More Thoughts On Composting

Can more be said on the subject of compost? Apparently yes, more can be said on this subject.

Someone requested that I show you all what my homemade compost sieve looks like.

I made it myself from scraps of 1” x 6” lumber, sized to fit over my wheelbarrow, using half inch hardware cloth for the screen part. I’ve been using it for five or more seasons with nary a sag in the sieve. (“Nary a sag in the sieve”… I’ll have to admit that I like that phrase and am tempted to yes, hold on… turn it in to an acronym: NASITS)

Generally, I throw two or at most three good sized shovelfuls of compost onto the screen part and then push it through into the wheelbarrow with my hands. It is best to wear heavy leather gloves for this work; lesser gloves will end up with holes in them in no time at all. I know this from first hand experience.

What doesn’t make it through the sieve goes back into the compost bins for further breakdown.

My bins didn’t start out as nice as they ended up last Sunday.

Here’s the before picture.



They were actually fuller than that, but I had already removed some of the uncomposted “stuff” from two of the bins before I remembered to take a “before” picture.

Here’s the after picture, one more time.
What you don’t see in this picture is the bamboo screen that I usually use to hide the bins during the growing season. I purchased the screen and the wire compost bins from the Gardener’s Supply Company. The bins have lasted for at least 10 years and show no signs of needing to be replaced, and I’m on the second screen in that same amount of time. To keep the screen from being completely destroyed in the winter time, I store it under a tarp with all kinds of other stuff to keep the ice, rain, and snow off of it.

After reading my post on “Embrace Compost”, Dee from Red Dirt Ramblings suggested in a comment that everyone post about their compost bins, sort of a “I showed you mine, now you show me yours” contest, except there is no real prize other than I promise you’ll be richly rewarded with wonderful compost if you do have compost bins.

So how about it, what does your compost set up look like? Post about it and let us all see. Leave a comment here with a link so we can find you!

*****
And if you are disappointed that there is no prize for posting about your compost bins, don’t forget you still have time to enter the contest to win a copy of What’s Wrong With My Plant? (And How Do I Fix It?).

How’s that for a great prize? And there will be three winners!

It’s easy to enter. Just go to that post, enter your name and a url in the Mr. Linky Widget and leave a comment there telling us about a problem one of your plants has. Deadline to enter is November 16, 2009, 5:00 PM EST.

What's Wrong With My Library? Book Giveaway!

Show of hands if you already have a book in your personal library that helps you find out what’s wrong with your plant?

If you raised your hand, I’m guessing you already have What’s Wrong With My Plant? (And How Do I Fix It?) By David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth (Timber Press).

If you didn’t raise your hand, I’m guessing that like me, you have literally hundreds of gardening books, but no one book like this one that deals exclusively with plant problems.

So, let’s follow along in the style of What’s Wrong With My Plant? (And How Do I Fix It?) and see what the remedy is for your library problem.

My library does not have a good book on plant problems.

Do you want such a book?

Yes.

If yes, go to next paragraph.

There are three ways to solve the problem of not having a good book on plant problems.

You can purchase What’s Wrong With My Plant? (And How Do I Fix It?) for yourself.

You can ask someone to buy the book for you as a gift.

Or

You can enter a book giveaway and be one of three lucky people who will get their own copy of What’s Wrong With My Plant? (And How Do I Fix It?).

Which remedy would you like to try first? The book giveaway? Yes, that's what I would try first, too.

To enter, leave your name and blog url in the Mr. Linky widget below and leave a comment describing one of your plant problems by Monday, November 16, 2009, 5:00 PM EST. Later that evening, I’ll randomly pick three winners who will each receive their own copy of What’s Wrong With My Plant? (And How Do I Fix It?) by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth.

Be it a disease, an insect, a rabbit or a mystery, don’t hold back the gory details when you describe your plant problem in your comment. We want to know all about it so we can commiserate with you!

