self sufficient life

Winter composting

Most gardeners know that good compost is an invaluable addition to their garden soil and the avid gardeners I know all have a compost pile to make their own compost. Few, however, continue their composting during the winter months because they think the cold weather will grind all activity in the compost bin to a halt.

Yes, the composting process is a lot slower in winter, but the process doesn’t stop completely. Even if the temperatures drop well below freezing this winter, a little work and planning now will give your composting a head start once spring arrives.

Harvest your compost, so you have plenty of room in your bin for the winter composting. Since you will be mostly adding greens to your bin throughout winter, you’ll need some browns to keep the bin in balance, this is where all the leaves you raked up come in handy.

With a steady supply of fresh kitchen scraps, your compost pile should be able to keep itself fairly warm and do it’s thing. Some insulation around the bin can help to keep the temperatures up and speed up the composting process a little. While the best place for your compost bin in the summer is under some big trees, or any other shaded place to prevent the compost from drying out, in winter you’ll want to place it in a sunny spot, so the sun can warm up your compost pile.

What if you don’t want to move your compost pile or add insulation? Keep on adding your kitchen scraps to the bin and balance with dry leaves. When your compost pile completely freezes this winter, don’t worry, it’s a good thing! The freezing and thawing will damage the fibers in your soon-to-be compost making the breakdown easier once spring arrives.

Do you compost during winter?

What to do with all that basil

Do you grow basil on your kitchen sill too? Those little pots of basil that you can buy in most supermarkets are great if you only need a few leaves in a salad or for decoration, but if you let them grow, they can give you a lifetime supply of basil.

Once the basil plants grow big enough, they will start flowering and the flowers will produce seeds. You can see the seeds when the plant drops its flowers. Each flower usually produces four seeds, with a few dozen flowers on each stem, you can easily harvest a hundred seeds from a single stem.

After planting seeds that I harvested from a plant last year, I have also tried to propagate the plants by taking cuttings. The cuttings where a great success and I soon had more basil than we could eat in salads. As the plants where already flowering, I had to use the leaves before drying the seeds. I decided to make some pesto and it was good!

Here’s how I made the pesto:

Ingredients:

• a few hands full of chopped basil leaves.
• A clove of garlic
• A handful of cashew nuts
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• A little lemon juice
• Some pepper and salt

Pound the garlic, cashew nuts and basil in a pestle and mortar or use a food processor. Real pesto is made with pine nuts, but cashew nuts are a lot cheaper alternative often used in the pesto you can buy in a glass jar from the supermarket. Add a little olive oil until you have a consistency you like and add pepper, salt and lemon juice to taste.

The pesto can be kept in the fridge for a few days or you can freeze it. I use this pesto to make sandwiches, just smear a nice thick layer of pesto onto a slice of bread and top with turkey or chicken breast and tomato slices.

If you want to use the pesto with pasta, you can add a few handfuls of grated parmesan cheese, just stir it into the pesto. When storing the pesto in the freezer you should omit the cheese as it doesn’t freeze to well. Just add the cheese after thawing the pesto for use. Enjoy!

Worms in supply chain management

Summer was ending when we got the key to our new home and greenhouses. Heating the greenhouse this winter is really not an option because it will be too costly. Still, we didn’t want to wait until spring, so we quickly did some vegetable planting, hoping for a small harvest before winter really kicks in.

As we where running out of good soil for the planting I decided to try something different. We had some Styrofoam fish boxes laying around which looked like a perfect size planting container to grow some cucumbers in. The worms in the worm bin had not produced enough vermicompost yet, but I figured: why not let the worms continue their work while the plants are already growing?

So, I filled up the fish boxes 2 thirds of the way with a mixture of halfway done garden compost and the contents of my worm bin, including the worms. The boxes where toped of with some good soil. While the plants grow the worms should create a steady supply of worm castings.

Not knowing if this would work, I was pleasantly surprised by the growth rate of the cucumber plants. Now, six weeks later, the plants have grown nicely and are starting to develop fruits. This method of growing cuts out the work of having to harvest the vermicompost and the plants seem to like the steady supply of fresh nutrients.

I just found out that Compost Guy is doing the same, he calls it “Garbage Gardening”. I think if you want to sell your produce, a better term for this method of gardening should be used, as “Garbage Gardening” will probably not market very well.

Worm composting

If you want good soil for your vegetable garden, flower beds or potted plants, without having to pay for it, composting is what you should do. I’ve had a big compost bin standing in my garden for quite a while and it does a great job, but it takes ages to turn my kitchen scraps into good compost. These big compost bins rely on bacteria to break down the scraps and they will take between 6 months and a year before you can use the compost.

Worms however can compost a lot faster. While digging in my garden I found a good number of worms which I have added to my compost bin to speed things up. When I recently decided to move my compost bin however, I found no worms in it. After a few weeks of hot and dry weather the worms all dug down into the soil beneath the bin and where gone.

If you want to compost with worms, which is also called vermicomposting, you need a different kind of compost bin. A worm bin will have a closed bottom, so the worms can’t get out. You do have to drill a couple of holes into the bottom, so excess water can get out. You can use any type of plastic bin for worm composting, but ideally it will have a matching lid. Worms breath like all animals so you need to make sure they get enough air. A few slits or holes in the side of your bin will take care of the air circulation, but you want to cover them up with some screening to keep flies out.

