My New Toy

If you know me at all, you are aware of my coffee obsession, evidenced by the hefty stash of fair trade whole beans on my counter and the coffee plants growing throughout my house. Now I have a new coffee-related toy, and I couldn't be prouder: it's a lovely coffee grinder I got from an antique store in downtown Waukesha last weekend.

A few years ago I relied on my large combination coffee/espresso machine to make a latte for myself every day. But as I became interested in relying less on fossil fuels in my everyday existence, I started boiling water with a very heavy duty, 1950s tea kettle and using a French press to brew my daily caffeine fix. In the summer I can use my wood-burning stove outside to boil the water, but until recently I could not go completely off the grid with my coffee because I still used an electric coffee grinder to prep my beans for the press.

I stumbled upon hand coffee grinders while looking online to see if such a thing as hand paper shredders existed (they do -- I bought one, which I use to create bedding for my vermicomposter). That's when I saw my first hand coffee grinder and it occurred to me that I could probably find one at an antique store. Sure enough, there are plenty of them, in many styles and a variety of prices. Mine was about $40, which, to me, is worth it, not just because it enables me to grind my own coffee off the grid, but because it is a beautiful work of American craftsmanship. Compared to my late 1990s coffee grinder, which looks like a dull kitchen robot, this grinder is so pretty I just can't take my eyes off of it. Don't you agree?





The down side is that it now takes me about five minutes of uncomfortable grinding to make my daily cup. Also, instead of getting a good course grind suitable for a French press, this little mill grinds the coffee so fine it tastes more like espresso or Turkish coffee when brewed. Which actually isn't a big problem, because I like my coffee in the thick-as-mud range.

Now if I could just find a hand-crank TV set...

Compost Gnats and Escaped Worms

Last week I wrote candidly about the somewhat embarrassing fungus gnat invasion in my worm bin. As you may recall, my husband Steve and I moved the infested bin outdoors as a temporary solution until I could figure out what my next step was going to be, whether waging biological warfare (by adding beneficial nematodes to my bin to kill the gnat larvae) or something else.

I opted for "something else," because "something else" is free, and much less scary than playing with creepy living organisms that may or may not solve my problem. So the other day I got out a few five gallon buckets and my wheelbarrow (and yes, it's "wheelbarrow" and not "wheelbarrel", as I learned today to my chagrin). I lined these vessels up on a concrete slab in my backyard, opened the compost bin, and started sorting the contents of the bin. This tedious, messy and somewhat back-breaking process involved adding about two shovelfuls at a time to a wooden sifter Steve crafted for me out of wood and 1/8" hardware cloth, then shaking the sifter over the wheelbarrow to separate the finished compost and worm castings from the unfinished compost. While some of the worms did fall through the holes in the screening, it wasn't terribly difficult to pick them out. I put the unfinished compost in one of the five gallon buckets, and then a second when the first filled up.

Truthfully, this is the first time I have harvested my compost in the entire year of its existence and I realized while doing so the task was long overdue. While I have harvested small scoops of compost/castings here and there to make compost tea, I have never gone through the bin and removed vast amounts of compost. This experience taught me three things:

To avoid problems like fungus gnat and fruit fly infestations, bins should be processed more often than annually -- maybe once a season would make more sense for an active bin, as it takes about three months for worms to process food waste.

Just as it is very useful to have a two-sided compost bin in my backyard, it will also be useful to have two side-by-side vermicompost bins instead of one. So from now on I think I'm going to alternate between two bins to keep both of them active and prevent them from becoming overloaded and prone to pests. Also, under the right conditions, worms breed like crazy, so after one year I have more than enough worms to move them into new bins and share with others.

Vermicompost is amazing! The stuff I sifted was gorgeous -- well, gorgeous to an organic gardener, anyway. It's rich, dark and crumbly. I wish I had done this worm-bin-sifting earlier, because the compost I harvested will be extremely useful in my gardens. Although some of the things I've seen over the last few days aren't really for the faint of heart, it still seems worth it in the end when I think of all that rich stuff I'll be able to feed my vegetables.

