GardenDesk has moved again

I apologize to any of you who have followed me over the years because I know I have moved this blogs location several times - what a pain. I'm sorry.

Well, I have now moved back to just www.gardendesk.com and am using typepad again. I left this old blogger blog in place for now since my moving has caused some confusion. If you want to see the most current posts, click here. Also, you can find my current rss feed at feedburner.

If you are interested, I wrote a whole post detailing why I've mad these changes. You can see it here.

Once again, I am sorry for the inconvinience. I hope to see you over at the new GardenDesk!

Happy Gardening!

Benefit with vermicompost from your own wormery!

As you may or may not know, I have a worm bin full of thousands of redworms that I keep in our dining room. The whole family enjoys feeding the worms our vegetable scraps and watching the babies hatch. My worm bin is the Gardens Alive Worm Factory.

I have written before about setting up the worm bin here and here. I have written about how to harvest the worm compost from the bin, but I have never really shown why vermicompost is so great.

Worm castings, or vermi-compost is the super compost - the best organic natural fertilizer possible for your plants. I have always read this and believed it, but this year I decided to put it to the test.

Remember the Pea bed that I prepared back in March? In that bed, I put two rows of chicken wire fence with two rows of peas on either side of each fence. Afther the peas got growing, they looked like this:

For my experiment I put freshly harvested worm compost as a top dressing on the two rows of peas on one fence and not on the other.

After a few weeks, the pea vines on the composted side grew so much bigger than the other side that they reached above the fence and fell over! They also yielded many more peas! The easiest way to show you the difference is by this split screen picture:

The left side had the vermicompost added. Look how much thicker the vine is than the one on the right. The right side did well too. I never would have known the power of the worms if I hadn't done this side-by-side test. The peas were fabulous, by the way.

On the same day I added the worm castings to the peas, I transplanted my last early tomato plant. I added a generous amount of the worm compost to it's hole as well.

It may be just a coincidence, but that is the plant that has been giving us our early ripe tomatoes so far! The other early tomato plants haven't ripened yet. Sounds fishy doesn't it? Or should I say wormy! I'm convinced that the vermi-compost made the difference. It makes me want to get another tray started on my Worm factory right away. Each finished tray makes quite a bit of compost.

I have a friend that has been asking me about worm composting and how to do it. That has made me realize that I never really written a comprehensive how-to compost with worms post. I am now in the process of doing that. It will be added to gardendesk.com as a page. Worm composting is one of many topics that I write about but don't really give good details to the beginner. I apologize for that and am working on making that better. That is why I started the GardenDesk page arm of this site. So far I do have a general composting page, a seed-starting page and a beneficial insect page. Soon I will add a worm composting page and several others.

For now all I can do for my friend is refer her to my worm composting thread and recommend some books like Worms Eat My Garbage: How to Set Up and Maintain a Worm Composting System and The Worm Book . Also, my Worm Factory came with a great little informational booklet that I am loaning to her. She has said that she may buy the same bin that I have which made me remember the Gardens Alive online $20 off coupon that they have. You can get that by clicking here:

I posted that primarily for her, but anyone can use it. It leads to the main Gardens Alive page and is good for any of their products. If you are looking for the Worm Factory, you then need to search for "Worm Composting System". I highly recommend worm composting and endorse the Gardens Alive Worm Factory.

Other than my friend reading this, I'd love to here others thoughts on worm bin composting. Do you have one? Have you made one yourself that you are happy with? Does the idea intrigue you or disgust you. One thing is sure, vermicompost IS nature's super-compost!

Keep Growing!

- Marc

Enjoying our Early Tomatoes and more!

Wow, it has been a long time since I posted here. I have a bunch of reasons why and some strange stories to go along with them. For now though, I'm going to try to get back to blogging as if I never stopped because I have countless things to report.

This year's garden is the biggest and best we've ever had! Possibly one of the most exciting things to report is that we are now eating a few early tomatoes!

This was the first one we ate but actually the second one picked. It was harvested on June 6th. We missed our early tomato record by one day, unless you count the first ripe tomato picked. The first one, picked on June 3rd was a huge, record-sized beefsteak tomato that looked like this:

Does that count? It reminds me of when a pullet lays its first egg. The first one is always a tiny strange little egg. (Our chickens are doing great by the way.) I've never seen tomato plants operate in the same manner, but this one did! Side by side they look like mother and child.