(The fine print: Open to U.S. residents only. If you don’t have a blog, leave the url of http://www.timberpress.com/ in the Mr. Linky widget. Make sure I can get your email address from your blog or your comment, or send me an email because you will be notified by email if you won. The generous people at Timber Press are providing the books for this giveaway. One entry per person.)

For more information, check out my review of this book, posted on October 20th.

Embrace Composting For A Happier Life

Some gardeners have a dirty little secret that they don’t want anyone to know about. They think they are hiding it well, but one look around their garden and it is obvious.

They aren’t composting!

They don’t have compost bins or any means to compost the refuse from their garden. I don’t know what they do with all their plant clippings and leaves and apple cores and leftover jack-o-lanterns, and I’m too polite to ask. But I won’t judge them, either, because each gardener has their own circumstances and must live with their own actions.

I’ll just go on record as saying…

Embrace composting for a happier gardening life.

There are all kinds of excuses for not composting…

Some gardeners think that composting is a lot of work. There’s all that talk about turning the piles, after all, which involves a pitchfork or shovel to “turn” the compost, usually by digging the compost out of one pile and onto another.

Some gardeners think that composting is complicated. It sure sounds complicated when you read about the “proper” ratios of green (wet) matter and brown (dry) matter. And then there are compost starters for sale at the garden centers. How much of that do you need? And what if the pile is too wet. Or too dry?

Some gardeners think that compost piles are ugly and that they smell. They think it looks like a pile of debris and wonder what the neighbors will think if the wind blows the wrong way.

Well, forget all that, none of it is true!

Embrace composting for a happier gardening life.

Composting doesn’t have to be a lot of work. You can add to a pile and just let it sit without turning, if you’d like, and eventually, you’ll have compost. It may not be as fast as you would get compost if you occasionally turn the pile, but that pile will eventually break down into compost.

Composting isn’t complicated. You can just pile up whatever you have from your garden, “greens and browns”, with no store-bought compost starters, and you’ll eventually get compost.

Composting doesn’t have to be ugly and it shouldn’t smell. You can put a screen around the compost pile to keep it from being seen or purchase a tumbler or other plastic unit and hide it behind a big shrub. And if the pile is getting enough air and isn’t full of stuff that shouldn’t be in a compost bin anyway, it won’t smell.

Embrace composting for a happier gardening life.

I spent today embracing composting!

I started out early this morning harvested the compost that had miraculously appeared since the last compost harvest. This involved removing the uncomposted debris from the top of one pile, then shoveling out the compost underneath. I used a homemade compost sieve to screen out some of the uncomposted debris in some of it, (screened compost pictured above) but as I dug further down into the pile, I found I didn’t have to screen out debris as much.

Then I put the uncomposted “stuff” back into that empty bin and proceeded to fill it with uncomposted debris from the second pile, and repeated the process of harvesting compost from that second pile. Then I moved on to the third pile and did the same.

Once I had the compost harvested, I got out my chipper-shredder and went around the garden cutting back some of the perennials and sending them through the chipper. This reduced what were once big piles of debris into bite-sized pieces, which will compost much faster. (The more I use that chipper, the more I love it, but that's a topic for another post.)

Now I’ll just leave the compost bins for the winter, adding whatever kitchen scraps I have leftover that I can’t use in the worm bins in the sunroom and let compost happen.

Embrace composting for a happier gardening life.

The compost bins at May Dreams Gardens

Once Upon A Time, Tying Up Loose Ends

Once upon a time, when the gardening season was just beginnning, many garden bloggers converged upon the city of Chicago to visit gardens and meet one another in person.

My reputation for hoeing being well established by then, several gardeners were excited to tell me about this sculpture of a boy hoeing in a garden at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Today, I found this draft post on my blog with this picture and wondered whatever was I going to write about it?

Also included in this draft post was this picture of the famous sculpture of the Swedish botanist, Carolus Linneaus.

Wouldn't it have been an interesting story if my mom and dad had named me "Carol Lynn" after "Carolus Linneaus"?

They didn't, of course. Lynn is not even my middle name. But it would have been an interesting story.

