May 5th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

For some time I’ve lamented that I never manage that seemingly perfect mix of compost heap ingredients that yields a little backyard furnace of thermophilic microorganisms, the one that keeps me from spreading weed seeds all over the yard (I’m damn tired of Arizona ash, sunflower and frostweed sprouts everywhere). I vowed to do better with composting this year, but wasn’t really doing anything systematically better to get there.

A week ago, however, I went to bury some kitchen scraps in the pile and flipped over a layer of organic detritus and discovered… heat!

The temperature needs to be a little higher… 135-160 degrees is the optimal temperature to destroy seeds and pathogens (not that I suspect THOSE are a problem… yet). Could be I need to get more air or moisture – or less – into the mixture.

But I think I stumbled into the right mixture of “green” to “brown” materials for the compost heap quite on accident. And a way to reproduce it in a somewhat reliable way. Last week when I mowed the grass for the first time this season, I had a bag of scavenged mixed oak leaves and grass from another yard I was mowing near. The bottom of the bag had rotted out, and when I went to move it, the leaf mixture spewed forth. Did I bother to rake it up? No. I had my gas-powered vacuum cleaner already running, so I kicked the leaves around and mowed them up. Since it’s a mulching mower and I bag the clippings, I had inadvertently created a really good mixture for the compost heap, probably achieving close to the 30:1 ratio of carboniferous to nitrogenous materials.

But it has been exceptionally dry here, too.

So, to help with that, I’ve been allowing tap water to sit in white plastic jugs. This allows the city-provided chlorine to outgas and prevents it from damaging the microbial community in the compost heap. Every week I dump a 5-gallon jug into the heap to help keep it moist. I generally turn it (or at least give it a good prodding) on the same rough schedule so it maintains some oxygen.

Last night I checked the temperature again, and it had fallen to around 110?. I suspect a lot of the nitrogen-bearing grass has been used up. It’s getting close to time to mow again, so I’m definitely going to toss in more leaves as I do.

And if that doesn’t work, I might resort to peeing in my compost pile.

carbon, compost, nitrogen

March 20th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Sometimes it’s not all showy new plants or fabulous creations in the garden on a Spring weekend… and that’s okay. This was a good, productive weekend devoted to garden maintenance tasks. No building, no new paths or beds, no trellis structures… just solid, satisfying upkeep.

Potato Mounding:
The potato crop has been growing like weeds, so it was time to do their second mounding. I did the first mounding about three weeks ago, and my furrows were mostly filled. So I had to come up with a source of soil to do this work. I had a good half-wheelbarrow of compost from my pile to dig out, some bags of Houston soil, and a half-wheelbarrow of Hill Country blend. So I loaded up my wheelbarrows and did some mixing. What I produced probably turned out to be some of the best soil I’ve ever worked with. (I’m beginning to dislike straight Hill Country blend for planting. It dries out far too quickly and crusts over.) The potato rows are now mounded, about halfway up their stems… left plenty of the leaves showing to allow the plant to remain vigorous but protect the tubers from sunlight… Eek! Solanine!

Over the past couple nights, I’ve lost stems of potato plants to a cutworm… or at least that was my theory. Today, I did a little probing around with my soil knife at the base of the cut plant, and I found the vile bastard! Dispatched. Hopefully there aren’t more. But now I know how to find them.

Native Grass Bed:
This is the last major ornamental bed I created since beginning a focus on food crops. I made it in Spring, 2009 to contain grasses native to Central Texas. I have bushy bluestem, little bluestem, sideoats grama and seep muhly. A few other acceptable things have crept in: columbine and prairie verbena. But one other plant, a baccharis, which piggybacked with one of the little bluestems from the Wildflower Center plant sale, had gotten very large and unruly. And unwanted. (Though, to be fair, if I had open ground in the sun, I’d have moved it or kept it. They can be rather pretty, even if they do have properties that give some people intense allergic reactions). So, I dug it out. In the process I had to move some bluestems to other parts of the yard. While I was at it, I trimmed back the thickest old growth, leaving just enough to retain interest. I moved a few rhizomes of the sideoats to other parts, too, and shored up the bed’s karst limestone edges. I gave the bed a side-dressing of my compost mix, too. But I didn’t want to add too much. Most of these grasses do well in dry, alkaline soils devoid of too much organic matter.

Native Sprout Rescue:
Every year a few plants I really like decide life is better outside the established borders and die back within the beds after establishing sprouts in my brick or gravel paths. And since I’m a real sucker for a few of them, I will pry up bricks and dig up gravel to move them to more suitable places. I did some of that to clear a brick walkway and re-establish some borders that had come apart. After siting some karst limestone chunks at the edge of my large semi-circular bed, I moved a prairie verbena into one of the holes in the limestone. I also moved a Texas primrose to the edge of another bed.

All of the prairie verbena I have came from a single one-inch sprig I imported with some reclaimed karst limestone. I broke that sprig out of its rock with a chisel and replanted it. So I know this stuff is tough, can be moved easily, and will grow under strange conditions.