Tomatoes aren't the only thing we have harvested during my sabbatical from blogging. We've gotten a generous amount of lettuce, spinach, sugar snap peas, broccoli, and have begun harvesting cucumbers and almost zucchini. Much more is planted and doing well. I will try to get caught up here and post regularly about it all. I have enough to write that I could post every day if I'm able to get my act together. For now however, I'm going to enjoy some fresh sliced tomatoes with my family.

How are your tomatoes doing? What about the rest of your garden?

Keep Growing!

-Marc

Planting Peas and Potatoes for Patty's Day!

Happy St Patrick's Day!

Here in Kentucky, instead of wearing green we can plant it! Green Peas that is. Local farmers also say planting potatoes is fair game on St. Patrick's Day. I don't know if I agree with either because in many years it stays really cold until mid-April. This year however I am going to take a chance along side my neighbors. Of course I can never garden exactly like regular folks so I'm planting the potatoes in the greenhouse beds.

I may have overdone it a bit in buying 50 pounds of Kennebec Seed Potatoes, so I won't put all of them in the greenhouse. Later when I am no longer worried about frost, we plan to put the rest in the row-garden portion of the yard.

That is unusual for us because we primarily garden in raised beds which is where I planted the peas. The ground was still pretty wet last night which illustrates another reason why I love gardening in raised beds.

Last night I cleared out the bed closest to the greenhouse with a rake to make room for some peas. If I wanted to plant them in the regular ground as in a traditional row garden, it would have been way to wet to plant. I planted four rows of peas, each row on either side of a chicken wire fence.

Later I will add more support poles to the chicken wire pea fences. It was very important for me to put the supports up before I planted the peas so I would know where exactly to place the rows.

Also, I usually have a problem planting tomatoes and things that need support because I plan to add the support later, but sometimes I don't get around to it. After doing this with half of my tomatoes last year, I vowed to ALWAYS put the support up prior to planting. So here is my quick pea supports.

The other fun thing about preparing this pea bed was watching the chickens watch me. You can see the coop in the background on the right in the previous picture. I treated the chickens to an occasional worm as I turned over the soil. They were delighted!

Taking worms over to them gave my back a break every now and then. I'm not yet in gardening shape so even prepping one 4x12 raised bed wore me out. That's another reason why I like raised beds - you can work only a few beds at a time and still be very productive.

Later this week in the outdoor garden I hope to plant beds with broccoli, cabbage, lettuce and spinach. I think my pea bed is a pretty good start. I just hope they germinate well. Maybe by planting them on St. Patrick's Day I'll get the luck of the Irish!

Happy St. Patty's Day!

Is Winter Really Over?

I actually got hot outside today while I was pruning the apple trees. It was 62 degrees and the snow is just about melted! Could winter be over? I don't think I can believe that since we have had record amounts of snow this year.

Here in Kentucky we didn't get near the snowfall that the east cost got, but we did get 27" in February and more that a foot of it all at once. It was hard to keep it off of the greenhouse.

My daughters favorite thing about having a greenhouse this winter was that when we were playing in the snow, we could go in there to warm up. It was also a great place to keep the sleds!

The only thing we could do in the garden was go sledding.

That picture was taken during one of our smaller snowfalls. Most of the time the garden beds have looked like this:

There was a lot more snow than we are used to. Even playing in it got us much more tired than usual.

It was our first winter as chicken owners. I learned that chickens do not like snow!

During the last snow, about eight inches blew into their pen and the girls refused to leave the coop. When they would jump down into the snow, they would squawk and flap around like they were being attacked! I actually had to shovel out the snow, put new wood chips down, and bait them out with lettuce from the greenhouse.

They still spent most of their time inside, but at least now they would come out to eat and drink. That's also about the time they start laying more eggs again. Now that it has been warmer, there are some days that every hen lays. Soon I will be able to let them back out in their grazing pen.

There will be a lot going on in the garden pretty soon too. I do have some early tomatoes and lettuce started and have much to share with you.

Most of the winter I have been writing pages for my new gardendesk.com site (as opposed to this blog). Now I plan to turn my attention back to blogging, so stay tuned here.

In the meantime, check out one of my new pages. The ones I have done are Seed Starting, Beneficial Insects, Composting, Garden Bargains and Tomatoes! I hope to write more as well - Spring can be very busy and exciting.

