Another Sunny Day

I'm pretty much worn out at this point. I hurt in more places than I care to list. Some of you may recall our wind chime collection. Well, it's once again in place. The house is surrounded by happy, mystical sound. Angel & I have had some of these chimes for a long time, so this time around I've had to re-string and do other repairs on many of the pieces. The end result is good. As I type this I can hear some of the nearest chimes.

It is interesting (to me, anyway). The chimes sound pretty loud close up, but the sound drops off very quickly with distance. That's probably a good thing. Keeps the nabes from getting irritable.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Ray got the gates up. Now, when the gates are closed, no large (or even medium-sized) animal can pillage the garden without scaling or leaping over some kind of fence or gate. We had a few antique (circa 1900) hinges left, so I put a clear coat on six of them and asked Ray to hang the gates w/ those hinges. Today I pulled all the pins out, cleaned them, and greased the hinges. Then I drilled a hole in the deck so that the gate pin can anchor properly.

The gates need a coat of oil sealant, but that will have to come later... perhaps next weekend.

I also built a cool trellis-type-thing for the pole beans in the main garden. It is at the east end of the garden facing west. It's one of the first things I've built here using my shop. I used scrap wood. It would have looked a bit better if I'd had somewhat stouter uprights, but this has a bit of coolness as it is.

Speaking of the shop, I put in a couple of hours cleaning it a bit more. It's now quite usable. The next order of business is to begin sorting through boxes of fasteners and small parts and get those organized and usable.

Angel and I also put up a bird house today. It's visible outside the kitchen window. All we need are some finches or other small avian-type creatures to take up residence. It's too small for crows or ravens.

As we finished erecting the bird house, Angel noticed a large number of raptors catching a thermal just northeast of us. She counted 16 hawks all soaring, gaining altitude, with nary a flap. Again, the weather forecast said 61°F, but the outside temperature measured 68. I guess that was enough for an updraft to form.

While I did the above chores, Angel focused her attention on relocating the small scrap wood pile. The scraps are small; the pile is big, by-the-way. Rats had been living underneath the pile. They're gone now, but the mess they left behind was still there. Anyway, the pile is now mostly down the hill east of my office with the rest of the main firewood supply. Once the remaining scraps are relocated, we'll be able to landscape that area. It's one of the more visually appealing spots on our property. It's north of our porch, but it gets good sun from April through September.

Dinner was Cape Cleare salmon (that's a wild fishery) steaks. Some of the fishermen quick freeze their catch and bring it down to the local farmers' market. Angel got some yesterday. I poached the salmon in white wine with a few herbs. It doesn't need much. I brought it to a gentle boil, covered, in a stainless steel skillet. Then I basted the steaks a few times and turned them. Another three minutes and they were done. I served the salmon w/ brown rice and fresh cauliflower steamed w/ olive oil and garlic. For a wine, we had "Seven Deadly Zins," one of our favorites. Actually, I like this wine so much that I only took a couple of sips during dinner. I've been savoring my glass as I typed this entry...

As I type this, Angel reads a novel in the big chair by the window. In a few minutes we're going to watch the second half of Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai".

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

On evenings like this, it seems like it cannot really be the Wrong Rock.

The Worms, Reloaded

The Venerable Friendly One is having a cup of tea on a glorious afternoon here, north of the 48th parallel. A rest break is in order. Today's forecast called for 61°F today. It is now 68. No clouds. It's just past 3:00PM and the PV array is still pumping out more than 3KW of power.

It seems to be a perfect time to chat with The Wrong Rock for a bit.

"Why a rest," you ask? Well, I have just spent about 4 hours futzing (that's a technical term applied to clueless urban farmers) with my worm bin. It's been clear for weeks that the worms were not thriving, so today was allocated to:

1. Investigating
2. Diagnosing
3. Improving

...the habitat of the worms.

Now this delightful activity was best performed in the basement – the finished part of the basement. "Why," you ask?

