How Not to Vermicompost

In July-September in the carolinas, black soldier flies lay their eggs which hatch into larvae the can eat rotting vegetables many times faster than worms, probably on account of them having teeth. In fact, their chewing is quite audible. When they are ready to pupate (turn into adults), they crawl out looking for soil to bury themselves in. Being 40% protein and 30% fat, they make great food for chickens or fish, and harvesting them for biofuel shows some promise. For all these reasons they are welcome guests in the compost pile or vermicomposting bin.

Seeing the remarkable drop in bulk in my vermicomposting bin when the first wave of flies passed through, I decided it was time to harvest. I stopped feeding them for about 6 weeks, but when I tried to harvest it wasn't quite ready yet - too wet and the clumps turned very hard as they dried out. In the mean time, we accumulated extra compostables because it is prime harvest season in the garden. I just threw the empty bean shells and kitchen waste into a new bin and forgot about them for a month, hoping that the soldier flies would do their thing and pre-digest them for the worms. On that score I was not disappointed.

Caution: gross-out factor: high

But the added moisture has to go somewhere, and it had oozed out onto our patio in a small black puddle. From this, the mature larvae had crawled out looking for a place to pupate and painted a maze of wiggly little black lines extending several feet from the puddle. A little gross, but not a real problem.

I cut into a 29 pound watermelon the other day, found it vinegary, and added it to the compost. A nearby shovel chopped it up easily and I felt rather self-congratulatory as I showered the watermelon splatter off. Well, maybe 3 or 4 days later I opened the bin (which has no worms in it yet) and only the rind was left. The rest was positively crawling with tiny larvae, mostly looking like soldier flies. The pool underneath the bin had grown and now smelled faintly of immitation popcorn butter. Pretty gross, definitely a problem, but not pressing enough to get my attention.

A few days later, I went down to empty the kitchen compost bin (a 2-gallon bucket) and found a pool of black liquid several feet across with a white frothy center and a very strong smell of fake buttery trash. Around it for a couple of feet on all sides were the little wiggly trails of the larvae as they crawled away to pupate and were probably eaten by wandering birds or frogs. After a careful approach, I lifted the lid, the inside of which was covered in white fungus and now home to at least 3 fairly full-grown house spiders. If anything the larvae had multiplied since I last checked on them. It was time. The not-so-vermicomposting bin needed a new home away from our home.

Picking up anything over 100 lbs requires the yard cart, which of couse had a flat tire. Some wasp had discovered that the coupling on the end of the hose has the perfect size hole for raising a family. I had to disassemble the whole thing, pick the mud and a few wasp larve out with a bit of wire, then blast it with the garden hose, soaking myself in the process. Hose reassembled, tire inflated, I put the yard cart under the "worm" bin like a dolly and carted it out to its new home on some very poor soil under a tree in the yard.

Even hosing down the patio and sweeping it did not remove the black stains.

Garden Center Sells Invasive Species

When we lived in North Carolina I spent many a sweat-filled hour on a ladder with saw and crowbar prying English Ivy off of trees and the side of our house.  It had taken over whole hillsides and several disturbed areas in the woods.  It is almost as bad as Kudzu.  Yesterday I tried a new garden center on the border of North and South Carolina and was shocked to find them selling pots of this monster.  I mentioned it to someone who replied that they wouldn't sell it if people didn't ask for it.  I went away without buying anything.  This morning I wrote them this letter:

I recently visited your garden center and found it to be an attractive, friendly place with a surprising variety of healthy plants.  But I was shocked to discover that you were selling English Ivy (Hedera helix).  One only need drive up 176 a mile or two to see how this plant can dominate a natural plant community to the complete exclusion of all native undergrowth and even kill trees.  In fact, in North Carolina, this plant is classified as a Rank 1 Invasive Species, meaning that it is one of the worst non-native species; a vigorous grower which displaces our native plant and animal species.

