Hot stuff

I'm going to be away for a couple of weeks, so I've had to compress a lot of garden-related jobs into the last two weekends. On Saturday we tackled the chicken coop, carting out ten wheelbarrow-loads of litter and giving the floor and perches a good scrape and clean. Mike chipped some cedar branches to replace the old litter and it now smells a lot more fragrant in there!

This is a twice-yearly job, September and March. I was a bit more scientific about it this time, making sure that each barrowful got a good soaking of water before adding the next one. It's much more difficult to get the pile properly wet if you add the water at the end (as I found in September).

By this morning (two days later), the temperature inside the heap was reading 54°C/129°F, which is in just about the right range for killing pathogens. The outside temperature was just 3°C/37°F when I took this reading. Yes, that is a cooking thermometer. And no, I don't use it in the kitchen any more. ;-)

The heap will be a bit stinky for a while, as it cooks and then cures. But it's nowhere near the house and I'll miss the worst of it, as I'll be away. I'm no fool...

Labour days

My first full weekend at home since the beginning of April, so it has been a mad rush to catch up with all the work that needed doing in the garden and barnyard. Mike has been supplementing the lower vegetable garden with additional soil and now has tilled all that into the beds so that they're ready for planting. This means that the beds are slightly higher than they've been in the past, so I hope we'll avoid the flooding issues we had at the end of July 2008.

I extracted the first batch of chicken manure compost from the rotating composter. That process (which I started on 11 March) seems to have worked very well - the compost looks great. I've added that to the beds that will hold the potatoes and have started another batch with a fresh load of chicken litter (the temperature of that hit 59°C/138°F this afternoon, so it's cooking away nicely!).

We've planted the sprouting Russet Burbank potatoes that were left over from last year's harvest and all the tomatoes and pepper plants have now been transferred to their own pots. There are around 250 tomato plants - most of which I'm hoping to sell. It's been great having Mike's mum here to help - an extra pair of hands makes a lot of difference at this time of year. On Friday afternoon we got all of the onions and leeks into one of the long beds in the upper vegetable garden, while the brassicas are gradually being put out into one of the other ones. I did the red cabbages just now - I thought I'd sown fewer this year, but there still seem to be rather a lot of them!

There was a tree giveaway at Picton this morning, so we collected three sugar maples and three highbush cranberry shrubs. Which also needed to be planted out today. The soil in the front garden was rock hard, as there's been so little rain of late, so poor Mike had to take the tiller attachment off the tractor and replace it with the back hoe (which he only took off last week) in order to get the trees in the ground. I'm not sure that I'm very popular with him at the moment...

The tulips are just beginning to fade, but they've been looking lovely:

Cooking...something else

Warm weather and the sight of seedlings in the greenhouse prompted me to get making some compost from the detritus in the chicken coop. The chickens are spending most of their time out in the orchard again now, which meant I could get into their corner of the barn this afternoon and remove a barrow-full of shavings and droppings from underneath their roosting area.

We obtained a rotating composter from a County scheme two years ago. I was never very satisfied with it as a means of turning kitchen waste into garden compost. This was my own fault, I think, for failing to supply it with enough moisture to do the job properly. My regular vertical plastic bins do a good job without needing any additional water, so I'd stopped using the rotating one. But it did occur to me recently that it might be a suitable container for turning the chicken waste into compost.

I transferred my barrow-load of material into the composter, adding a fair bit of water as I went. By the time I finished there was an unappetising chicken-poop-coloured drip emanating from the base of the unit, so I hope I've added the right amount.*

I did all this in the greenhouse, thinking this location will help the contents get to the required temperature to kill pathogens (130-150°F/55-65°C according to this article at Seattle Tilth). There is a ready supply of water in there, too, which will help me to keep it at the right level of saturation to encourage decomposition. The 'uncooked' compost mix looks like this:

The article from the Seattle Tilth site suggests that the proportions of brown to green material (i.e. shavings to manure) in the mix should be 1:2, 1:1 or 2:1. I have to admit that I did not carefully measure the proportions (shocking, I know), but I suspect that it is more like 2:1 or even 3:1. I hope that in a month or two it will be in a fit state to add to the garden.

*This is reminding me of one of my grandfather's jokes. Oh dear, can't resist sharing it.
Woman to butcher: "Do you keep dripping?"
Butcher: "No Madam, it's just the way I stand."

Schadenfreude is the spur

It's a shameful thing to admit, but it was a fellow blogger's foiled plans for this weekend that got me working today. Soilman promised that he'd be cutting down his asparagus and spreading muck. Then the weather let him down.

I had no such excuse: a glorious, windless, sunny day with temperatures nudging 10°C/50°F. My asparagus needed cutting down, too:

Perhaps I would have done the job anyway, but I have an unpleasant feeling that the knowledge that poor Soilman was unable to attend to his allotment was the main motivation. I cut down the old spears, Child#2 carried them off to the compost pile and I weeded the tyre/tire beds. I emptied one of the compost bins and topped up the beds with chicken-manure-enriched kitchen waste. The asparagus/rhubarb garden is looking a lot tidier now:

I'd like to claim that Child#2 helped out for the pleasure of it, but there were frequent comments along the lines of "What do I get for doing this?", which would suggest that the simple joy of gardening is not quite enough for the younger generation.

I had to enlist further help to harvest the parsnips. There's something about the stoniness of the soil here that makes it difficult to extract them intact from the ground. Carrots and potatoes are no bother, but parsnips are just impossible. Mike did a good job:

He didn't ask for any reward, either. He's known me a bit longer, though, so perhaps knows not to expect any! After preparing and blanching them, I ended up with five pounds of parsnip in 64 pieces, now all in the freezer.

