Tag Archives: Composting

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Strawberry Harvest, Alfalfa Tea, Another Underground Composter and Loads of Echinacea Seedlings

Today was the first official strawberry picking. I had reduced the bed by 1/3 when I put in the everbearing bed so it didn’t take me nearly as long to pick. Its a good thing, my back has been giving me a fit with regards to bending. I keep forgetting I’m not 20 any more. 😉

I started another batch of alfalfa tea today. This is my first year using it and I did a little experiment. I treated part of a row of raspberries, salad burnet and a few others. The difference was most noticable in the salad burnet. The plants I treated were much darker green than their neighbors all other things being equal (that I can tell). The recipe I settled on is 4 cups of alfalfa pellets to 5 gallons of water. I put this 22 gallon trash can out at the edge of the garden next to the underground composters (I added a second one recently). This stuff gets pretty nasty smelling and in case it gets knocked over I didn’t want it close to the house.

echinacea-seedlings

The plan was/is to use this half barrel for a couple of sweet potato vines (Porto Rico) and a flower or two. The other day I noticed that it is full of volunteer echinacea seedlings. There is a small patch of purple next to this planter and this is the first time I’ve had seedlings come up. I’ve transplanted about a dozen or so already but there are dozens more.

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Compost Time

inground-compost

Yesterday I harvested the first batch of compost from my underground composter. I put the trash can in the ground last May. Over the summer and into the fall I put what didn’t go into either the worm bin, compost pile or other above ground composter into the can. There weren’t as many earth worms in it as I would have hoped which explains why it wasn’t as mixed as I had hoped. Think I’ll throw in a handful of redworms this time. Occasionally I would peek inside and watch the once heaping can shrink down to a little over half full. I was concerned emptying the can would be a pain but it was no big deal with a shovel. I left a little inside as a starter for my next batch.

As you can see the can produced a wheel barrow full. Most went on some blackberries with a little being mixed with some vermicompost into a newly dug hole for my Double de Coubert rose.