Africanaussie

Well, as you know I have been trying to fit my new compost tumbler into my composting schedule.  You are supposed to stop topping it up at some stage and then let it finish off before transferring to the stand alone compost bin.   The thing is that I am not sure what to do with the kitchen waste that accumulates while the tumbler batch is processing (about 4- 6 weeks.)   I have lots of leaves, and they seem to take forever to break down too!  The kitchen scraps compost down quickly but the leaves take ages....So I keep adding to the tumbler, and it is in fact now getting rather full and a bit heavy, so something had to be done. This is what it looks like.  and inside: A worm farm, everyone suggested....    I have only ever heard of one person with a worm farm in this climate.  Recently though, I saw an honesty stall with bottles of worm wee.  Hubby looked the other way when I went to put my coins in the jar and pick up a bottle....

As I was doing my update on my in ground worm buckets last week I began to mull over how my gardening has changed since I started blogging.... Worms ;  I had never even heard of worm composting when I first started gardening.  In fact I thought they were talking about earthworms.  I didnt have room for a worm bin, so discounted the idea of having compost worms in my small garden.  Then I read about worm tubes, but wanted to be able to harvest the castings, so with a little bit of inspiration from here and there my worm buckets were born. worm buckets Permaculture :  This is something that still does elude me a little.  I have such a small garden that I really only have zone 1/2 or 1.  Permaculture can spill out into other areas though and so I see those principles popping up in different areas of my life.  Nice to know that we dont have to own a huge farm to become permaculturists. Food forest :  I have lately been seeing more and m...

I realized lately that when things are flowing nicely I really dont think about them much.  Point in case is the worm buckets that I started out back in November 2013. You can read about that here:  My start in worm worm farming. Just over a year now, so they have run the cycle through a wet season and a dry season. I also put some little worm tubes into the wicking beds, but they dont seem to do very much, although I place a few bits of fruit or some scraps into them every now and again.  They might need to be emptied out and re-filled.....  The in-ground worm buckets on the other hand - oh my!  they are a wriggling mass of healthy fertilizer manufacturers! Here is the one bucket in the sweet potato bed. I think two are just perfect in my little garden, as I like to have kitchen scraps to put into my compost tumbler as well.  Since I started the buckets I notice the same tiger worms in my compost tumbler, so not sure how they migrated there, b...

I have been avoiding facing up to the weeds out in the veggie patch.  The more you avoid them the more rampant they become so this weekend I made weeding a priority.  As I go through the beds I throw the weeds onto my weed mat paths.  Once done, I simply turn the weed mat over and voila!  the weeds are gone :)  Making weed tea attracts mosquitos in this climate, and yet I dont want to throw anything that comes out of my garden away.  doesnt it look nice  and clean now?  I also moved one of the worm bins into a more accessible area, right here in the asparagus bed.  This one has a bucket on top with fresh yummy veggies to entice the worms to move up.  That will leave the castings in the lower bucket that I can add to plants that need an extra boost.  I think the lime tree might need some boosting.  Not sure what is going on -one of the branches has started dying and there are these white spots all over the dying branch. ...

Compost is something I do for my garden that I feel really really good about.  In the back of my mind I knew that somehow compost sequestered carbon, but the facts here on  Jerry Colby Williams blog  make me want to go out straight away and build another compost bin. My first compost bin was just that - a plastic bin, and it is still going strong - it is about 8 years old now.   and I worked the compost in that continuously, turning over the compost two or three times a week.  I dont have the room for hot composting, but my gosh I got my mixture humming along pretty nicely.  Some of my bins favourite food is Browns: mulched dried leaves from our lychee tree shredded cardboard and newspaper Greens: cut lemongrass leaves seaweed picked up from the beach beer waste from the bottom of the beer brewing barrel  Then I was gifted some gardening money and off I went to pick up a compost tumbler.....  I find this one actually takes a bit...