Saturday, October 9, 2010

Remember That Volunteer?

A month or so ago I posted about a volunteer pepper plant that appeared in the soil/compost mix that I repotted my chive in. The extraction was initially successful and the plant has continued to thrive in its new home.

It even has two babies!


I think this is going to be a white bell pepper, but I'm not sure because it was a mixed seed pack.


My chives and the other 2 winter bell pepper plants.


Within the next few days I'll be pulling the last of my outdoor pepper plants in an attempt to overwinter them. We'll see how it goes!

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Vermicomposting

Last year I started a worm bin (vermicomposting) to process vegetable waste, cut down on our stinky trash and get a nice organic fertilizer pretty much for free as a result. All went well until about mid August. My worms were happy and quickly processing all of our food scraps. Then I went away for about a week and made sure to leave them with plenty of food, but I forgot to check the weather forecast. If they had been inside the apartment, this would be no big deal, but I had moved the bin onto the front porch/sunroom. So a combination of ridiculously high temperatures and forgetting to open the windows resulted in a sauna-like environment and lots of dead worms.

Since then I've been ridiculously busy and keep forgetting about my need for new worms until I have a full food waste bucket that I can't get rid of. Well, I finally got around to ordering new worms on eBay and even decided to do a whole bin makeover!

My new bin is a 10 gallon container from Lowe's

Newspaper has been shredded, soaked in water and wrung out for a nice moist bedding

My new worms in their new home!