It has been since the end of WWII when the government had an over abundance of things like nerve gas that they needed to dispose of.  What a better disposal method than to spray it on food crops.  Turning DDT into a pesticide led the US down a dark road.

But that was the 1940s.  People like organic stuff now.  It has to be better now… doesn’t it?

No.  It is becoming worse.

An article published in the NY Times on May 3rd illustrates just how bad things have gotten.  Seed companies have been genetically modifying corn, soybean and cotton seeds for years to be Round Up resistant.  This means farmers can spray Round Up on their crops to kill the weeds, but not the crop.  Trouble is, weeds are smarter than farmers and companies like Monsanto.  Weeds have now evolved to be resistant to Round Up.  This means more chemicals and more genetic modification.

To get a better idea of what is so wrong with the food system in America you could read books like Omnivore’s Dilemma or In Defense of Food.  You could watch movies like Food Inc. or King Corn (which I highly recommend).  However, one of the best films out there on this particular subject is a little known documentary, The Future of Food.  You can watch it for free on Hulu.

It isn’t a secret as to what our opinion of GMO food is.  We don’t like it and are quite angry about it.  What can we do about it?  We are very conscience about our food choices.  We do our best to purchase food from reputable organic farmers.  We plant heirloom variety seeds.  We educate ourselves about the state of the food system.  We vote with our wallets.  It makes a difference.

Earthworms are are for just that… the Earth.  Bin worms are red wrigglers.  They are adapted (my anthropologist husband cringes at that word) for digestion of decaying matter (ie. kitchen scraps).  They are much different than soil dwelling worms.  Sadly, our nursery does not sell red wrigglers and we cannot find a supplier for them.  However, there are multiple locations online that you can purchase your worms from.  Personally, I purchased mine 2 years ago from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm.  This is where I direct people if they are interested in starting a worm bin.

So where is the weekend project in all of this?  Actually, it is more of an afternoon project.  So easy you could call it stupid easy.  First, visit this website to get the nitty gritty on how to make a cheap and easy bin.  You don’t need to purchase special worm bins.  The worms don’t care.

Next, you’ll need to get your bin ready for the worms.  When I started my bin I did loads of research on how to do this and how to get ready.  This was all well and good, but some of what I tried failed miserably.  Not so much that I had to start totally over, but I did have to let my bin sit for quite a long time.

Place a thin layer of garden soil in the bottom of your bin.  Healthy, fertile soil is best, but I just grabbed a shovel full and threw it in.  Next is the covering.  I’m not talking about the lid for the bin.  This is the biggest mistake I made when I started my bin.  If your scraps are not covered you will get gnats.  Gnats are gross.  When you open your bin and are attacked by thousands of flying little insects it’s icky.  Shred 2-3 Sunday newspapers and moisten them.  I throw the shreds into a giant tub and hose them down with the garden hose.  Once they are sufficiently moist, wring them out so they are only damp.  You don’t want your bin drying out, but you also don’t want it sopping wet.

Now you have your bin, worms, bottom layer and top layer.  Place the soil in the bottom as mentioned before, place your food scraps in a thin layer on one side of the bin (more on food scraps in a bit), then the worms on top of the food, then cover with a thick layer of the shredded newspaper.  The better the covering the fewer gnats.  Every few days place your food scraps under the shredded paper on the opposite side that you placed it the week before.  If you notice that your worms are not keeping up with the scraps leave the bin alone for a week or two.

The best thing to do is start slow.  You won’t be able to throw weeks worth of kitchen scraps in all at once and expect the worms to consume everything.  They are small, and need to get to work and reproduce.

As far as the food scraps go… that is where I had to do the most tweaking.  I found that if I put in large scraps the worms couldn’t handle it.  Or they could, they were just slow.  I started collecting my scraps in a bowl on the kitchen counter.  I had the tendency to forget about the scraps if they were in a covered bucket.  In the bowl they were more noticeable.  Every 3 days I put all of the scraps into my food processor and whiz them around until they are finely chopped.  I have to do it in batches.  I then put that mash in the bin.

As time goes on you will get a nice layer of vermicompost.  As that happens keep burying your food scraps under the compost.  They deeper it is buried the less likely the bin is to get gnats.

