean? All agreed that it’s a holistic approach, and Ken added an important point - that it’s a realistic, factoring in real-world limitations like labor and cost. I chimed in about all the interest now in lawn replacement - but with what? Compared to the cost of grass seed, masses of perennials are expensive!
All about organic Christmas trees, and a new certification - Naturally Grown - in the NY Times. And here’s Fine Gardening on the subject of organic Christmas trees.
Retailers in Tampa, Fla., might have to take nitrogen-enriched fertilizers off the shelves in the summer, according to the St. Petersburg Times. Great news, and hat tip to the Daily Dirt.
Community gardens not only provide healthy food, exercise, and green spaces for city residents; new research proves that they also revitalize neighborhoods and increase home values. For more information about this study, go to: Real Estate Economics . Hat tip to the National Gardening Association.
Rick Darke Loves Grasses gives just an introduction to this highly opinionated advocate for both native plants AND ornamental grasses. More coming from Rick soon!
New on Sustainable-Gardening.com
Our newest contributor is Professor Jeff Gillman of the University of Minnesota Department of Horticulture. He’ll be reporting quarterly on Hot Topics in Hort Research. He’s also contributed an article about Hardy, Disease-Resistant Roses, and one about No-Till Gardening.
Professor Linda Chalker-Scott covers the controversial topic of Wood Chips as Mulch.
How to attract butterflies gives the real dirt about those high-maintenance feeders, and what plants really work.
Who says there’s nothing for gardeners to do in the winter? Why, in the past month alone I’ve attended seminars at Scott Arboretum and Brookside Gardens, heard the irrepressible Rick Darke speak at the National Arboretum, toured pointesettia growing facilities at Homestead Gardens, and joined in seasonal festivities at the American Horticultural Society headquarters at River Farm in Northern VIrginia.
On the Home Front
This month I acquired my very own vermicomposting operation, and my garden was assessed for the possible addition of a rain barrel by AquaBarrel owner Barry Chenkin himself. No decision yet.
And with some mild days for gardening I’m planting freebie bulbs and raking. Always with the raking - from about 45 deciduous trees.
On a close-in corner lot near downtown Rockville, Maryland is a bit of the Pacific Northwest - a woodland garden filled with evergreen trees and shrubs, both broadleaf and conifer. The kind of garden that’s fully there all winter long and looks even better with a dusting of snow, or more.
The gardener here is a long-time reader of this blog. We’d emailed back and forth a bit and after seeing his plant list I was determined to see this garden, and did exactly that on an unusually cold day last winter.
The major plants in this winter wonderland are the junipers ‘Robusta Green,’ Hollywood, and ‘Blue Point’, Hinoki Cypress, the Falsecypress ‘Wells Special’, Virginia red cedar, Hick’s yew, Pyracantha and Mahonia.
There’s one tiny lawn, in the sunniest spot, and it serves to show off the woodies surrounding it, and later the masses of perennials waiting underground for their day in the sun.
Many thanks to Eric for sharing his fabulous garden with me and my readers.
A Yoshino cherry tree growing happily for 10 years in my curbside garden up and died this year - due to the double whammy of beetle infestation and tent caterpillars, I’m told. But wedged as it is into a narrow strip of land between sidewalk and road, with close neighbors including a beautyberry shrub, ornamental grasses and lots of sedum, using a stump-grinder was NOT an option. Even if I weren’t a tightwad.
So I thought in the spirit of research I’d try using the bottle of Bonide Stump-Out that has been sitting in my basement for longer than I remember (from waaay back when I bought products pretty much on faith).
So what IS the stuff? Not that the bottle tells you, or their website, but some sleuthing reveals it’s sodium pyrosulfite, which when mixed with water turns to sodium dioxide, a smelly gas that breaks down lingens in wood to create pockets. Instructions say to pour the stuff into the drilled holes, add water, then wait 4-6 weeks and THEN pour gasoline down the holes. That seeps into those pockets, see? Then wait another 4-6 weeks, pour more gasoline down the holes and then set the whole thing on fire. (I’m not making this up.) The instructions further swear that it doesn’t really create an open flame kind of hazard, though local laws still may prohibit it. Ya think? And only six inches from the sidewalk, it just wasn’t going to happen.
Now a fun thing to do on every known gardening subject is to see what those real gardeners on forums like GardenWeb and DavesGarden have to say, based on their own gardening experiences in various parts of the country. For products and plants both, I love their forums!
And guess what they had to say about Stump-out? No one reported that it worked as claimed, but several people said it definitely doesn’t. Instead, one gardener recommended putting high-nitrogen fertilizer down the holes, and another suggested fresh manure, with mulch on top of it.
So I’ll have to add those to my list of easy stump removal techniques on the website. Then I’ll try something and watch what happens, up-close in this very public spot I pass by every day. I’ll pretend I’m a scientist and report the findings right here.
That’s from Cultivating Words - the Guide to Writing about the Plants and Gardens You Love by Paula Panich. She encourages her readers to, when visiting a garden, achieve "that mysterious sense of rapport, of identity with the ground. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get still as a needle you’ll be there."
Here’s how she recommends visiting a garden:
Visit a garden by yourself
Visit early in the day or late in the afteroon, for softer light
Know only the bare basics about the place you’re visiting (you can research everything later)
Take a minimum of notes.
Take a minimum of photos, perhaps just as you’re ready to leave.
Listen
Smell
Now do I do this myself? Sometimes I’m with a friend, and that’s a whole other experience - a fun one. But when I’m alone, except for taking more than a few photos, yeah, that’s how I do it. How about you?
The photo shows a charming garden I discovered on a local garden tour last spring. Too bad there were hoards of other tour-goers.
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to the living room the worms totally stopped trying to escape. 
planting trees, and whether eggshells really deter slugs. 
nd garden filled with evergreen trees and shrubs, both broadleaf and conifer. The kind of garden that’s fully there all winter long and looks even better with a dusting of snow, or more.