Compost Swap:
Since I had dug out the remnants of one compost pile and had emptied the bin, I decided to swap and invert the contents of another pile into it. And this is the work I’m feeling now, mainly in my lower back and arms. But to my delight, I found that most of the material in pile I was moving is half- to three-quarters finished. As a bonus, there is a solid two wheelbarrows of finished compost from the bottom. I didn’t have a lot of “green” material to layer in with the stuff I was moving, so I added a couple layers of dry Natural Gardener fertilizer to add nitrogen to jumpstart the compost microbes. I watered both layers to give the pile some moisture. I’m curious to see if I actually get heat out of this pile. I usually don’t get too much heat unless I mix in a lot of cut grass. Overall, I’m hoping to master some of the nuances of composting this year.

Miscellaneous:
Hmm… what comes to mind?

• picked more radishes and carrots. And a few bolted onions, too. I sure hope they don’t all bolt. However, the weather was right for onions to think they should flower, so we’ll see.
• pulled 986,760 weeds
• found and dispatched a lot of green caterpillars that were eating my lettuce. Jenna found the first one, and got after them with a vengeance. It’s a good sign that she’s getting protective of our veggies!
• freaked out about all the pillbugs eating everything from the tops of my radishes to the bottoms of my potato plants, as well as my strawberry plants and onion leaves. Spread lots of diatomaceous earth and vowed to water only in the mornings.
• added glauconite to several beds hoping to improve the quality of those soils and the taste of vegetables grown in them
• improved my former-tallow-tree bed with more pine straw and some of the grasses I moved. I’m starting to consider this my “native woodlands” bed… partly shady near the center but dry.
• noted, in general, pests are back. caterpillars/worms, mainly. But so, too, are their main predators… wasps!
• had an inspiring visit to the Wildflower Center… but that’s another post.

compost, cutworm, diatomaceous earth, glauconite, grasses, little bluestem, prairie verbena, soil

February 27th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

This time of year in Central Texas is not the time of year to skip a weekend of garden blogging. Amassing the activities of two weekends means you’re more than likely in for writing a novella when you do get around to chronicling your garden doings, for everything starts happening all at once. Such is the predicament I find myself in now. Seems like there are a hundred developments and doings to relate. Probably no good way forward other than just to dive in, though.

Probably the most important thing I did the weekend before this one was reduce my brush pile mountain down to a molehill. Some of the material in the pile went back at least 3 years, including the trunk of a former Christmas tree. I created at least three wheelbarrows of excellent mulch, some of which went right back into the compost, while much of the rest went to cover an area that used to have grass.

I did also clean out an area that was my particular windmill to tilt at… the site of the former Chinese tallow that fell last July. It had become a trashpit of discarded brush, pieces of tallow tree, random rotting lumber (most of it from palettes), and broken concrete. Woven into this aesthetically appealing tapestry was St. Augustine grass, straggler daisy, and various hackberry starts. Much of this crap was mulched – except for the concrete. The trusty 20+ year old Craftsman 5.5 HP chipper/shredder did several hours of duty, releasing untold pounds of pollutants into the atmosphere. But at least the mulch was free, organic and locally-sourced.
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cedar, compost, raised beds, soil

February 1st, 2011 by Marc Opperman

ZZ Top wasn’t singing about compost? Hmm. Well, having schlepped a half-cubic yard home from the Natural Gardener, and then wheel-barrowing it all over the yard, I’m sure I subconsciously re-worded the song to honor all the new turkey compost. Mainly I wanted it to work into the new potato bed, hopefully to lower the alkalinity of our native Central Texas soil. (Potatoes dislike high alkalinity. Gives them something called scab, apparently.) If the 18-degree freeze doesn’t somehow do them in (they haven’t sprouted – just planted them Sunday), the seed potatoes ought to be ready for some mounding in 3-4 weeks.

I had lots of leftover compost, so I top-dressed several beds. Hopefully this will result in better-tasting tomatoes and peppers come time for their season. (My tomatoes last year were disappointingly bland. Sort of like store-bought tomatoes.)

I’ve been reworking my entire back yard in an effort to bring more vegetable beds online. Part of this has meant refiguring how to access some of the areas that haven’t had grass in them for a long time. I want to keep removing grass, and I have a lot of various brick around. I’ve been moving rock around, and have begun creating another broken-brick path to keep some of the garden area from being a mud- and/or weed-pit. I like the progress so far:

brick, compost, natural gardener, potatoes, rock, turkey compost

January 26th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

This past weekend was somewhat productive in garden-land. I finished up my 30-minute compost pile. Why “30-minute?” Because I tossed most of it together in about 30 minutes last Thursday evening after work, that’s why. In the immortal words of Han Solo, “She may not look like much, kid, but she’s got it where it counts.”

See what I mean? Ghetto. (As is my photography). But it will do the job. And for those of you following along at home, that’s two wooden shipping palettes ganked from work with a liner of metal window screen I had left over from a failed window-rescreening job. All of it is lovingly and skillfully nailed to the side of my existing compost bins. (Snort!)

In other doings, I got myself to the Natural Gardener for seed potatoes (Kennebec and Red Pontiac), three bare-root Brazos raspberry bushes, and dirt… a few dig-yer-own bags of Hill Country mix. The dirt went in my third raised bed, and the raspberries went behind the bed along our fence. Should be a good place, as they’ll get some run-off water from the sprinkler system, as well as a decent amount of sun. Might also, however, be a little too close to the squirrel highway (the fence.)

