Plants and animals [gardening]
Llama jade status update from my office:
The ants are all happy, which kind of amazes me, but I'll take it. The crickets are doing okay. I need to manage them more intensively this spring.
We have this little closet in the kitchen right next to the stove that probably contained a water heater once upon a time. We've mostly used it to store grocery shopping supplies. Once every couple of months,
scrottie shouts, "Where have all the plastic bags gone off to?????" I get tired of having to precariously stack and rummage around in the closet whenever I go grocery shopping, so I finally stuck some nails in the walls to hopefully establish a simple but more effective organizational system.
S says my worm bin design causes worms to, well, worm through the drainage holes and drown in the catch bin. So I bought some stainless-steel mesh and hot glued it over the drainage holes:
S had been filling the blue recycling bin with kitchen scraps for the worms. I am not sure he always remembers to make sure to cover all of the kitchen scraps so the fruit flies don't get in. We have had a very persistent infestation. On a previous occasion it was also giving off smells indicative of anaerobic decomposition. At that point I rearranged some of the stuff in the bin, and this time it smelled fine and looked like the worms had eaten almost everything they could eat. The blue recycling bin was about half-full, and very heavy. Worms and soil seep out of its drainage holes, too, onto the wood platform or basement floor.
It is probably also the case that, no matter what I do in the way of worm management, there will be differences of opinion on the subject.
I was able to sort out some worm-free dirt to apply to plants. I put some of the remaining worm-filled dirt into the newly-screened bins, but didn't have time or space to properly sort the worms from the remaining worm dirt in the recycle bin. I was able to remove enough dirt from the recycle bin to be able to at least aerate the remainder, which will make it possible to finish the sorting sometime soon. It's the wrong time of year for applying worm dirt to the garden anyway, and much harder to do the sorting in the basement instead of outside on the back porch in brighter light. Projects for the spring, I suppose.
At least I can now start feeding the worms kitchen scraps again. Worm dirt is really great for gardening.
This entry was originally posted at https://rebeccmeister.dreamwidth.org/1513049.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
The ants are all happy, which kind of amazes me, but I'll take it. The crickets are doing okay. I need to manage them more intensively this spring.
We have this little closet in the kitchen right next to the stove that probably contained a water heater once upon a time. We've mostly used it to store grocery shopping supplies. Once every couple of months,
scrottie shouts, "Where have all the plastic bags gone off to?????" I get tired of having to precariously stack and rummage around in the closet whenever I go grocery shopping, so I finally stuck some nails in the walls to hopefully establish a simple but more effective organizational system.
S says my worm bin design causes worms to, well, worm through the drainage holes and drown in the catch bin. So I bought some stainless-steel mesh and hot glued it over the drainage holes:
S had been filling the blue recycling bin with kitchen scraps for the worms. I am not sure he always remembers to make sure to cover all of the kitchen scraps so the fruit flies don't get in. We have had a very persistent infestation. On a previous occasion it was also giving off smells indicative of anaerobic decomposition. At that point I rearranged some of the stuff in the bin, and this time it smelled fine and looked like the worms had eaten almost everything they could eat. The blue recycling bin was about half-full, and very heavy. Worms and soil seep out of its drainage holes, too, onto the wood platform or basement floor.
It is probably also the case that, no matter what I do in the way of worm management, there will be differences of opinion on the subject.
I was able to sort out some worm-free dirt to apply to plants. I put some of the remaining worm-filled dirt into the newly-screened bins, but didn't have time or space to properly sort the worms from the remaining worm dirt in the recycle bin. I was able to remove enough dirt from the recycle bin to be able to at least aerate the remainder, which will make it possible to finish the sorting sometime soon. It's the wrong time of year for applying worm dirt to the garden anyway, and much harder to do the sorting in the basement instead of outside on the back porch in brighter light. Projects for the spring, I suppose.
At least I can now start feeding the worms kitchen scraps again. Worm dirt is really great for gardening.
This entry was originally posted at https://rebeccmeister.dreamwidth.org/1513049.html. Please comment there using OpenID.