Well, worms don't like bright light. So if you dump the contents of their bin in a place with bright light, they'll burrow away from the light. This reflex on the part of the worms make it easier to herd them. You just keep brushing the worm bedding around and the worms keep burrowing. Eventually you can separate the two. The finished part of the basement has a wall lined with windows. When the blinds are up, it's bright in there. Not basement-like at all.

It's cold and dark in the unfinished part of the basement. Carrying loaded worm bins up and down the stairs wasn't that appealing. That left the finished part of the basement.

So I found a giant piece of cardboard and laid it beneath the windows of the basement. Then I placed several sheets of newspaper on the cardboard. Then I opened the worm bin and dumped the contents onto said newspaper.

Immediately, I was able to diagnose at least one of the problems with the worms' habitat. It was too wet. Food was moldy and stinky. So was some of the shredded newspaper. The whole thing was a slimy, stinky mess. I took the worm bin pieces out to the garden and hosed them off so they were clean.

Now I have read that cardboard is a good component for worm bedding, so I snagged a nice box from Angel's stash of potential shipping boxes. No color printing. Check. Pretty clean. Check.

I cut this box up in a couple of different ways. First of all, I cut one piece that would just about cover the bottom of the worm bin insert. That's the place where the worms live. It's got a bunch of holes in the bottom and you need to have something to keep the worm bedding from falling through the holes into the bottom tank. I sprayed this piece of cardboard with water from the garden hose (not too wet!) and placed it in the bottom of the bin.

Then I cut the rest of the nice clean cardboard into strips. I made a sort of woven "place mat" thing with cardboard strips and wetted that too.

Next I got some new bedding. I decided that my first try was too easy to compact and get gooey, so this time I decided to try to reproduce something closer to a worm's natural habitat (whatever the heck that might be). We still have some organic compost that we used in the main garden. We also have some of the soil that I took from the garden and strained to remove the rocks. Finally, we have some sawdust from my adventure with the chipper/shredder.

All three piles have been sitting out in the weather. It rained pretty heavily last week, so when I dug down a couple of feet into each pile, I found nice moist stuff. This is what I used for my worm bedding.

I mixed some of all three (compost, earth, and sawdust) together, emphasizing the compost, and placed a couple of inches of this mixture in the bottom of the worm bin. Then I laid the damp "place mat" on top of that and added some more mixture. Then the remaining damp strips of cardboard, peeled to make them thinner and (one hopes) tastier and easier to eat. I topped off the bedding with another inch or so of the compost-earth-sawdust mixture.

I did this whole thing in the place in the basement where the worm bin stays. This new bedding was both deeper and heavier than the original. It is moist, but not wet. It is not sticky and smells pretty much like moist earth.

Next I tackled the stinking mess on the floor of the basement.

Over the next few hours, I pawed through the stuff, looking for living worms. Each time I found one, I carefully cradled the worm in the palm of my left hand while I continued pawing with my right. Much of this was done kneeling on the floor (wood over concrete... padded by the edge of the big piece of cardboard). Sometimes I sat on the floor. After a while I realized that I could spot living worms better if I wore some of my reading glasses.

Each time I got 10 or 20 worms out of the mess, I carefully transferred them to the new bedding.

Oh, and I wore some latex gloves while I did this. I just couldn't see any benefit to smearing my skin with slime. This whole process was sort of smelly. Even now, I'm slightly nauseous, but it's getting better.

After a few hours, I had separated hundreds of worms from the old bedding. Clearly, the old environment wasn't as toxic as I'd feared, but it clearly wasn't that comfy for the worms. I found full size red wrigglers, significantly smaller red wrigglers, and what I'm pretty sure were baby red wrigglers. These last worms were paler in color and tiny, but they were shaped just like and moved just like their larger brethren. I am choosing to be optimistic here. Hopefully they are not the larvae of some kind of alien invaders.