The potatoes will go in the ground. I cut them and dusted them with sulphur as suggested by the Natural Gardener potato fact sheet, and they are presently curing in the garage. Hopefully I’ll get to plant them this weekend, but I think I need to work in some compost first. Probably an entire pickup load from Natural Gardener (yet to be procured.)

Also yanked some miscellaneous plants, mainly helianthus maximilliani and pavonia braziliensis that, together, had taken over a very large portion of the back. They, in turn, shielded from destruction a great amount of bermuda grass, St. Augustine and the other major scourge of my yard, straggler daisy (Calyptocarpus vialis – should be called strangler daisy). I did a LOT of digging and composting, but I did consign the bermuda grass rhizomes and stolons to the fire pit. I’m not letting that stuff near anything resembling soil if I can help it.

bermuda grass, compost, natural gardener, potatoes, straggler daisy

January 4th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Still a little slow around the garden. But while reading of people buried by snow in the northeast and elsewhere, I’m thankful we here in Austin have a year-round growing season. This weekend I got off my butt and acted like it.

I built another 36″ x 60″ x 12″ raised bed out of lumber from Home Depot (gift card burning a hole in my pocket) and filled it with soil and compost I brought back from my parent’s yard. Had to supplement, though, with some of my own compost from the bottom of my pile. I shouldn’t be surprised at this point, but I am always delighted when I dig down to the very bottom and find lovely rich compost.

In the box, I planted two varieties of radishes and two varieties of lettuce. All are suited for this time of year, and hopefully I’ll see some germination in 5-10 days. The radishes are “french breakfast” (row 1), and “cherry belle” (row 2). The lettuces are “leaf / red sails” (row 3) and “butterhead / tom thumb” (row 4). Both the radishes claim they’ll be ready for harvesting in about 28 days, but I’ll believe that when I see it. Both the lettuces claim 45-50 days. All the seed is from Botanical Interests courtesy my parents (a Christmas gift).

I have space for another row of something in the back. Since I sited this box against my porch, there is a ready-made trellis for climbing beans or peas. I’m thinking peas. I also have wood for a second box, but not the 14 cubic feet of dirt to go in it. So the second box will wait a little bit.

I also worked a lot of shredded leaves and pine needles into some of the soil in the back part of my yard, near the back fence. I dug a lot of damnable bermuda grass rhizomes out, as well as a metric ton of straggler daisy. I’m considering trying potatoes in this area, though we’ll see if I can work the soil a little more before then to where I feel it’s ready.

I also thinned my carrot seedlings after a few pointers from Dad and his fifth graders. They are all now dutifully thinned to one inch, and I’ll never plant the seed that thick again. (I did take some of the thinned seedlings and planted them in between my too-widely-spaced rows. We’ll see how those do.)

Lastly, I just wanted to share a photo of my little gardener-in-training, helping his grandpa pick oranges on Christmas Day in Houston.

Not unlike another photo I know.

carrots, compost, dad, dirt, lettuce, lumber, radishes, raised bed

June 15th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Over the weekend, I had a lot of yard maintenance to do. Mowing, weeding, de-bugging, etc. I also wanted to turn the compost piles and swap the contents of the two. It’s a good way of mixing them up and making sure they are aerated. I was expecting them not to really have much in the way of useable compost yet. Boy, was I surprised.

Maybe I had neglected turning them for too long a while, but the bottoms of both contained a foot of rich, dark soil the color of coffee grounds. It was filled with earthworms and the daddy of all decomposers, hercules beetle larvae (probably dynastes tityus). 

I’ve only seen dead versions of the adults in my yard, and even that was a while ago. So hercules beetles are mostly a guess. But still, with larvae that big – the circumference of a golf ball – that’s probably the beast. I’ve seen these consistently in the bottom of the piles. I’ve always taken it as a good sign my compost pile was performing well.

I managed to dig out two wheelbarrows full of soil to top-dress a couple beds. I estimate there are 4 or 5 more wheelbarrows in there, and much more on the way. I added equal parts shredded live oak leaves saved from Spring and freshly-cut grass to the left pile. I covered that with some pieces of paper yard waste bags. I’m interested in seeing if the paper helps hold moisture in the compost. I left most of the useable soil in the right pile, though I did mix some in on the left to spread the microbial goodness.

compost, dirt, dynastes tityus, hercules beetle, wheelbarrow

April 28th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

From the Earth911.com website today… an article on what companies are doing to create packaging that can be composted in backyard composting piles:

http://earth911.com/news/2010/04/26/the-next-wave-in-composting/

As an aside, a large number of the things we commit to the trash or hopefully – at worst – the recycling, can be composted. Paper egg cartons, cardboard, used paper towels (as long as there are no harsh chemicals in them), the cardboard inside of toilet paper rolls, brown paper used in shipped packages, paper drink cups, newspaper, #7 PLA plastic drink cups… and now: the packaging from SunChips.

What can be composted in your household?

compost