A few other tips and tricks:

1) Don’t put moldy food on the bin
2) Don’t put fat scraps in the bin (no meat)
3) worms don’t like onions, garlic or heavy quantities of citrus.
4) worms won’t break down avocado rinds, but they do like them for reproduction.
5) it is ok to forget about your bin for a few weeks/months at a time. I left my bin outside without feeding the worms the past 2 winters and they are still there.
6) if your bin gets too wet leave the lid slightly ajar and let it dry out a bit. This also works to get rid of gnats.
7) replace your shredded paper bedding as the worms consume it. As you get more castings (vermicompost) you will have to put in less paper.

Good luck on your bins.  They are very simple and rewarding.  If you have photos of your own worm bins please share them with us.  We love to know what creative ideas people are coming up with.  You can email your photos to sproutoff@sproutingoff.com.

This season I plan to use Tagro once again.  The expansion of the garden will require us to purchase the mix instead of the bucket method of last year (if you go to the Tagro facility you can shovel as much as you like for free).  We are estimating 10 yards to complete the garden.  Since our soil is very hard from years of compaction we are taking the lazy man’s way out with building the garden.  I’ve been hoarding newspaper and cardboard and I’ll rake all of the Photinia leaves once we are ready.  I will lay down many layers of paper and cardboard and then the Tagro on top.  We are not removing the grass underneath.  This will either work out well or be a very bad thing.  I hoping for the former.

We are also putting in a meandering gravel path, but we will put landscape fabric under that.  We would eventually like to till the garden beds, but not the path.

As for the raised beds in the back we will amend those with Tagro too.  In addition I add Soundgro to those and I’ll sprinkle in a little bid of worm castings.

Next year we should be able to rent a full sized rototiller for the main garden and add more Tagro and various manures.

Now the straight Tagro method may not work for the full vegetable garden since Tagro is a little more acidic than I would like, but again gardening is trial and error.

Earlier this Spring I went into my potting shed to retrieve a tool, toy or other item throw in there over the Winter.  There was this odd aroma emanating from the shed, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.  I didn’t think anything of it and went about my business.  A few weeks later I was doing some cleaning up and looking for sprinkler system parts to work on the vegetable garden system.  That smell was still there.  I did a little investigating and found droppings.  The smell was rat urine.  Lovely.

Evidently the rats that were vacated from under our house when the cats moved in decided to snack on our bags of corn gluten all winter long and had made a nice little home for themselves in my potting shed.  I did the best I could do to clean up the mess and I threw away any remaining corn gluten (so sad, it’s such a great pre-emergent).  From there on we went about our merry business.

For most of the summer I haven’t paid attention to the smell or the recurrence of other rat droppings.  Anything I smelled I just chalked up to formerly peed upon wood or droppings that I didn’t get with previous sweepings.  Mostly, I wanted to ignore the fact that there was or still is a rat living in my potting shed.  This afternoon I’d had enough.  The smell finally got to me.  I’d also had enough of sitting at my desk and staring at the computer while the sun was shining.

I spent most of the morning emptying the contents of the shed out into the back garden and disposing of anything that had come in contact with any rat poo.  This included nursery pots and leftovers from a previous garage sale.  While cleaning I came to realize that I hadn’t just done a poor job of cleaning earlier this Spring.  My little vermin never moved out.  He just substituted my expensive corn gluten for only slightly less expensive organic lawn fertilizer.  I thought I had foiled the beasts when I put all potting soil and fertilizers into a Rubbermaid container.  Nope.  They climbed right in and helped themselves.

The rest of the afternoon I spent vacuuming up rat poo and power washing the inside of the shed.  I had dirty rat poo water raining down on my head.  I think it was the single most disgusting thing I have ever done in my entire life.  All in the name of organic gardening.

This weekend we will be making a trip to IKEA to purchase a metal bin to put any future lawn fertilizer in.  Hey, it worked for the bird food.

When we first landscaped our garden the first plant I purchased for the reworked space was a collection of 5 Twickle Lavender bushes.  They were small little one gallon beauties that performed like pros.  Unfortunately, I didn’t take into consideration that the Thundercloud Plums over their heads would eventually create a deep dark shade (on the south side of my house I might add).  Slowly the three middle plants died and the two on each end (they are planted up my front walk) are leggy and don’t produce flowers anymore.  However, I did get a great flower harvest off of them right before they kicked the bucket.

In the years since I’ve learned quite a bit about Lavender and what it likes and doesn’t.  I likes to be left alone.  A yearly hair cut and some fish emulsion if you are feeling generous are it’s basic requirements.  It would prefer mostly to full sun and nice well drained soil (slightly sandy if you have it).