Some (peripheral) good news: I am still able to get down on the floor and get up, over and over, for hours at a time. It's not as fun as it was when I was a child, however.

In the process of sifting through the muck, I also encountered some tiny spiders and what looked like an earwig or two. I didn't transfer those to the new bedding. At the end of the whole thing, I swept up. I didn't make too much of a mess, so it was only a matter of 20 minutes or so to clean up.

Now the worms are safely bedded down in their new quarters. I hope these are more suitable and that the worms thrive. I must say that so far, vermiculture has been much more challenging for me than regular old composting. I just read the wikipedia article on "Vermicompost" and it seems just as simple in theory as it originally did. Oh, well. I suspect that the new bedding is a bit deeper than it needs to be, but probably this will be okay. I hope so anyway.

For the next few weeks, my plan is to emphasize things like lettuce leaves that are too funky to go in a salad, finely chopped vegetable trimmings, and things like that. I will put these on the surface of the new bedding. This is much less aggressive than the articles on vermiculture say, but after the first experience, I need to take this slowly.

Garden Today

The last couple of days have been brilliant.  Today the sun is shining brightly.  At 3:30PM, we'd already generated over 20 KWH of energy and the array was still producing over 2 KW of power.  I'm pretty sure we could do better if I were to get up on the roof and carefully clean the PV panels.  If I approached the whole thing from the back (north) side of the house it would probably be safe.

At the right, you can see some of the rows of salad greens in the main garden.  As I type this, Ray is outside putting up the final set of gates.  This is a good thing.  At lunch time I went out to check the mail.  "Bambi" was standing in the flower bed that's on the NW side of the driveway. S/he looked at me as I came down the stairs.  She looked at me very calmly.  I had to get within about 8 feet of her before she decided to saunter off into the neighbor's yard. Yes, it is a Very Good Thing that Ray is putting up the gates.  "Bambi" and her friends could make short work of the garden.  I shudder to think what could happen if the neighbors' goats get out.

At the left, you can see some little chard plants and some potatoes that are clearly thriving.  Some of them came up outside my bird netting, so we'll have to see if the crows have a go at them.  I'm hoping that since potatoes grow underground, we'll be okay.  

Last night I cooked up some chard we got from the co-op.  I washed and cut the chard into manageable pieces.  Then I put some canola oil in a skillet.  I added a splash of sesame oil and some herbs for flavor.  I cooked the greens gently -- all the time thinking about the Steve James recording of "Greasy Greens" from his "Not for Highway Use" CD.  They weren't very greasy, but they sure were good.  Later in the summer we're going to enjoy eating from this garden.

The soil seems to drain extremely well.  We've had a couple of good rainstorms in the past week, but there's never been any standing water in the main garden.

Tomorrow, I'm going to re-bed the worms (if any are still alive, that is).  I think I've got some ideas on how to make them more comfortable.  Hope I'm right.

Was that a Corner We Just Turned?

Angel, Isabelle, and I moved into our new home just about a year and a month ago. Of course the home was just barely inhabitable at that point. It was about seven more months before the house was done enough to call for a final inspection. What with the mess of construction and the partially organized chaos of moving, it almost seemed as if the components of our life had been dumped into a gigantic container and shaken. And shaken some more. And then divided into blobs and distributed around the property.

Big, well-labeled things were organized quickly. So were basic need-type things: cooking utensils and clothes, for instance.

The garage? Oh, don't go in there.

The basement? Piles of boxes of books waiting for the bookshelves to go in. Other piles of boxes that probably should have been placed in the garage.

The yard? Piles of construction wood scrap. Much of it useful. At least useful as firewood. But so much of it. And just everywhere.

Little-by-little, mostly on weekends, we've been nibbling away at this chaos. That's Angel and I doing the nibbling. Isabelle yawns on her blanket by the window and covers her head with a paw as if to say, "Can you guys be quiet? I'm trying to take a nap here."

