straw bale compost pile

Making a compost pile can be as easy as arranging a few straw bales:


Although our indoor worm bin has been very successful at turning our food scraps into worm castings, now that we have a yard we will need a larger outdoor pile to compost food and yard scraps.

We chose to make a compost pile from straw bales for two reasons:

1. Since we plan on transferring a few handfuls of red wigglers into the pile, the straw bales will help keep the pile warmer during the winter.
2. Dog-proofing. The fungi at work in compost piles can be toxic to dogs, so this will keep the rotting food scraps a bit more secure than would a more open chicken-wire or pallet-based pile.

This second reason I learned about after getting a scare last night when our dog started vomiting and shivering. I didn't see him eat anything specifically, but we put down some chicken manure that he may have tasted. Poor dog.

I'm currently covering the pile with a window found in the garage. A cover made from rigid insulation and OSB/plywood would be better for the winter.

The disadvantage of a straw bale based compost pile is that it is more pricey than a more open pile with walls made of chicken wire or wood pallets. I may decide to make a pallet box to use to stage more woody material.

In other compost news, the pile of woodchips in our driveway was steaming this morning!

accidental worm tea

We had been meaning to make worm tea to apply to our garden. Well, we got some accidentally. We must have been making the smoothies we feed to our worms with more water than usual, because the tray that catches extra water had a lot of brown liquid in it, when usually it is dry. I guess that's a nice feature of our wooden worm bin--it self-regulates if it gets too wet.

I wonder about worm tea vs. directly applying worm castings. Castings are easier, and probably slower-reacting, but can introduce seeds.

planting

This past weekend we got our garden plot started. We started by loosening the soil using the double-dig method. We then amended the soil with the three bags (~9 cu. ft.) of compost that we picked up the previous weekend. Finally, we planted seeds for peas, radishes, arugula, lettuce, spinach, rainbow chard, broccoli, and mesclun (lettuce mix). In addition to all of those fresh plantings, we inherited a strawberry patch and a few onions in our plot! Thank you previous gardeners!

To get ready for summer planting, we started seeds indoors for tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, tomatillos, broccoli, basil, and other herbs.

Since we are new to gardening in the ground, we've needed to find good information from websites and books. The Boulder Culinary Gardeners' website has an excellent Boulder/Denver planting guide. We have read a few different gardening books as well, including How to Grow More Vegetables and Square Foot Gardening. I like the detail and explanations in How to Grow More Vegetables. What's your favorite gardening book or resource?

bulk compost

Time to start prepping our community garden plot! Growing Gardens, the organization that manages Boulder's community gardening system, had a truck load of compost delivered to one of the the bigger community gardens in Boulder. They sold the compost by the wheel barrow. We ended up with 3 wheel barrows of compost which we bagged and hauled across town with an eGo carshare car. Did I mention how beautiful the weather was?