My collection of Lavender bushes has grown from those original 5 (now 2) to include 11 more.  Six were planted earlier this spring.  I love the look of Lavender, but I also use it.  Each year I harvest every last bloom off of each plant, bundle them together and hang them in the garden shed to dry.  I then use a pillow case to catch all of the dried blooms (pick out the earwigs) and store the dried flowers in an air tight container.

Today was my annual Lavender harvest.  It is always bitter sweet because I won’t have the pretty little flowers dancing about in my garden.  The bumble bees also get a little grumpy that I’m taking away their money maker, but a gardeners got to do what a gardeners got to do.

What do I do with all the bounty?  It goes into various crafts that I sell to support my gardening habit.  The main product is eye pillows.  Little bits of fun fabric filled with organic flax seed and organic Lavender make for great gifts.  In addition to the eye pillows I am entertaining the idea of putting together dryer bags and maybe a few fun sleepy time pals for kids.  We’ll see how much the harvest yields.

Being the frugal gardener I am I didn’t go out and purchase a fancy worm bin.  That would be too easy (and not to mention expensive).  I did some internet searches and found a few ideas.  The one I went with is courtesy of WSU Whatcom County Extension.  Honestly, is there anything a county extension office doesn’t know?

The gist of the whole thing is to get yourself two 8-10 gallon Rubbermaid containers.  Drill a bunch of holes, insert shredded newspaper bedding, a little bit of soil and some worms.  Feed the worms regularly and viola!  Instant (or not so instant) vermicompost.  And if you want to be super frugal you can collect the worms right out of your own garden.  I went the easy route and purchased mine from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm.  He had a great price, and I do believe he takes paypal.

However, like I mentioned, it took me months to get it right.  The first week I had the bin I dumped loads of vegetable peels, scraps and the like into the bin.  I just wanted to make my worms happy.  I had done lots of research on how to do this and thought I was doing it all correctly.  What I failed to realized was that I only had about 250 worms and worms are small.  They may be voracious eaters, but they are still small.

Within a few weeks my bin was over run with gnats.  And ohh how I hate gnats.  In fact I have one flying around my office that is tormenting me to no end.  Tried as I might I could not get rid of the gnats.  My bin was also a wet soggy mess… resulting in worm loss and proliferation of more gnats.  I would try leaving the lid off in the warm sun for hours.  The gnats didn’t go away and it just baked my little worms.  In an effort to sop up some of the moisture I emptied my shredder bin into my worm bin and mixed it in with the little vermicompost I did get.  Unfortunately, I didn’t realize I had sent credit cards through the shredder until it was too late.  (I still deal with little bits of plastic).  I was about ready to give up on the whole endeavor.

We went away for the summer, school started, then the snow started.  All the while I neglected my little worms.  No fresh bedding, no new food.  I was sure that the prolonged cold we’d experienced would put an end to my little friends.  At some point in February I took the lid off of the bin hoping I could at least salvage a little bit of vermicompost.  To my surprise my worms were still alive… and hungry.  So I started feeding them.

Here’s what I do that works.

1. I keep my worm box in the garage.  I put it on the lid for the other Rubbermaid container and elevated by two pieces of 2×2.  This lets the worm tea collect in the tray below.  I empty the tray in the warmer months and put the tea on various stuff in the garden.
2. I always have a 3-4″ layer of moist shredded newspaper on top of the worms.  If it starts to get a little thin I add more.  I think the newspaper is vital.
3. I bury the “food” deep in the vermicompost.  Covering up as much food as possible helps to keep the gnats away.
4. I never ever put any moldy food into the bin.  If it sits in the bucket in the house too long and gets moldy it goes in to the trash.
5. Once a week (or less often) I take all of the bits out of my inside bin and run them through the Cuisinart to chop them up in to a fine food mash.  That is what I bury under the verimcompost and newspaper.  I have some non-chopped food in the bin right now and it has been there for weeks.  They are very slow at breaking things down.

The bin I have inside was purchased in the kitchen section of IKEA.  It has a lid, sits next to the garbage can and works quite nicely.  I peel vegetables onto a paper towel and throw the whole pile into the holding bin (paper towel and all, the towel helps absorb moisture so mold doesn’t grow).  I wash the inside bin out once a month or so.