Boxes in the basement are reopened for the 12th time, but now inspected carefully. Oh that's where the yoga mats went! Piles of stuff -- really just stuff -- finally sorted through in the garage to uncover... a GIANT container of some kind of caulk. A five gallon can that had originally contained paint but now holds a paint roller hopelessly stuck to a grate and about 3" of dried paint sludge. Empty paint cans that the painter or the contractor should have removed. A carpenter's much-abused sawhorses, left behind for someone else to deal with. I may cut them up for firewood too, by golly. Other things are found. Sorted. Discarded. An end to mysterious boxes. Or at least a decline in them.

The last couple of weekends seem to have brought us past a corner, however. The yard, while still far from completely landscaped, looks like something's being done with it. The garage mess finally sorted through sufficiently to clear a space in the shop area where one can walk and work on things without stepping over & around ladders, paint cans, garden tools, boxes, boxes, (did I say boxes?)... the list goes on. But now most garage stuff is stacked neatly on shelves or hanging on the wall or in racks. One can visualize a kind of ordered state. Or perhaps a state of markedly reduced disorder.

In short, we have passed some nebulous point and are entering a region where the chaos seems to be declining. We are entering a place where one may imagine doing things without constantly wondering where the right tool or fastener might be hiding. We identify where we'd like that hoe, rake, shovel, mattocks could reasonably reside when not in use.

It is good. It is very good. And about time.

Oh, and lest I forget to mention, the weather was nothing short of gorgeous.

Tulips

The tulips Angel planted months ago have bloomed. Just a week or two ago we started to see some buds forming. In the last few days, the flowers have opened and are adding some color to the area on our deck that faces the main vegetable garden.

Today is less sunny than yesterday, but it was off-and-on very bright, and all day long it was perfect gardening temperature.

Angel & I transplanted another donor plant from a neighbor -- this time Penny & Bill. They have a spectacular yard and they decided that they didn't want a large, high-standing cluster of some grass-like foliage.

This plant, in the right place, will get pretty big. In P & B's yard, it was hemmed in by other established plants and the street. We have an excellent spot for it where it will get plenty of sun and grow to form a backdrop for irises, day-lilies, rhodedendrons, and other flowering plants. These are all along the northwest side of our driveway.

We continue to sift large rocks from the stony soil. What is left behind, when amended with organic compost, is very plant friendly. Angel continues to plant smaller donor plants given to us by other kind friends and neighbors.

Much is done. Much more remains.

Worms Under Stress

Last week, when I checked the worms, they seemed to be doing fine.

This AM I went down with some leftover brown rice, some used tea leaves, and some fruit leavings, and saw no live, adult worms! The drainage pan beneath the bed contained quite a few dead worms. I did see some little "wormlings" wiggling about in the bedding.

So I cleaned out one large glop of un-consumed food and took the drainage pan outside. I dumped that whole mess into an outdoor compost bin and then hosed out the drainage pan. Now I've reassembled the worm box in the basement.

Maybe the materials I used for the bedding (mostly shredded newspaper and cardboard with some added sawdust and soil) contained something toxic? Maybe it's too wet? I'll need to keep a close watch on this; although I don't know what to do differently. It's probably time to reread the web references on worm bins.

Roaring Out

May seems to be getting its sunshine act together. The last couple of days have been nothing short of stunningly beautiful. 65 °F, slight breeze, bright sun.

The potatoes, squash, garlic, salad greens, and many more veggies are simply roaring out of the ground. All that heavy ground prep that I did last year as my alter ego "the human mole" seems to have paid off big time. Tomatoes are going in the greenhouse. Flower boxes of tulips are painting everything yellow, coral, and pink. So far; so good.

Angel has some asparagus in (won't be able to eat that for a couple of years) and some chard (which is thriving). Those are on the north side of the property -- sort of behind the garage. That spot gets good sun only from about April through September, but we're told that's plenty of sun for these two plants.