 

The first step in controlling the spread of invasives is to stop planting them.  When customers ask for plants that are a menace, I would hope that you would use that opportunity to educate them about our native “alternatives”.  They are generally the plants best adapted to our local climate and most attractive to birds and wildlife.  For instance, in response to a query about English Ivy, you could recommend Virginia Creeper which has similar habits, but provides brilliant fall foliage and small blue fruits that are very attractive to birds.  It anchors itself harmlessly with little spots of glue instead of aerial roots that suck the sap from living trees, ruin wood siding, and even penetrate painted concrete.  If a native plant escapes cultivation, there are numerous natural predators and diseases to keep it from wiping out everything else in the landscape.  Other good native suggestions might be Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera Simpervierns), Carolina Jessamine, or Crossvine.

 

After seeing the English Ivy, I discovered you were also selling Japanese Barberry.  While it may not be particularly dangerous here, I know it was displacing native vegetation where I used to live up north.  The experience of seeing dangerous plants mixed in with the rest of your selection made me feel very uncomfortable about choosing any plant I didn’t already know to be safe.  Not having the invasive list memorized, I simply left and did my shopping elsewhere that day.

 

North and South Carolina have a unique, beautiful, and important natural history.  Selling plants which are representative of that history will add to the sense of “place” that makes the Carolinas wonderfully different from any other place on earth.  I am including copies of the NC and SC Invasive Species lists.  Both North and South Carolina have native plant societies that you can join.  I find the SCNPS to be a very friendly group of practical and interesting people.  Their meetings are always uplifting and educational.  I would encourage you to join one or both organizations.

If I had any doubts about the demand for native species, they vanished when I attended the SCNPS native plant sale this spring.  We arrived within 15 minutes of the start time and already over 100 people were filling carts with plants.  Several things I didn’t grab instantly were gone when I made a second round.  We actually had to defend our cart from other shoppers several times a minute while we shopped.  Every plant they sold was native to South Carolina (even one extinct native tree was offered - the Franklin tree, Franklinia alatamaha - which now occupies the most prized spot in our landscape).  Every shopper knew that they could feel good about what they were doing for the environment and where their money was going.  If you have any doubts about the economic benefits of selling native, I encourage you to attend the fall plant sale and see for yourself.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this letter and consider my concerns.  I can tell that a lot of thought and effort has already gone into making your business as nice as it is.  When making your inventory selections in the future, please, “First, do no harm”.  The native plant communities will thank you and ultimately, your customers will thank you.

If anyone has suggestions about how to improve such a letter for the next garden center I'm all ears.

Feed the Soil, Not the Plants!

"One of my friends runs an organic golf course which is beautiful. He had the soil tested and found that it was deficient in every nutrient. He then had plant tissue samples tested and they had the perfect amounts of every nutrient in them. The soil test only looks for soluble plant nutrients, but beneficial microbes make insoluble nutrients available to plants."

Source: Ed Updike at the Organic Growers School this past weekend.

If you feed your plants soluble fertilizer, 1/3 to 2/3 of it is going to leach away to become water pollution instead of plant food. But if you build the beneficial microbial populations in the soil, they make the insoluble minerals already in the soil available to the plants they surround.

At one end of the spectrum are orchids like Lady Slippers which have no root hairs (blueberries don't have root hairs either). Instead they have a myco-heterotrophic relationship with a fungus that can feed the hairless roots. Like other orchids, the seeds of the Lady Slipper remain dormant until they come in contact with the specific fungus they require to grow. This weekend I learned that more than 80% of plants have known relationships with soil organisms that affect how they derive nutrients from the soil. Sadly, I missed the class on Mycorrhiza because I think that would have tied everything together nicely.

How to build the microbial population in the soil? My organic gardening neighbor would say, "organic matter, organic matter, organic matter." If you can't get enough (and few can), you can "brew tea" by putting a bag of premium worm castings in water with a little unsulphured molasses and bubble air through it until the bacterial and fungal population has reached maximum size (18-48 hours depending on how efficient your apparatus and proportions are). The activated beneficial organism tea can then be sprayed over crops or diluted (up to 50/1) and watered into the soil. The less biologically active your soil is, the better it works. And it really works - Jafasa Farms looked beautiful!

