Worm Farm: 3 Weeks

I continue to like my Worm Factory.  After 3 weeks, I have had no problems with it.  Like everything else I do, I have been totally unscientific about it.  On most days, I add a small amount of vegetable scraps or coffee grounds, but I don't measure it out.  Every few days, I've been added damp shredded cardboard from cereal or K-cup boxes (tearing it up is therapeutic).  When I use eggs, I grind them up in a paper towel, wet them, and stick them in to keep the soil loose.  I've been surprised at how fast things are decomposing.  I don't cut my scraps up into tiny pieces or freeze them either because I don't want to.  I've had no pests and have decided that worms make the most interesting and low maintenance pets. 

What to Do When You Break Your Tomato Plant

Yes, I broke a branch off of one of my tomato plants today.  I was very sad.  It was one of my tasty 4th of July tomatoes, and it had a number of delicious looking green tomatoes on them.  As the saying goes, when life hands you a broken tomato branch with green tomatoes on it, cook them. 

My husband broiled them, and we had them as a side dish to our hotdogs.  I made up a delicious basil-mayo sauce to go with them.  I use this recipe for the tomatoes and the sauce. 

There are few things more tasty than grilled/broiled green tomatoes.  I love them.  I love fried green tomatoes too, but grilled tomatoes are a whole easier to cook, and they are definitely lower in carbs/calories than the friend version. 


For lunch today, I made whole wheat pasta with my favorite pesto sauce from a book called Pasta Pizza Presto.  It really is the best pesto I have tasted, and it is especially good when it is made from fresh basil from the garden.  It has been a huge hit anytime I made the recipe for a potluck.  My children love it.  I mixed the pasta with some pre-cooked frozen grilled chicken from target for protein.  My husband and I each cut up a small 4th of July tomato to mix with our pasta, and our younger son ate some Sun Golds. 

For dinner last night, I harvested green beans and carrots.  I just cooked them in butter and salt and pepper.  Can't get much better than that.  This year, I grew some baby-type carrots.  Wow--I can't believe how much better they tasted than store-bought.  I definitely plan to grow more carrots in the cool seasons from now on.  They are worth the extra watering. 

I love planning meals around my garden's harvest.  I tend to find cooking boring in general, but the fresh vegetables from the backyard inspire me, and I find it more enjoyable than I usually do.  I enjoy the vegetables even more if my husband is the one doing the cooking. 

Plant Review: Tomato Short and Sweet

I bought two Tomato Short and Sweet plants from my local garden center back in the early spring/late winter in order to jumpstart the tomato season.  I put them in an Earthbox, and they grew pretty well at first.  I kept them inside on cold nights and wheeled them back outside for warm days and nights.  I got my first tomatoes in early May.  They were not great.  They were grocery-store quality in flavor.  Also, they tasted bad once they got really ripe.  It was nice not to have to buy little containers of tomatoes from the grocery store, but the flavor really was a disappointment.  The plants died earlier than I would expect for a determinate variety.  I suspect a mineral deficiency and wish I had added dolomite when I planted.   I did add fertilizer.  I'm not sure the dolomite would have improved the flavor of the tomatoes.  I doubt it. 

Anyway, I liked the concept of growing tomatoes in a container early and will do that again, but next year I'll try a different variety.  I'm really happy that my other varieties of tomatoes are ripening--they are delicious and tangy and taste like what I'd expect out of a homegrown tomato!

Worm Farm: Day 5

I set up my Worm Factory on Monday.  My worms arrived by mail on Tuesday, very healthy and in great condition, from a place called Uncle Jim's Worm Farm, and they seem to be living very happily in their new home.  As I kept homemade worm bins before, I feel fairly confident that I know what I'm doing in terms of maintaining the bin.  So, far I have only given them some tiny bits of food, in addition to their bedding, and I plan to add a tiny bit a day, gradually increasing the amount.  I stared with only 500 worms, so I will probably be using this first tray for a while. 

I would have ordered the worms and bin from the same place and have them arrive on the same day EXCEPT that I ordered the worms on impulse and then had to figure out what I was going to do with them, and I decided to order a commercial bin.   I know it's weird to order 500 red wriggler worms on impulse.  Most women buy shoes and purses on impulse--I buy worms.  I'm a freak. 

My main concern with this indoor bin is the possibility of attracting fruit flies--how I hate flies.  I am putting layers of damp cardboard on top, right under the lid, to keep the fruit flies out.  If they do show up, it's easy to make a fruit fly trap (I know from a terrible infestation we had last fall--unrelated to worm bins).  [To make the fly trap, just put cider vinegar in a container, put plastic wrap on top, and punch a few holes in it.  Works great.]