So what do you think? Is Winter almost over?

A Welcome Sight!

Seed and gardening supply companies are clairvoyant! They seem to know the exact moment when you become sick of winter and spring fever is beginning to set in.

Last week, my car got stuck in the snow at the end of our driveway. All I could do was put my boots on and walk up the hill to the house. Since the car was now parked closer to the mailbox than the house, I decided to get the mail first. Expecting mostly bills, I was pleasantly surprised to find with those bills some of my favorite garden catalogs!

The best catalog that I got was Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I wrote all about them and their catalog last year.

The other catalogs I got on the same day were Henry Fields, Totally Tomatoes, and Gurney's. Wow - Jackpot! I will put these with my other favorites and decide what new seeds plants and supplies to buy this year.

What a great cure for Spring Fever!

Greenhouse Growing Update

You may remember that we built a new greenhouse last Fall.

It came in handy this spring as we used it to raise a lot of seedlings. The main reason I wanted a greenhouse however was to have the ability to grow salad crops all winter long like Eliot Coleman teaches in his new book, The Winter Harvest Handbook.

It doesn't have to be heated, but it does need raised growing beds inside to grow the crops in. I wasn't able to finish the raised beds when I built the rest of it last year, so I got them ready this September.

The plan was to grow many perfect little seedlings inside under my giant light stand. That didn't work out because we had a huge flood in our basement right about the time I should have been starting the seeds. Instead I was busy tearing up wet carpet and drywall.

The light stand was still in that picture, but eventually it was dismantled. It will be put back together in the garage. (I'll post more about that and about the basement renovation later.)

Anyway, instead of starting seeds inside and planting seedlings in the greenhouse, I direct seeded in the greenhouse growing beds.

I planted lettuce, spinach, oriental greens, radishes, carrots and beets. We have been able to eat the radishes and some of the lettuce so far. This is what the growing beds look like now:

As you can see, direct sowing caused my lettuce bed to have bare spots and many of the plants are too close together. We tried to thin them but they are still bunched together. Much of it is still growing well. I still want to try to fill the gaps with new plants. I'm new at this, so I don't know if that will work.

It is still above freezing during the days here, but soon I will have to add a 2nd layer of plastic over the beds with small hoops or cold frames. I know I can keep the veggies from freezing. I just don't know how much the growth will slow as the day lengths are getting so much shorter.

No matter how much or how little success we have this Fall/Winter, I am having fun giving it a try. And the fresh lettuce is tasting real good!

I hope it lasts all winter!

I want to build another chicken coop!

Our chickens are now giving us a good amount of eggs. We only have five hens and are averaging four eggs per day.

Recently I posted an update on our chickens and the coop that we built for them. In that post, I told you that I love having chickens far more than I expected. We have never kept chickens before, so we started out small. Now I'm wishing that we had more but I only built a small coop. We could fit a few more birds in there, but the best option would be to build a 2nd coop. Last year I had trouble finding info on how to build a chicken coop so I made with without plans. It worked out pretty well, but I think I can build a coop faster with some good plans. Again, I've been searching for info on building an easy chicken coop, and I think I may have found it!

Its a ebook simply titled Building A Chicken Coop. It promises easy step-by-step printable plans for coops of all different sizes. It also covers things that are not as usual to find in chicken books such as what the cheapest and best materials to build with are. The first line of their promo sounds great: "Discover How To Easily Build An Attractive And Affordable Chicken Coop That  Protects Your Chickens From Predators,Maintains Their Health And Delivers More Delicious Eggs". Wow, that covers all of the important stuff! I'm excited to check this out.

I can't wait to build something new for the chickens so we can get a bunch more in the spring. In the meantime, our five are enjoying the new grazing pen I made for them.

My current coop will have to do until I have time to read Building A Chicken Coop and decide which coop plan to follow.

 
If you want to see for yourself more about the book I'm talking about, you can Click Here!

Hopefully we will have a mild winter and I can get started building a new coop before spring. I'll let you know how it goes!

Pollan's Botany of Desire comes to TV and DVD!

Many gardeners are familiar with author Michael Pollan, especially for his acclaimed books, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. But do you remember his book The Botany of Desire from 2001?

Well now The Botany of Desire has been made into a 2 hour television special to be aired tomorrow night, October 28th on PBS.

