The Barrel Project

(Note: I started this post just after I did this, but a month later am finally finishing this up.)

I haven’t talked too munch about my gardening adventures this spring. This is mostly because it’s too soon to tell if what I’m doing will help very much.  I decided to compost all my leaves from this fall, which got my neighbors to complain to me over the fence.

Last year, despite my attempts to compost my garden, we still didn’t get much from our garden.  Some small onions, a couple tomatoes, and that was about it.  The problem was two-fold — an infestation of hungry rabbits in our neighborhood and the lack of sunlight in our large yet shady backyard.  Both of these problems could be solved by moving our plants out of the garden into planters placed in the sunny parts of our yard.

Gina and I scouted out a couple mostly sunny parts of our yard late in the summer.  But our spring was busy and I wasn’t able to find planters at the price that I wanted to. But wait!  My brother and father feed cattle and they have these wide yet short plastic barrels that their feed comes in. My mom uses them in her garden for planters  and some protection from the critters that live in and around their farm. When we were there for the Memorial Day weekend I was able snag some, with the hope of transplanting at least a couple tomatoes as a controlled experiment as to whether this would work or not. On the Saturday after Memorial Day, I finally had a chance to start this.

As you can see, they are pretty big — I only had room for two of them in my van to get them and all the other stuff we brought with us back home.  I moved them out of the garage and went to work.

The first thing was to drill some holes in the bottom. I look my largest drill-bit (which isn’t that big) and drilled about 10-15 holes in the bottom of each one. If I would have had a larger bit, I would have drilled less holes.

Next, I needed to fill the bottom with something so  I didn’t have to put so much dirt inside them.  I could use sand but that would make the barrels really heavy and I would have to buy the sand.  So I decided to use something that I had plenty of anyway — cardboard boxes.

Cardboard really is a good thing — it will  break down, eventually.  But before that it will absorb water that gets through the dirt on top before it gets to the bottom. Then, if the dirt gets dry, water should flow back into the dirt.  The “cardboard as a sponge” concept comes from the research I have done with into compost.

The next step was putting in the dirt.  I have a small compost pile in the garden, so I moved that and dug dirt out from where that has been sitting.  The idea is that dirt would be the richest.  Moving the dirt wasn’t a big deal because I have a nice wheelbarrow for this kind of work. The bad part is that it took over one wheel barrow load to fill one of the barrels.  Closer to one and a third loads per barrel.

The last step was actually transplanting a couple of my tomato plants to these barrels.  Not too hard — I picked two plants (one an Early Girl and the other a Fourth of July).  I have another Early Girl left in the garden so that is our control to see if we really did make an improvement.  I also put some leaves and grass from the top of my compost pile for mulch.  This acts like a double-combo, because I’m not always good at watering and I had weeding.  A decent mulch takes care of both of these problems I have

Now a month has went by.  I don’t have pictures, but I will say that the feed barrels win.  The Early Girl has really turned into a tomato bush and has lots of flowers plus a couple small green tomatos on it.  The Fourth of July has grown tall, but it probably won’t give us tomatos by it’s namesake (because the Fourth of July is next week!).  The Early Girl left in the garden is maybe a quarter of the size as her sister in the barrel with just a few blossoms on it.   Success won’t be measured until we actually eat some red tomatos, though. Many times we have gotten excited about nice large green tomatoes on the vine and they never got red.

It’s composting time again

Even though the fall can fill me with dread, there is something like about the fall. It’s a bit weird,  but I like composting.  I feel like I know something that none of my neighbors do.

One of the big ironies of composting is that most of your composting material comes from the fall cleanup but most of the compost is formed in the heat of the summer. Therefore, you have to have a pile at least eight months of the year before you can say it does a bit of good.

I accidently left my grass long, but that may work out to my advantage — most of my leaves are from oak trees and they tend to take longer to compost. But I mow mine up and, with longer grass, I have more grass mixed in which will help them break down faster.  I’ve actually only done half of my yard, but I already got the garden covered with more than enough leaves.  This year, I did something different and took my existing compost (about 1 1/3 wheelbarrows full) and spread it on over the leaves.  Then I took the hose and soaked all of those leaves, grass and compost pretty good.  This came from The Complete Compost Gardening Guide, which I do recommend you getting from your library or from Amazon.com on the above link.   This should help those leaves even more and I should have some nice, mellow compost in the garden in the fall.