There's not much left in the open to harvest now: half a dozen leeks, some pak choi, more cabbages (of course!) and the broccoli, which is still producing well (though probably not for much longer).

I'm sure that next weekend the wellington will be on the other foot and we will be deluged with rain (or worse) while the south-east of England basks in sunshine. Then it will be the UK garden bloggers' turn to gloat over how much they've got done outside...

So, what's at the bottom of YOUR compost pile?

I was diligently turning over the giant compost heap I made last October. It doesn't look much like compost yet, to be frank, but it began to look a bit more like soil near the bottom. I started putting some of this compost on a nearby bed (earmarked for corn this year). Then, as I pulled a forkful of compost away, the air was suddenly filled with piercing squeals and a small nest fell away from the bottom of the fork, tumbling these little beasts out onto the ground. They were not at all happy about being disturbed, I can tell you. I wasn't very happy myself, come to that.


I felt instantly terrible - a mole-molester - but also fascinated at seeing these tiny creatures. I ran off to get a couple of trowels so that I could move the moles without making them smell of human (although my hands were fairly comprehensively covered in compost by this time, so that might not have been a big problem). I also got the camera (because otherwise you wouldn't believe me, right?). I carefully lifted the nest (which still had a few moles inside it - you can see it (and a mole's foot) in the bottom right of the photo above) back into the hole it had come out of, then scooped up the four 'loose' moles and returned them to their siblings. They stopped squealing once they were back in the nest.


Then I re-packed some soil around the nest and covered it over with a handy piece of wood. I sincerely hope that the mother mole will come and rescue her brood and take them to a safer spot. Their eyes aren't open yet, but they're about half the size of an adult so I'm guessing that they're nearly two weeks old (based on the Wikipedia information on Star-nosed moles). I hope they make it to adulthood - sorry for disturbing you, little moles.

Compost comme de l'art

This installation took me seven hours today. I'm thinking of selling it: I'm sure I put just as much thought and effort into it as many more conventional artists put into their work.

I recycled the posts and wire that the cucumbers had been grown on for two of the three sides, then filled the structure by clearing up the remains of the squashes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, corn and beans.

We needed to work on the drainage of the lower vegetable garden, after this July's tomato disaster, where the entire area became waterlogged. I realise that I've never really explained what is where in the garden/barnyard, so here is a not-to-scale diagram to record the current layout. There is a gentle slope from north to south.


Today, Mike dug a trench along the southern end of the upper vegetable garden and connected it by porous piping to the trench that he dug in the spring to the east of the lower vegetable garden. We're hoping this will divert some of the excess water away from the eight vegetable beds that are periodically drowned.


I also dug some sand into the tomato bed (the only one of the eight lower beds that's empty at the moment) to bulk it up a bit and improve the drainage. This was suggested by one of the solar panel guys (who happens to be an organic farmer), but I also took heart from reading Kate's article about using sand, even though the soil here is not clayey like hers (and the comment about sand plus limestone making concrete did give me pause, but what the hell). A big heap of fine sand was left over from the pipeline-laying that the solar panel work needed. It's been well watered by the dog, but I'm guessing that dog urine is probably good for the garden too. Sorry, was that too much information?

Talking garbage

I'm impressed with the way garbage is dealt with here. All recyclable packaging and containers are collected free of charge every other week and there's a weekly collection of 'real' garbage, which costs $2 per bag. You buy little blue labels in advance and stick them on the bags when you put them out. As the recycling is so comprehensive, we find we're only generating one bag of rubbish a fortnight - so we spend $52 a year (£26) for this service, which seems reasonable.

I've been composting all the vegetable waste we produce in two plastic compost bins that were here when we arrived, but it seems this isn't that common a practice here. Recently the County advertised in the local paper, asking people to apply for a rotating composter as part of a County-wide trial. I've always fancied one of those, so I applied and was thrilled to find out the other week that I had been selected to take part, along with 19 other households around the County (75 applications had been received in all). Last night there was a meeting about the trial and I got to collect my new toy.

The Council don't currently provide a separate kerbside collection service for compostable materials, so a lot of it is going into landfill at the moment. It costs them $225 per tonne to dump things in landfill, so this trial is looking at ways of reducing that cost. As well as the composter, they provided us all with a green bucket for use in the kitchen and a scale to weigh it with. We have to weigh the waste that we put into the composter and record the amounts, until the end of October. Then these figures will be used to calculate the savings for the County. I didn't like to point out that I would have composted my materials anyway...

There were some interesting talks, including one from Doug Parker, who farms on an organically-certified farm in South Marysburgh. It was great to listen to someone who is so passionate about compost (which, by the way, is mainly pronounced to rhyme with 'post' around here). He had even brought some of his compost along for everyone to examine. Then two representatives of the manufacturers described the features of the composter. It's supposed to be pest-proof (which is good, as we had a rat living in our compost bin in Sale for a while), although they had heard of one installation in Vermont which was regularly played with by a bear.

This morning Mike and I set up the composter and I placed it next to the back door (this involved shovelling out a big snow drift). It's made by Sun-Mar, who started out making composting toilets and this is built on the same principles. The rotating drum speeds up the composting process, so that compost can be extracted from the centre in as little as two to four weeks. Although it might have to get a bit warmer outside before that's achievable, I suspect. The retail price of one of these is $250. I've paid $50 to take part in the trial, but I think $30 of that is refundable at the end of it, so I'll get my composter for $20. Bargain!