This is a great project to do with children.  It helped my son get over his fear of worms.  He asks almost every day if we can go feed the worms.  This way he sees that we don’t waste anything and that is a good thing.

So many of us are looking for inexpensive ways to improve our homes inside and out.  With a little ingenuity it isn’t that difficult.  Since this isn’t a home improvement site I’m going to focus on ways to improve the landscape in an economical fashion.

The obvious choice would be to home compost.  What?  You don’t have your own compost bin?  That’s ok, neither do I.  It’s not for lack of want.  We are looking to rearrange some fencing to make our back yard a little bigger and we’re waiting for that to happen.  Other no brainer choices would be rain barrels (don’t have those either).  Both will give you resources that cost nothing.

If you are like me and don’t have a rain barrel or compost bin you’ll need to find other ways to save money.  One thing that I do is utilize a local resource for organic fertilizer and compost.  Those of you lucky enough to live in Pierce County Tagro and Soundgro.  Both can be obtained for free.

With Soundgro you can only get the free stuff on one day a year.  Last year we were lucky enough to drive by the Chambers Creek facility on free day and scored 2 50 lb. bags for free.  We then purchased an additional 50 lb. bag for $3.25.  This year the even was on March 14th and sadly, we missed it.  Luckily, we still have 2 of the 50 lb. bags from last year.

Tagro is available for free direct from the facility.  Just back up your truck, car or whatever and fill it up with as much as you can shovel.  I have a small SUV and we take a frillion 5 gallon buckets and fill them to the brim.  I could borrow a friend’s truck, but I’m lazy and the buckets work.  In addition to the free compost you can purchase a cart full of potting soil for only $5.  It is enough potting soil to fill both of my front window boxes and then some (a lot actually).

If you are like me, you might be skeptical about the use of biosolid fertilizer.  Everything I was taught in school pointed to it being un-safe for garden use.  Things have changed in the 8 years since I’ve graduated.  The process of  making the biosolids is quite safe and the end product is amazing.  Last year my vegetable garden was lush and beautiful.  I used a small quantity of Tagro in the beds and added Soundgro in too.

This year, we are utilizing the free Tagro by spending our “gardening days” (Tuesdays and Thursdays) picking up the compost in the morning, weeding and applying in the afternoon.  I’m working on our flower beds little bits at a time to make things more manageable.

I plan to continue this series of “gardening on the cheap” throughout the season.  If you have any additional money saving tips you can send them to me at lisa@sproutingoff.com.

Since it is snowing and we’d rather be outside working in the garden than on the garden what do we do?  Seed catalogs.  There is a large selection of seed racks in every store you enter at this time of year.  Going to pick up your prescriptions at Walgreens?  Pick up some cucumber seeds while you are at it.  Actually don’t.

I am a big supporter of organic is better, but heirloom is best.  Odds are that the seeds on that drugstore rack aren’t heirloom or organic.  In fact they are likely to be genetically modified.

Many home gardeners first turn to Territorial Seed Company for their purchases.  Territorial seeds are found in most garden centers and they have a wide variety of seeds to choose from.  Territorial was also started by none other than Steve Solomon.  Better yet, it is a Northwest company located in Cottage Grove, OR.  I purchased my seeds from Territorial for years, but a few years ago I had issues with germination so I gave another company a try.  This isn’t to say I discourage purchases from Territorial.  I highly encourage them.

I buy my seeds from Heirloom Seeds.  In general heirloom seeds (the actual seed, not the company) are seeds produced from open pollination.  This means they are not genetically modified, and were not created in a lab somewhere.  I buy heirloom seeds because with open pollination of my own I can harvest seed from my plants and buy less the next year.  Of course tell that to the employees at Heirloom Seeds who just processed my $37 order for the year.  Trouble is that they are a very small company run by a family and their turn around time is about 40 days right now.  This does not bode well for my impatient 4 year old.  So a package of Territorial Seeds might be in our future next week.

Whichever company you decide to purchase from, I suggest you study their catalog thoroughly.  Make sure they have the seeds you are looking for.  I find it a nuisance to have to order from 12 different companies because they don’t have 1 variety I’m searching for.

Ideally, you will want to order your seeds in December so they arrive in time for planting, but seeing as I just ordered mine last week we’ll let that slide.  Just be aware that you’ll want to get your peas in the ground by President’s day so you may have to visit your local garden center in the mean time.

This week we’ll discuss what to do with those seeds while you are waiting for them to arrive and what to do with them once they do arrive.