 

I was able to view an advance DVD copy of it, and I recommend that all gardening and food enthusiasts tune in. The premise of both the movie and the book are that we humans "think" we control plants and use them to satisfy our own desires, when actually the plants are controlling us. About the film, Michael Pollan says, "We don't give nearly enough credit to plants. They've been working on us, they've been using us, for their own purposes".

Pollan and producer/director Michael Schwarz takes us on a beautiful voyage around the world to get an up-close and personal look at the history of how four very important plants have crossed paths with mankind. They profile the Apple, the Tulip, Marijuana and the Potato.

Watching this riveting account of plants prompted me to get The Botany of Desire book as well. The movie does a good job of capturing the essence of Pollan's original work, but of course the book goes into even more detail. If you like the movie and haven't read the book, I urge to to pick up a copy.

What the film accomplishes that the book can't is visual in nature. The photography is beautiful and illustrates the growing processes well. It is also nice to see Pollan and other experts talking instead of just reading quotes. The film is broken up into four half hour segments, each concentrating on one of the four plants. It wouldn't surprise me to see it later aired as a mini series in half hour segments. There is no official word about that. As of now the only airing is slated for October 28th at 8:00 p.m. on PBS stations. After that, it is scheduled for DVD and Blu-ray release on November 3rd. Here is what the DVDs will look like:

The DVD is a great addition to your video library, but you have a golden opportunity to see it for free tomorrow night!

Watch the special and then come back here and let me know what you thought of it. Do you agree with me that it is visually beautiful, interesting and informative? Does Pollan make you think differently about your relationship with the plants in your garden? Let me know your thoughts!

Thanks - Marc

Update on our Chickens and the Coop

I just realized that I have never posted about our adult chickens on Garden Desk! That's crazy because we absolutely love our chickens. I never knew how much fun they would be, and the eggs are delicious!

 

We did manage a post back in April about raising our chicks. We raised the chicks in our garage while we built our outside coop. We built the coop mostly out of wood that we already had from an old deck that I took apart a couple years ago. The coop construction took much longer than anticipated but they have been in it for three or four months now. here it is:

We were able to put it right in front of the garden and beside the greenhouse.

When we would read about keeping chickens, it seemed that many people let them roam around during the day. Around here experienced farmers were telling us to watch out for the many predators, some even during the day. We have to watch out for hawks, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, opossums, weasels, rats and the neighbor's dogs. Many people told us that we wouldn't be able to keep our chickens alive.

With this in mind, we tried to build a very secure coop. The building that they sleep in is in the very center, up on stilts with no outside walls. The small window openings have two layers of wire over them and we even put wire mesh down under the floor boards.

The rest of the coop is all under tin roofing with two kinds of wire around the perimeter. The wire is also buried in concrete at the bottom about 18 inches under ground! The door has a second latch about a foot off the ground so nothing can squeeze in.

If anything does manage to sneak in during the night, they shouldn't be able to get in the wood building. The chickens have a small door that they use during the day.

They go inside at dusk and then I lock their door.

Here they are coming into their building:

The other wall is hinged for us to get inside for cleaning. It also has the nest boxes built into it. When closed it also has a heavy duty latch. Here is what it looks like from the outside:

Here is the nestbox part of the inside:

 

The chickens' main feeder and water hang from the building under the nest boxes.

All summer we fed them plenty of fruits and vegetables, an occasional worm or grasshopper and grass that we pulled. Recently, I thought they should get to graze in the grass on their own. In order to keep them safe while grazing, I constructed this crude grazing pen:

I can lock them in if I want to clean out their coop, or I can connect the two units with portable chicken wire sides and top that roll out of the way when not in use. You can see what I mean from this angle:

 

The chickens love grazing in their new pen in the evenings. At nightfall, they go back inside to their roosts and I disconnect the pen and lock them safely in their coop.

The chicken coop and grazing pen are working out pretty well, especially since I built it without any real plans. The chickens have adapted well to it and are laying eggs almost daily now. As good as getting fresh organic eggs is, I think my favorite part about our chickens is that they are super friendly. They are more like pets than farm animals. They actually enjoy being held and get excited when they see us.

Raising chickens is great! As long as winter goes well, I hope to get more next spring. Of course then I'll have to build another chicken coop!

Thanks for reading!