the little wild kingdom

[flowerbug]

i did get the peppers planted and now can get on with the beans in all of the rest of the gardens. will take me a week or two depending on the weather and whatever else comes up.

 

[flowerbug]

yesterday was the annual running of the worms finale and over the past several months i've been thinking of retiring from worm keeping and so i have not restarted the worm buckets yet and i may not until the fall or perhaps never.

i did learn a lot about them from keeping them and taking care of them, they were not that much effort but with my most recent mistakes and Mom's change of her routine i wasn't getting enough of the right kind of food scraps to keep them going very well and the bulk of the worm buckets did not support worms very well at the end. they all did need to be refreshed and i did need to get some different worms and i am not getting out much to look around and i don't want to order them to be shipped to me either. just not what i have time to do these days. so it was time to let the worms go that i did have and to regain that space in my room (it looks very strange now to not have those buckets there).

instead i will be doing the bury in the garden kind of food scrap composting and then the worms will have a more natural setting out there and when it gets colder in the fall and i can't do that i'll return to drying things out as usual and then i can store it in a bucket until i can bury it in the spring. any spoiled and messy stuff can go on the weed pile out back as usual, the birds pick through it looking for bugs and other treats...

14 years and it will be a change in routine and scenery and i'll have to get used to it.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Wow - that certainly is a big change for you. Sounds like you've got a good alternative plan though.

 

[flowerbug]

today finished up planting one garden with three rows of mixed beans (a variety of selections from last season's crop) and of course i also put some Purple Dove beans in with them to make sure there were plenty of chances to get some more crosses. when i harvest from this part of the garden i'll have to remind myself to keep all those beans apart from the rest so i can replant all of them.

sure i'm counting chickens before they hatch here but that's what is fun for me too is trying different things and seeing what happens but also just imagining what i may get in return eventually. so far so good.

i did clean out all the trays of food scraps i had dried that were sitting around my room on the floor waiting for me to get them in the worm buckets or buried in a garden. that happened today and so this room looks very strange to me right now. i've not seen this much floor space cleared since the spring of 2010. at one time i had 17 or more 4-5 gallon buckets in here, the past year i just had 7. now there are none. but i do have other buckets stacked in the corner that have shredded paper in them or they are empties that i'm saving because you can never have enough clean buckets. that i have just one stack is an improvement too...

two bags of bean pods from last fall's harvest i need to bury in a garden and half or all of that may happen tomorrow.

killdeer mama came back and has three eggs in her nest, not sure if there will be four tomorrow or she'll stop at three. sad if she lost all her babies. it's not a sure thing for them here even inside the fenced gardens, once they go off and running this isn't a shoreline that's consistent, there's a lot of ditches and places for little birdies to get caught or lost. she's not going to be very happy when i need to get that pathway weeded that she's nesting in...