My Vermicomposting worms arrived!

Worms? you ask. . . . yes I'm a weirdo (if you weren't already aware of that), and I now have pet worms. Why? Well, beside the fact that I'm a weirdo, the worms will eat most of my kitchen scraps. . . things like apple cores and and bits of vegetables that I don't eat. After they eat it, they poop. The poop is nutrient rich fertilizer that can be used in houseplants, as well as my patio garden outside. I don't think any of it will make it out into the patio garden this year though. The worms don't eat and poop fast enough. Oh, and the technical term for worm poop is "castings"



I tried getting my worms from a source near where I live . . . close enough that they were only about a fifteen minute drive away. Unfortunately, they didn't have their act together, and after several attempts to purchase worms from them, I gave up and ordered some from another supplier on the other side of town.

Want to know more about vermicomposting . . . check out the links below:

• http://www.redwormcomposting.com/getting-started/


• http://www.cityfarmer.org/wormcomp61.html


• http://journeytoforever.org/compost_worm.html

Here's an overall view of what I have growing out on my patio. On the far left you can see the hanging upside down tomato plant. In the tan rubbermaid container is the normal tomato plant. The gray rubbermaid container on the left has cucumbers growing in it. The one on the right has Black Seeded Simpson lettuce that needs picked, as well as seeds started for some romaine lettuce. The dark color pot has the zucchini plant, and the terra cotta colored pot has cilantro. The paint bucket is the pepper plant, and the smaller green pot behind it is mint. In the window boxes at the bottom of the picture, I planted seeds for lettuce, carrots, and radishes yesterday. You can see that some of the containers are now up on clay brick things. These were freecycled, although not through the network.

Yesterday I converted a 5 gallon paint bucket into a self watering container. I used the ends of water bottles for a reservoir the same way I did for the self watering pot I made in the beginning of April. I planted a green pepper plant in the paint bucket. I thought about getting another plant that produces red or yellow peppers, since they're more expensive to buy in the store, but stuck with green since I seem to use them more often. In the self watering pot that I recently harvested lettuce from, I planted a zucchini plant. Both of these were store bought, and already growing, rather than starting them from seeds.

(zucchini)

I did use seeds for my cucumbers that I planted in one of the rubbermaid containers early in the month. They're growing nicely.

(cucumbers)

My upside down tomatoes are still growing, confused as they are.
My normal upright tomato plant isn't doing as well though. Some of the leaves are turning yellow, and it's not looking as healthy as it did before. It decided to bolt again, and produced lots of flowers around the same time its overall health went downhill. I removed some of them in the hopes that it will spend more energy on itself rather than producing tomatoes, but I'm going to have to stop doing that if I'm going to have any to eat.

First lettuce harvest tonight. I used all of the lettuce that was in that self watering pot, wanting to make room for a zucchini plant I bought today. I also picked a few leaves off of the lettuce in the container. It wasn't bad, but I don't think I'll go for the Black Seeded Simpson next time I'm looking lettuce seeds to buy. Just a little too bland.

I have ants that keep trying to set up colonies outside my front door and window, so I'm trying a natural solution to get rid of them, and in the process use up the peels from clementines I've been eating. You can use a blender, food processor, or in my case human power and a hand chopper to puree the peels, then mix it with water and pour the mixture over the ant colonies. The ants don't like the acid or Limonene found in the peels.EDIT: This didn't really work very well. The ants are tough. They moved the bits of peel off into a pile away from their colony.

Recent rain we had did a good job of filling up the reservoirs on my self watering containers. I decided to top them off, but as soon as I began adding water, it started draining out of the overflow holes. Nice to see that they're working as they're supposed to. My upside down tomatoes are growing nicely, so I thinned the plants down to one per hole as the instructions said to do, then hung them up. My experiment at growing lettuce indoors didn't work so well. The lettuce grew long and spindly, and never formed a good structure to hold itself upright. I stuck it outside to see if it recovers. In the picture below, you can see a comparison of how my indoor lettuce(lowest container) progressed, compared to the lettuce I had growing outside(upper two containers) in self watering containers. The indoor lettuce was assisted by a grow light for a few hours a day, and sat in direct sunlight several hours for the first month it was growing. The sun no longer shines in my patio window where I had placed the lettuce. I still have mint growing in a pot there, and while it's not growing as fast as the mint I have outside, it seems to be holding up better.

My tomato plant is steadily getting bigger, but it decided to bolt. We might have gotten a little frost one morning while I was away recently, then the weather warmed up again. Don't know if that had anything to do with it or not, but I decided to pinch off the buds to let the plant get a little bigger.

My upside down tomatoes also grew while I was away. I'm giving them some time outside while the weather is nice. I'm thinking that by the end of the week I'll reduce them down to one plant per hole, then hang the thing up.The line of storms that moved through the area over the past couple days didn't bring that much rain according to my rain gauge. It was just under half an inch, but some of it may have evaporated before I had a chance to look at it. The rain did fill up the reservoirs in my containers again, so I shouldn't have to worry about watering them for a few more days. So far they're working like they should, and the soil is staying moist.