Fill your bin about half way with moist newspaper or cardboard strips and add a layer of soil. If you have a compost bin you can probably find some worms in there or you can do some digging in your garden. You can also go the easy way and buy some composting worms in a garden center or order them online.

Keep your worm bin out of the sun and make sure it stays moist. The worms will accept temperatures between 10 and 30 degrees centigrade but will do best at around 25 degrees. Be careful not to overfeed the worms or your worm bin will start smelling bad. Don’t add any scraps until the last batch has been eaten completely and always burry the scraps you are adding. In time you will get a feel for the amount of scraps your worm bin can process.

Aquaponics Lettuce and Basil

My aquaponics system with expanded clay granulate is doing good. The lettuce I have planted in there hasn’t grown too much, but the plants are looking good and seem to start growing now. The reason why they haven’t grown until now is because there weren’t enough nutrients in the water. When you want to grow something in a new aquaponics system, you have to let the system mature for a while and give the nutrients time to build up a high enough level to sustain your plants. I’m the impatient type and can’t wait for maturing systems when trying new things, so I planted way too soon. Things are looking good now however, so it’s all good!

I have also put a cutting from a basil plant into the grow bed and planted some basil seeds. The cutting was cut from a basil plant that I bought from the supermarket and lives in my kitchen window. I just cut a piece and stuck it into the clay granulate. Two weeks later the cutting still looks good and it has grown some impressive roots! The basil seeds have sprouted too.

Aquaponics, take 3

With some help of the nice people over at Backyard Aquaponics, I now know why my tomato plant didn’t grow. The gravel I was using as grow bed medium was the wrong type of stone, probably limestone or marble. This caused the pH of the water to rise up to 9.0 and inhibit the plants nutrient uptake.

They say that lessons learned the hard way stick better, I agree. Before getting the next trunk load of gravel and take half a day of washing it and shoveling it into my grow beds, I will take a sample home to test. I’m quite sure I will not forget to do that!

Well, back to aquaponics, square one. I got a bag of Seramis expanded clay granulate to use as grow bed medium. This stuff is specially made for plants, so it should do the trick. It is a lot more expensive than gravel, but it has a few advantages: the very porous material is very lightweight and the capillary action will suck the water up for quite a few inches. Because of this it can be used in a constant flow system with a constant low water level, so no more messing around with loop siphons. I used a small square container as grow bed. A hole in one corner is covered with a drain sieve which prevents the clay granulate from washing into the fish tank.

I’ve planted some lettuce into the grow bed and threw some basil seeds in. Stay tuned for their progress!

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Compost vs. Aquaponics

Almost 4 weeks have passed since I set up my aquaponics system and planted a little tomato plant in there. Another seedling from a seed of the same tomato has been planted into compost which I have enriched with cow manure. The plan was to compare the total yield of both plants, but there is nothing left to compare.

The aquaponics plant has not grown at all in the 4 weeks. The only difference to how the plant looked 4 weeks ago is the color: the plant is now purple, which is a sign of not enough nutrients and too much water. I guess I planted too early. I will let the system mature a little longer and try again in about a month.

The plant in compost is doing very well. It has grown tremendously in the last 4 weeks and looks very healthy with juicy leaves and a thick stem. Even the Lego minifig I placed into the pictures for size comparison noticed the difference and wanted to stay in the compost veggie-garden.

For now the score is: Compost 1, Aquaponics 0. But I expect this to change once the system has matured…

Breeding birds in our garden

Our garden is swarming with life. We hear little birds all day from all directions. Most bird nests are well hidden in tall trees or dense shrubs, but if you provide the birds with a suitable nesting location you can place it somewhere where you can watch the little ones grow up and fly out. We got a pair of great tits in our birdhouse and after seeing the parent birds fly on and off with food for the little ones for a while, they where ready to spread their wings today. We watched 6 little birds come out of the birdhouse and fly away into the big world.

Square Foot Gardening

Our kids are never playing in the sandbox because of the bugs and spiders that get in there, so today we got the sand out to try something new. Since the contents of our compost bin wasn’t ready to use yet, we went into the forest to get some good compost. We filled the sandbox with it and used some rope to partition the square meter box into 9 square feet patches.

Each square has been planted with a different crop. We have planted: four heads of lettuce, one tomato plant, one cucumber plant, four cloves of garlic, some rosemary, thyme, a sunflower and two patches with some different flowers.

The size of one square meter is perfect for our 8 year old daughter to walk around and be able to reach every part of her garden. This system was taken from the book All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew and it supposedly lets you grow about twice as much in half the space compared to traditional gardening, while only requiring about 20% of the work.

Fishy Tomatoes

After a bit more tweaking, the barrelponics system is up and running! I have put seven little goldfish in that I had rescued from our 800 liter goldfish tank before the big ones could eat them. The little ones overwintered in our tropical aquarium but where now getting big enough to eat the guppy fry, so they needed a new home anyway.

I have taken one of the tomato plants that I had planted in the garden a few weeks ago and moved it into the aquaponics barrel. Another one that is almost exactly the same size will stay in the soil. This should be a nice test to compare how the two plants develop and how much fruit they produce, let the waiting game begin!