We have blueberry and raspberry plants in. All the blueberry and non-local raspberry canes surrounded by cylinders of chicken wire to keep the deer off. Angel got some little strawberry plants in as well.

We talked to a guy named Tim about having the property mowed a couple of times per week. The Amigo's knees just can't take pushing the electric mower up and down the hills, and I can't afford a ride-able tractor/mower right now. I think we'll let Tim's team take care of the basic mowing for a while. It'll make things look better and let me spend time on some other projects.

There is still a part of the main garden that needs bird netting. Maybe I'll get to that tomorrow. Also, Ray-the-contractor promises that he'll finish the gates for the front porch and get them up next week. Early next week. That'll close off the last potential deer access to the main garden. So far the critters have shied away from walking up the steps, onto the porch, and into the garden. There is such a big salad bar for them without moving into a confined space like that, that they don't seem to be interested, but we can't count on that long term.

On other fronts, neighbors, new friends, and random people encountered on walks have given us cuttings and bulbs from their gardens. We've put in literally dozens of ornamental plants without spending any money on them. It's so great. Most of the plants have taken to their new spots very well. In a couple of years, even the yard may look decent.

We're getting close to the first phase of gardening drawing to a close. It feels good.

There is another retaining wall to build. And there is much more of the property to develop into food-producing land. In a micro-scale effort like what Angel and I are doing, it seems very manageable to do this in a way that actually improves the quality of the soil. It really is nothing more than time and money limited -- but then most things are, right?

but wait, there's more!

It's now about 8:40PM.  After a long afternoon of heavy garden work, Angel & I are relaxing, reading.  The weather turned mild as the day wore on and we cultivated a few square feet near the front of the property.  There, the already rocky soil was made much worse during the construction because the contractor had a large load of coarse gravel dumped in that area to keep the mud down near (and beneath) his construction trailer.  Now we must break the soil and rocks apart with a mattocks, pile it up, and run it through a screen.  We are gradually moving the rocks down near the street to form a parking space near the mailbox.  Eventually, this will be a large, color-filled area of perennials.  For now, we dig, we sift, we move dirt and rocks.  We hurt.

The wind came up about a half hour ago, and the rain that threatened off and on seems to have decided to water our newly transplanted shrubs and flowers.  This is a good thing.

The house is warm and quiet: I can hear the refrigerator in the pantry and a wind chime just outside the window.  Beneath the cheery sound of the chimes, I can hear the wind gusting past the house.  It is good.

What Happened?

It's May 2nd. Yesterday was another sunny day -- the latest in a string of lovely days in which the PV array pumped out lots of energy.

Today, however, dawned cold and gray. It is as if the calendar had been set back over a month. This is the first weekend of the local farmers' market, and it was raining when we began our day.

Now, please don't misunderstand, I enjoy cool and rainy... cool and foggy... cool and overcast. It is just a surprise when the weather changes so abruptly. Soon I will join Angel in the garden. We have barely scratched the surface of what we need to do; although we are seeing potatoes and lettuce growing in the garden.

One other brief bit: at 12:01AM yesterday (May 1st), WDOT shut down the Hood Canal Bridge. This is a long-planned maintenance shut down. It will last from four to six weeks. The teams are working on the bridge 24 hours per day to get it back up as quickly as possible.

Big controversy among the locals. Consternation in some quarters. This is not a big deal to Angel and me. We have, after all, only visited The City twice in the past 12 months. The local shops and those the next town over have nearly everything we need.

But some people seem very wound up about the Hood Canal Bridge being down. They write (some barely) letters to the editor of the local paper. Their letters castigate the WDOT for shutting down the bridge. It is baffling. In other parts of the country, bridges are allowed to deteriorate and fail.

Me, I'm glad that the bridge is being maintained. Bridges should bridge. People should think.