I was liberal with the leaves, though, and I know that they will not all compost out by the end of winter.  And that’s okay — I’ll just pile them up and put them on my compost pile in the spring.

So what will I do with the other half of the yard?  Well, I’m not going to put those leaves in the garden, that’s for sure.  I’ll probably put what I can in the pile I already have and the rest of the leaves in spots around it.

The Incredible Shrinking Me

I’ve struggled with my weight my entire adult life. You have to understand that to understand what follows:

Around the beginning of the year, I started making a list of “things I want to accomplish”. Not quite resolutions, but things that absolutely needed to be done. I put “Lose Weight” at the bottom of the list, not because it’s so important, but the other items were more immediate and short-term. I’ve also not come up with a weight-loss strategy that has worked for me more than a few months. I didn’t want to add a diet and exercise regime into a mix with a lot of other things that I want do . I already had enough to do without all the stress of watching my weight. If I just could maintain it through the next year, I would be happy.

Fast-forward to the end of May. I ran into someone that I don’t see very often and he said that he could tell I was losing weight. I kind of flaked it off, thinking that he just hasn’t seem me in a while. A few days later, someone else made the same comment. And then, a few days later, yet another person mentioned it. I stopped to think — surely there was a pattern here.

I didn’t feel any lighter, but I decided that I maybe needed to be more observant. When I got dressed for work the next day, I grabbed a pair of pants that used to be a tad snug so I hadn’t worn them in a while. Sure enough they were fitting better. Quite a bit better, in fact. That day, while waiting for the bus, someone else mentioned that they could tell that I was losing weight.

This is actually quite crazy, because I’m not doing one thing to lose weight. In fact, my diet is probably worse than a year ago. I used to be more careful about what I eat, but lately I haven’t even been paying attention.

So what’s happening? Do I have a tapeworm living inside me? I hope not. After Gina and I racked our brains, we came up with something: the garden and by association, the yard.

It seems that all the work in the garden and yard has been enough consistent exercise that it has helped me shed some pounds. My embracing the hobby of gardening (which was on my “Must Do” list for this year) seems to have put me on the weight loss path. Who would have guessed? And what will happen next year, when Gina and I expand are garden? Yes, that plan is already in the works.  Who knows?

But, then again,  I just saw Dave for the first time in months and he didn’t say anything about it, so maybe I’m just getting excited over nothing.

The Mysterious White Grubs

Earlier this spring, I noticed a few white grubs in our garden, which was covered all winter with compost. I didn’t think anything about it — I just thought they are supposed to be there. But last night I planted some tomatoes and pepper plants and noticed that these grubs are all over the place. And some are huge! And I didn’t even see the bigger ones, but I saw holes in the dirt that I could put my finger through.

So I got a little more concerned about it and turned to my trusty friend — Google. What I found out about it is about as confusing as everything else the Net has about composting. Some people say this, some people say that, and you aren’t sure who to believe.

This page identifies them as the larvae of the Green Fruit Beetle and describes them as a good thing for a compost pile. Both the larvae and the beetles feed on decomposing organic material, and so what’s wrong with that? But there are pages and pages about people dying to get rid of them.

Wikipedia says the larvae thrive in urban compost piles (which I have!) and feed on the roots of grass. My compost is one thing, but my grass is another. Wikipedia also says that the beetles eat peaches and figs, which I have none. I do have tomatoes, though and they are fruit — will they feast on those?

To get rid of them the organic way, I would have to find some nematodes. Would I be able to find some in Omaha? If I got rid of them using chemicals, what else would I kill in my seemingly-perfect composted garden?

So should I leave them or figure out how to get rid of them? I’m not sure what I should do . .

On another note, in my research, I found a blog named I Wet My Plants, which is not only a good name for a gardening blog, but a good organic gardening blog.

Update:  I took a grub to Moore’s Nursery by my house and they confirmed that it was a June beetle larvae, aka a Green Fruit Beetle larvae.  After some discussion, the two ladies helping me said to not to do anything with the vegetables, but if the grubs get into the lawn then something has to be done.  Thanks to Kathy of “I Wet My Plants” for the thought of taking the grub to the greenhouse in the first place.