Worm Condo
This is part two of the article about creating a Growing Power gift that I started last week. Now that you have the ingredients for Growing Soil, it is time to purchase, gather, or make the rest of “The Gift that Keeps on Giving.” The next part of the gift is something that you will need to purchase for the garden, and that can be a gift to wrap for under your tree, which is the seeds. You can purchase seeds from Growing Power, a garden store, or from one of the many seed catalogs. The catalog I used, originally recommended to be by Will Allen at Growing Power, is “Johnny’s Selected Seeds”. They can be reached on the web at www.johnnyseeds.com or by phone at 800/738–6314. What seeds you order depends on a number of factors: 1) Your tastes and interests or those of the person you are giving the gift to; 2) Your growing space or that of the person you are giving the gift to. It could range from one large pot on the deck, to a small garden, to a large garden. My suggestions for the GP garden beginner is to stick with the easy and fast-growing items: lettuce mixes, green mixes, certain herbs like basil and mints and some vegetables like tomatoes, eggplants, squashes, cucumbers, peppers etc. depending on taste, conditions, room and soil. My experience with making your own soil is that even using the same soil and same seeds, two plants will grow differently, because of conditions, in two gardens. This year I gave Dawn of the DMZ Garden Co-op some of the same soil for mounds and the same zucchini seedlings I used, yet hers were many times more fruitful than mine. Discovering what seeds to buy, when to plant them, and where, is a learning experience and part of the gift.
The second part of part two is a Worm Condo. I am a firm believer that every garden, big or small, should have a worm condo. This is the outside box, big or small, where the livestock, the worms, eat the compost you make and turn it into the ‘black gold’ of castings. These castings are the black rich soil, full of living organisms, that so enriches the seeds that you can plant a lot in a small space. You can see a picture of a worm condo and some instructions at Worm Condo. Build a large or small one from scrap wood. Make sure you leave cracks between the boards on the bottom of the box so the water that seeps through the compost and castings can drain. The box built in my yard is square but the back legs are higher than the front. By using plastic stapled on the box it drains toward the front where it can be collected in a container. The water, now “tea”, can be put back into the box or used to waster plants. Depending on the material used, scrap or new, and depending on one’s skills to construct it, this part of the gift could cost from $0 to $50.
So in this Part II of the Gift that Keeps on Giving we have the seeds and castings-enriched or tea-enriched, fertile soil that we need for a Growing Power home model garden.
In Part 3 next week we will talk about the rest of the gift. Most of the rest are components and learning experiences you can purchase or do on your own. You will find the complete gift package at Growing Power Gift.
Comments
(:commentboxchrono:)