I sifted through about 2/3 of my very full bin and obtained one five-gallon bucket full of finished vermicompost when I discovered that the compost in the bottom of the bin was too wet to sift easily -- it was smelly, compacted and borderline anaerobic. So I aerated the remaining compost by scraping it off the the screening and pebbles that cover the bottom of the bin. Then I covered it with some of the unfinished compost and worms and added lots of *dry* shredded newspaper to the bin. I tend to not moisten the newspaper if the bin contents are already too moist, which is a common problem with plastic containers. I am hoping the dry newspaper will absorb the excess moisture.

Finally, I moved my processed bin to the basement, where I am going to let it sit for a while. In the meantime, I took the remaining unfinished compost and more worms and added it all to a brand-new bin. I covered the compost with shredded newspaper and set the new bin beside the original bin.

Regarding the gnats, I haven't seen any since I went through this process, although I did notice that the two flats of spinach I've been growing on my kitchen counter were also infested with fungus gnats. I experimented with pouring a homemade cleaning solution of water, vinegar and peppermint castile soap on the soil, as I've heard that diluted castile soap can kill plant bugs. I should have just made a new solution, but I already had this old solution in a spray bottle, so I thought I'd experiment with it rather than make a new solution without vinegar. The solution I poured on one of the flats did seem to kill (quiet?) the gnats, but also proved to hurt the spinach plants, as this morning they looked kind of withered. Not sure what got to them -- the vinegar or the soap, or both. I am probably going to dump that flat in the compost bin out back. I put the other flat outside, where I'll probably leave it now that it's warm enough. That's where a majority of my growing is taking place anyway, so I might as well focus on the outdoors and save indoor gardening for the fall.

One more candid confession: I have observed that two nights in a row some of the worms I placed temporarily in a five-gallon bucket with the lid loose for ventilation escaped. The awful task of scraping half-dried worms from my concrete basement floor is almost worse than finding a bin infested with gnats. Apparently these little red wigglers are SERIOUS night creepers and, in the dark, they will crawl to the top of the bin and all over the inside if it's shut. If a lid is open, they will crawl out of the bin and as far as they can get before drying up. If you have a worm bin in a place that is very dark at night, keep it shut, or make sure any screening you keep on top is too tight for the worms to crawl through (the 1/8" holes in the screen I put over the bin the second night apparently made for an easy worm exodus). After scraping about 20 dead worms from the floor, I think I've learned my lesson. Thank God they didn't escape onto carpet! Blech.

So now that I've said all that, anyone still want me to make them a worm composter? ;)

Insect Invasion

I have been trying to absorb everything I can about vermicomposting over the last few weeks and even created my own bin design to make for friends and possibly sell as a part of my business idea, "Gardens, Not Garbage." Things had been going well all spring with my one-year-old vermicomposter and I was feeling pretty confident about my composting abilities until I hit a bump in the road the other day.

The problem is flies. Last year, a month or so after I first started my bin, I found I had what I thought was a fruit fly infestation. So I moved my bin from the kitchen to a shady spot in my backyard, stopped filling it with kitchen scraps for a few weeks, stuffed the bin with dead leaves and let it rest outdoors, where I kept it there all summer and for most of the winter. I thought, foolishly, that my worms could survive the cold if they were buried inside my big bin and the bin were covered with snow, which it was for most of the winter. However, in the late winter I realized I had frozen my worms to death. Ooops! Not ready to give up, however, I bought new worms from Growing Power, brought my bin inside and I was back in business. That was probably in March or so.

Anyway, it wasn't until this last week in mid-May that I discovered a halo of flies around my bin. I assumed they were fruit flies, so I did some reading online and tried one trick I found at Chow Tips: I filled a few containers with a mixture of apple cider vinegar, warm water, and a squirt or two of dish soap. I put a mason jar and a large bowl full of the stuff on top of my bin the other night and the next morning both containers had a great number of dead flies floating in the liquid.

Unfortunately, the bin was still surrounded by a halo of flies, and yesterday they were so bad, my husband pointed out, that if you looked closely at the window next to the bin there were tiny flies all over it. Nasty.

I did more reading and figured out that these aren't actually fruit flies. Fruit flies may be a problem, too, and maybe that trick with the vinegar did work for them. But it actually seemed to do nothing for the fungus gnats that may be the real culprit in this situation.