Finding this long forgotten draft post buried in my list of posts is like discovering work undone in the fall garden. With leaves fallen from the trees and perennials standing as mere skeletons of what they were, we all discover amid the new bareness of the garden the remnants of plans and ideas that we didn't actually carry out like we had hoped to.

Perhaps hidden behind a shrub there is an unplanted half flat of annuals that just didn't make it into the ground? Maybe we finally found that bag of canna roots from two seasons ago that we meant to plant in the spring? Or we stumbled upon some stakes marking the corners of a new bed we had hoped to dig when the ground finally dried out in a season that turned out to be very rainy.

Regardless of what we find undone in the fall, the good news is that winter is coming, the garden slate will soon be wiped clean by snow and ice, and we can start anew in the spring. We can make plans to tie up those loose ends in the garden, to do better next year.

TGIF for Gardeners and Other Tidbits

TGIF for gardeners... Thank God It's Flowering, or at least this white carpet rose was flowering a few weeks ago.

I don't know if I'll find a dried up rose on the 15th for the next bloom day or not. Regardless, fellow gardeners from all climates, Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day will take place all through the winter.

You'll be surprised how clever and resourceful we temperate climate gardeners can be when it comes to finding blooms in the winter time.

*****Did you know that you can be notified via email whenever I update my blog with a new post? Sign up on the widget to the right and never miss a post again. Usually, the email shows up sometime in the morning. And no, you won't be spammed with email after email. According to Google Reader stats, I post an average of 5.1 times a week, so you'll get an average of 5.1 emails per week.
*****
Are you wondering where Hortense Hoelove is and what happened to her Friday advice column? Me, too. She went off to the garden late this summer, and hasn't returned yet. But if she gets a few questions, she might be lured back to answer some of them this winter. Send questions for Hortense to me at my Indygardener email address or leave them in the comments.
*****
There is a big rumor going around about a new bunny in town for Thanksgiving, who is of that same ilk as the Christmas Cottontail and the Halloween Hare. I love how non-commercialized Thanksgiving is, how if you do it right it can be a nice harvest celebration, a celebration of gardening. I hope the Thanksgiving Thumper doesn't ruin that!
*****
One of the greatest compliments one garden blogger can pay to another garden blogger is to expand upon an idea they've posted about, with a link back. Please check out this post on the Greensparrow Gardens blog. Thank you, Greensparrow!
*****
TGIF, Thank God It's Flowering Friday, and that we are going to have two beauitful days this weekend here in central Indiana. I'll be in the garden with Dr. Hortfreud and maybe Dr. Plantabulb. I might build a new raised bed or two, using the method I wrote about in my weekly newspaper column, Indy Garden Sense. Or maybe not. We'll see how it all goes once I'm out there in the garden.

I hope you have a nice weekend, too! Will you get to spend some of it in your garden? I hope so!

Thoughts Related to Viburnums

Raise your hand if you thought that the Viburnum genus was still in the Honeysuckle family, Caprifoliaceae.

Yes, I thought so, too, and many online resources and books still include it in that family. But it appears that after careful review using molecular phylogeny, botanists decided that the genus Viburnum should be moved to the Moschatel family, Adoxaceae.

Molecular phylogeny? I also naively thought that botanists looked primarily at flower structure to determine what family a plant should be in. Apparently somewhere along the way, botanists started looking at molecular structure to group plants together. What would Linnaeus think of that? What do you think of that?

This new-to-me plant family, Adoxaceae, which is in the same Order, Dipsacales, as Caprifoliaceae, started out with just one a plant, a little herbaceous number called Adoxa moschatellina. Pictures of it look vaguely familiar, like I’ve seen it somewhere before so I’ll have to watch for it now, just because I’m curious about it.

But it doesn’t look a thing like its newest family members, the Viburnum species, which are generally woody shrubs - much loved woody shrubs, if I may say so myself. But I guess molecularly, that little Adoxa and the Viburnums are more closely related than Viburnums and Honeysuckles. Who are we to question it?

Raise your hand if you know of the other two genus in the family Adoxaceae?