If I get ants, I will just put a Terro ant trap next to the bin.   I love those things.  They are safe to use around pets and kids, and they have worked wonders on any ant we've gotten in our house. 

I'm still pretty excited about the new bin, as are my kids.  I've calculated that within a year, we should  be able to put all of our veggie scraps into the bin (except for the garlic, onion, and citrus, which can go with the garden waste in the backyard pile).  My garden is so huge that, even at full capacity, the Worm  Factory could not even make a dent in the amount that I need each year, which is about 2-3 cubic yards for all my vegetable beds and front flower beds.  Still, I like the idea of efficently using our kitchen waste and less trips to the compost pile, both of which the Worm Factory should afford me nicely. 

Gardenscape: Video Game Review

If the weather is yucky, and you can't garden, or you can't garden for another reason (like it's midnight), why not play a gardening video game?  A few months ago, I really enjoyed playing Gardenscapes with my kids.  It is not really a gardening game, in that you don't do a lot of plant growing or anything like that, but you get to "decorate" your garden as a reward for finding hidden objects to sell in a cluttered mansion.  It is a very low-stress game, but the objects were a lot of fun to find.  I was sad when the game was over, but at that point I was a little bored of the rooms.  Overall, a fun game, completely appropriate to play with young children, cheap, and with a gardening theme. 

I liked enough that I want to try its sequel, Gardenscsapes: Mansion Makeover one day when the kids and I are bored.

Stuffed Cherry Tomatoes

A couple of times this year, I've whipped up some stuffed cherry tomatoes.  I'll post a link to a couple of recipes, but one quick variation is this:  Mix goat cheese with basil, salt, and pepper, as much as you think you'll need for the amount of tomatoes that you want to make.  Spoon out the top and a little of the insides of each cherry tomato.  Put the goat cheese inside.  Easy and delicious.  

Recipes:

• Cherry Tomatoes Filled With Goat Cheese
• Stuffed Cherry Tomatoes Recipe

Garden Update: May 2012

Well, it's been a good month.  Not a whole lot to harvest.  It got too hot for the radishes to taste good, but we still had tons of tasty salad greens.  Mostly, just waiting on vegetables to mature.  I did get many tomatoes off our little cherry plants that I kept in an Earthbox.  They were good, but not as good as the indeterminate varieties I grow in my beds.  Unfortunately, the plants are dying.  I only hope that the millions of tiny green tomatoes I have in my tomato bed start to ripen soon! 

I was able to harvest herbs (mostly parsley and basil) for sauces and herb rubs.  Yum!   We had enough green beans from my bush bean plants for a side dish for one meal. 

And the peas were wonderful.  I didn't use them all and don't really have a need for more split peas.  Next year, I think I will plant 2 beds of peas and be organized about picking them in time and freezing them for beef stew.  This was the first year, I've ever had enough peas to actually make a dish out of them!  In the past, we've just enjoyed eating them in garden. 

The cucumbers and squashes are  flowering.  The peppers are flowering and growing tiny peppers.  It looks like it was rainy enough this spring that I actually have some carrots to harvest soon!  The tomatillos and eggplants are coming along, although I think it'll be a while before I get anything of off those. 

It's the tomatoes, oh the delicious tomatoes, that I can't wait for! 

Worm Bin: Here We Go Again

I love composting.  I'm a lazy composter, however, and mostly buy have my compost delivered.  I don't make nearly enough compost to supply my entire garden.  And it's very slow to actually become compost since I don't turn it much or really do much of anything other than put our kitchen scraps and garden waste in their, combined with shredded paper and cardboard. 

Before we had a house with a yard and room for a compost pile, I experimented with some homemade worm bins.  I eventually grew tired of them and stopped my worm composting.  I found my homemade bins to be messy annoying to harvest compost from.  However, my children loved raising caterpillars so much that I thought they might enjoy some other critters.  This time, however, I'm going to give it a shot with The Worm Factory, a commercially made bin. 

The advantage to a bin like The Worm Factory is that it minimizes the time involved in sorting our your castings from your worms and unfinished compost.  

I think this is going to make the experience a lot more enjoyable.  Also, it will mean less emptying of the dreaded compost bucket that I keep under my sink.  I can add a lot of things to the worm bin as I go, rather than putting them in the bucket.  It will take a few months for my worm population to build up to the amount of kitchen waste we produce, but the composter can support a lot of worms.  And there are still some fruit and vegetable scraps that I will need to save for my compost pile, like onions and citrus, that worms don't really care for. 

I'll be updating this blog with some new adventures in composting and how my new bin works out!  

For more information on worm composting:

• The Worm Digest
• Worm Woman