Apparently flies are a common problem among us "worm workers" (borrowing a phrase from Mary Appelhof, whose book "Worms Eat My Garbage" I am reading right now). I came across this blog in which the blogger explains an identical situation. He ended up purchasing nematodes online to put inside his bins, which he said seemed to abate the fungus gnat population.

I think many of my houseplants are also infested with the same kind of gnat, because for a while now whenever I water my plants I'll see tiny critters fly up and then go back down to the soil. I am not sure if these are a danger to the plant, or to my compost, but they sure are creepy!

I have always been very careful to bury the food scraps I place in my worm bin under copious amounts of shredded newspaper when I add waste every week or so. However, my husband and one of my children had recently taken to adding some kitchen scraps unbeknownst to me until I discovered a banana peel sitting right on top of the bedding. I read in Worms Eat My Garbage that fruit flies like to lay their eggs on their food sources (moldy fruit) so their offspring have something to eat when they hatch, but that fruit flies are not burrowers, so unless food is exposed in the bin they are not likely to go for it. Also, their eggs are often on the fruit we buy from the store, so it would make sense that a misplaced banana peel could cause an infestation.

The fungus flies are more of a mystery to me, and from what I have read, they are harder to manage. I'm not sure what has caused this fungus gnat infestation. It could be that they somehow found their way into my houseplants and then into my worm bin, or vice versa. I'm not sure if the banana peels are what caused this problem, or if it's something else, but either way I'm eager to find a solution. I'd hate for a few hundred highly irritating but mostly harmless gnats to spoil my vermicomposting operation. For now, at my husband's insistence, I have moved the bin outside until I can figure out how to remedy this problem.

To be continued...

Exhaustion.

This morning I went to my parents' home in Illinois for round two of our garden project. Today I planted seeds utilizing the aforementioned "three sisters technique." I got started by raking the soil in the two square beds, mounding it in the middle and then flattening the top; I did the same for the rectangular bed, except that I made two mounds, instead of one. On each mound, I made several indentations for seeds, starting with one in the center, then six around that, then six more in an outer ring. In the inner rings I planted a mix of sweet corn and pole bean seeds in the square beds (with about three corn seeds in the center and then three pole bean seeds around the corn seeds). I only planted sweet corn seeds in the rectangular bed. Then in the outer rings I planted something different on each mound: pumpkin, watermelon, zucchini, and a combo of honeydew and cantaloupe.

I covered the seeds with peat moss, then watered them to keep them in place (it was very windy at my parents' house today). Then my dad and I laid weed barrier fabric down in the aisles between each bed. We held the fabric down with bricks until my dad has time to mulch the top.

This evening, Steve finished putting the grids on two of my raised beds, I cleaned up some yard messes, did a little weeding and, once the grids were all in place, planted several seedlings and all the potato pieces I had cut a couple days before and let dry. I now have about 60 percent of my raised beds planted.

I also planted two tiny chamomile seedlings in a container for my deck. I plan to take my oregano and lemon balm and put them in containers, too. I think from now on I'm going to grow all my herbs in containers on my deck, since so many herbs seem to spread so readily, and since they will be easier to bring indoors in the winter if I want to keep growing them inside.

In the next round of planting, which I hope to do before memorial day, I'll most likely be planting seeds -- okra and carrots definitely, and maybe watermelon and peas. I'll probably also plant the sunflower and marigold sprouts I have now in my indoor greenhouse.

Oh, and I caved today and bought a real "topsy turvy" tomato planter when I was picking up two bags of milorganite (to fertilize my pathetic-looking lawn) at Puhl's True Value. It was about $13. I think I'm going to plant one of the Wisconsin 55 tomato seedlings I got from the West Allis Farmers Market in the thing. Should be interesting to compare how my homemade upside down tomato planter compares to the real deal.

One more thing I splurged on today: 10 goldfish for our pond, as well as two bullfrog tadpoles with hind legs just beginning to sprout. Bought them from Aquaterra on North Avenue. While I was there I was tempted by an adorable, dandelion-eating Russian Tortoise. Kinda pricy, but sounds like a gentle, fun family pet. I'm thinking about it, but then again I'm so busy with my dozens of very hungry caterpillars that I'm not sure I need another pet right now.