Even if we don’t know the answer, we can easily use online resources to find out. What would Linneaus think of that?

The other two genuses are Sambucus and Sinadoxa. And just like the genus Adoxa, there is only one Sinadoxa, Sinadoxa corydalifolia. Unlike Adoxa, however, we are all unlikely to see a Sinadoxa, because it is a native to one specific region in China. (A little botanist humor, what do you call an Adoxa that does something bad? A Sinadoxa!)

One last botanic tidbit, I promise, maybe, at least for now. Do you know what a genus with only one species, like Adoxa and Sinadoxa, is called? A monotypic genus. I feel certain that tidbit is going to come in handy sometime - at a party, over the upcoming holidays, perhaps the next time you are admiring the yellow foliage of Ginkgo biloba, which is another monotypic genus, and is in fact the only genus in a monotypic family. Often called a living fossil…

Whoa, oops. Not sure where I was going with that. Anyway, back to Viburnums…

Raise your hand if you have a Viburnum in your garden.

I think most gardeners do because it doesn’t take long after being introduced to gardening to realize that some of our most beloved and memorable shrubs are Viburnums. In fact, as long as you garden someplace where Viburnum can grow, you’d be crazy not to have a least one in your garden.

In my own garden, my stand out Viburnum is Viburnum carlesii, the Korean Spice Viburnum, fall foliage pictured above. It has it all - spring blooms, good foliage all summer, excellent fall color, berries for the birds.

My sentimental favorite Viburnum is the old-fashioned snowball bush, Viburnum opulus 'Sterile'. It’s a big “wow” for a few weeks each May when its branches are weighed down with those big snowball sized blooms. I first saw it blooming in my grandmother's backyard and once I figured out what it was, I had to have one.

Plus it is a big shrub and I can hide the compost tumbler behind it.

What's your stand out Viburnum?

Basketball Season Has Begun And Our Thoughts Turn To Gardening

Basketball season has begun and our thoughts turn to gardening, as they always do.

If a gardener is going to follow a sport, I've always suggested it should be basketball, especially pro basketball, as in the NBA, because it's timed so that its season doesn't interfere with most gardening activities, at least here in USDA Zone 5.

For the most part, the season begins in late fall, after the first frost. Then it ends by mid-April, a few weeks before the last frost, especially if your team plays like my team these last few years and does not make it to the playoffs.

There are also several simliarities between basketball and gardening.

Both basketball and gardening sometimes involve digging holes. In basketball, that's not a good thing, as it usually means you've fallen behind by a lot of points and it would take a miracle to get caught up.

Digging a big hole can be a not-so-good thing in the garden, too. We can dig a big figurative hole if we let weeds grow out of control all season. Then we end up with not enough time to pull them all out. The weeds win, we lose, so we can relate to the frustration a basketball team feels when they dig a big hole and lose a game because of it.

Both basketball and gardening involves trees. Basketball is played on a hardwood floor, which of course comes from trees, and most gardening involves some trees. And some of the players are as tall as trees, too.

Both basketball and gardening bring to mind peaches. The first basketball games were played with peach baskets tacked up to the wall and many gardeners grow peaches and other fruits in their gardens. And what gardener doesn't have a peach basket or two squirrelled away in their garage or shed?

For years, I didn't think that anyone realized how perfect a sport basketball is for gardeners to follow!

Then I walked into the gift shop for the Indiana Pacers a few days ago and found... you are never going to believe it... or maybe you will believe it...

A team gnome!
Finally, life has come full circle.

Gardening meets basketball. Basketball meets gardening.

My new team gnome came home with me this evening and is currently hiding behind the Christmas cactus, pictured above, out of the glare of the lights of the gift shop.

Someone asked me if it has a name. All gnomes have names! This one is named gBloomer (with a silent "g"), which rhymes with Boomer, the name of the Indiana Pacers mascot.

Who can deny now how perfect a sport basketball is for a gardener to follow?

Welcome to May Dreams Gardens, gBloomer.