More gardening dreams, with discussion, research, and other stuff!
I believe I have pleased the City of Carlsbad with my efforts. If not, I will wind up in some local courtroom discussing this with some judge. I'm on friendly terms with a couple of our best local judges, so I'm not worried about that.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking more about how to make it easier for a 53 year old woman with kind of creaky joints and back, to manage a fifth of an acre of land in a desert region that occasionally kinda turns savannah, so to speak. Like during last June when it rained about seven inches the first week, and then kept going, though not quite at that rampant level.
All of that and highs in the 90's, with ground that is not all leached out, but actually fairly nutritious, results in some pretty impressive overgrowth.
The Opuntia
I've discussed the Opuntia at some length here already. I recently looked to see if there are Opuntia gloves available.
There do not appear to be Opuntia gloves available, so one is stuck here with either having Bermuda grass up your Opuntia all the time (Geez, doesn't that sound pornographic?) or else pruning your Opuntia up so you can get under it with scissors and cut down the grass.
Yes, scissors. Not shears, not anything they try to sell you as pruning stuff. Scissors. I like Fiskars; they make very nice scissors.
One might be tempted to use leather gloves, as have I. Don't. I've tried even welding gloves. Leather will catch the spines (both sorts) and they will work their way in to your hands. It's possible that my leather welding gloves might repel glochids (the tiny spines that come in bunches) but I have too much respect for Opuntia to get too invested in this idea.
Opuntia grow thick, woody stems. You can prune up the pads, and the plant will still stay fairly stable, though if you let it grow long teetering offshoots, they will probably break and fall off.
The Mulch Piles
Mulch piles, aka rough compost heaps, will just stay mulch piles unless you introduce certain elements.
a. Nitrogen. If you have a lot of woody stuff, it will need a LOT of nitrogen. Animal wastes work, synthetic nitrogenous products work.
b. Water. If it all dries out, it won't rot.
c. Containers. You can bury it, though that kind of shovel work is harder on some of the older of us. The ground is a kind of container.
I decided the other day to mail order four 31 gallon Rubbermaid Roughneck bins. I think these are broad bins, not trash cans. It cost me a bit over $100 with shipping.
I'm still planning on looking to find some cheap plastic containers around Carlsbad, but I want to refine how I do my composting, and Rubbermaid reliably makes plastic containers that last about 20x as long as anybody else does, in my experience. And I could not have gone off and found these for sale around here.
When I get them, I'm going to ruin them. I'm going to take my electric drill and my largest bit and drill 1/4" holes all over the bottoms and about six inches up the sides.
Then they will be ready to be passive compost bins.
Then, I'll set them somewhere behind a large piece of vegetation that will benefit from their presence. Like my honeysuckle vine.
Then, I'll line the bottoms with small broken pieces of wood, stalks, stuff like that. That's for the air flow. You don't want a compost bin that turns all into muck at the bottom.
About four inches of that will do, for each bin.
Then, on top of that, I'll add in some of the yard refuse I've collected and bagged. I may send some of this off to the city sludge/composting program, but meanwhile I need a lot of it.
I'll start with the lightest stuff. Leaves, and stuff that has already decayed to some extent. Leaves and twigs, for instance, will make a great mix.
Then I'll have four bins like that, and I'll run a piece of my hose system up into one of them, about once a week. The hose will be attached to an old piece of drip line that has cratered some. I'll tie it off with wire, to make the water distribute better.
It will help to have some nitrogenous stuff going in on top. I might start saving my urine again for that; I've been thinking about that. Urine is sterile initially; if you want to get into using urine to rot organic matter; note that a moderate bleach solution works just fine to sterilize any of your collecting devices.
Okay, so now the contents of these bins will be subsiding rapidly. I'll start moving the rotting contents of three of them over to the one on the left. The twigs and wood at the bottom of all these bins will be left alone.
Then I can keep adding new leaves and twigs and Bermuda grass cuttings that are dead, to the first three bins.
After a few months, the first bin should be good compost, and relatively sterile. I can then go toss it on a garden bed, or sift it and sterilize it to make it a component of potting soil.
I've used a few different techniques to sift finished compost. Here are some of them:
- Those plastic slotted trays that nurseries use to carry around small potted plant starts. They work great when you want to just sift a bit to mix into a pot when you're transplanting somebody.
- Stucco wire. That works great for a large screen sifter. You can set it over blocks with tarp underneath, and then dump a bunch of half-finished compost on top, and then go over it with a hand shovel, with gloves on (use gloves, it will mess up your skin otherwise).
- A cheap plastic slotted colander. That's good when you need just a bit.
Making Potting Soil For Seeds
Since we're talking about compost, might as well address this too.
Compost can be a great ingredient. But you should heat-sterilize it, as you should yard dirt that you use to make potting soil.
Get it up to 165 degrees F in your oven. Buy a little metal oven thermometer to make sure. If you get it up to about 180, it can screw things up. 165 will kill the bad stuff. Sorry for the lack of further explanation, but this is turning into a long essay.
I sterilize my sifted compost and yard dirt in bread pans, pyrex pans, whatever I have around. Just keep the temp down to 165 and be patient. (It's good to do this in the winter, because then the heat will heat your house too.)
Then I mix it with some vermiculite. I found a neat source for vermiculite today. 7 Springs Farm. These people seem to know what they're doing and they're indie. They also have some info available about how vermiculite is marketed, and how to understand what you're buying and looking for.
I had other things I wanted to write about here, but this is enough for now.
Journey of 1000 miles starts with one composting step!
I'm looking forward to hearing feedback from any of you about how you work your gardens.