How not to improve your soil with cover crops.

I went to several classes on cover crops in the 2007 Organic Growers School and returned very excited about farm-scale soil fertility. In March of 2008, we bought our farm and with the help of one neighbor's tractor and another neighbor's moldbord plow, we were able to break up the red clay enough to make a 1,200 square foot garden. I picked the spot with the worst soil on the property, but it is right next to the one well-powered water spigot, near the house, and gets full sun. I figured I could change the soil easier than moving the woods or the house.

Garden on May 21, 2008

With all the new farm chores, I didn't have time to make a garden that year, so I decided to plant cover crops and see what happened. I planted Oil-seed radish on April 10th 2008 and roto-tilled it under when half was in flower on June 1st. Not surprisingly, it grew best where the low spots were in the original land - we had haphazardly leveled the topsoil and it was probably deepest there. The soil everywhere else was just too poor for them to grow.

June 7th I roto-tilled again, added the recommended amount of lime (I had taken a soil test by this point) and planted a pound of Cow Peas "Iron and Clay". The radish disappeared like magic in 7 days. Yankees would call Cow Peas beans - they are like little square brown black-eyed peas. I planted them in rows because weeding the hand sown radish had been a nightmare. A scuffle hoe made weeding the rows very easy, though making furrows with a board sowing a pound of cow peas by hand made me really want a seeder. Interestingly, the peas grew best where the radish did the worst. I'm guessing the radish released something that made it hard for the peas to grow. I used seeds from Johnny's seeds, but I ran out on the last couple of rows, so I substituted with some cow peas from a bucket at a local hardware store. They looked identical to Johnny's, but by August 23rd, when half the crop was starting to flower, the hardware store bucket peas were covered with aphids and wilting while Johnny's seeds were going strong. Any place I was able to top dress with any compost at all grew twice as well as any place the soil was unmodified.

On August 30th, I roto-tilled again and planted oats and clover with the help of my father-in-law. They grew very evenly and with essentially no weeds. The clover was slow to start and the oats died of the cold in January, but that was by design so they wouldn't hold me back in the spring. I also added an inch or so of compost and maybe 40 lbs/1000 sq. ft. of wood ash from the burn pile. The books recommended 25lbs, but it looked so insignificant. Mid February I took another soil test...

Malcolm surveying the oats on Dec 13, 2008

What coincided with my expectations:
Phosphorus raised 35% (from low to medium)
Potassium doubled (from medium to very high)
Calcium doubled (from low to medium)
Magnesium raised 35% (still medium)
Salts halved (still low)

The surprises:
Sulphur halved
Boron halved
Organic matter lowered 35%
pH went from 5.6 to 6.9

I don't know what happened to the boron and sulphur, but I have a pretty good guess about the organic matter. I thought I was building the levels of organic matter in the soil. But then I remembered that they tell you to be careful about how much you plow. Maybe they should say to be careful to plow when the soil is too warm in the South (plowing when the soil is too wet makes bricks - which is very bad). Remember how surprising it was that the radish disappeared in a single week? The beans did the same. I'm guessing a population explosion of microbes had a feeding frenzy to the point they actually left me with *less* organic matter instead of more. Doh!

Also, they mean it with no more than 25 lb/K sq ft of wood ashes. I would have been fine if I hadn't also added the recommended amount of lime. A pH of 6.9 isn't bad, but I definitely overshot the 6.5 mark.

Even so, the cover crops were a net plus. The soil texture is many times improved, especially if I dig deeply, the roots penetrated and did a lot of good there. Each crop was many times easier to grow than the previous. But I will be very wary about roto-tilling when the soil is warm, and apply the recommended amounts of ammendments in the future. I'll definitely look into cutting crops down with a hoe in the summer and letting them wilt on the surface instead of tilling them in.

How not to plant English/Garden peas...

I've had 2 new gardens over the last 3 years and have planted peas too early each time. Up North (North-shore Massachusetts), it was simple:

1.) Wait for ground to show through snow

2.) Push peas into ground without disturbing the soil around them

3.) Peas grow.

It's not like that here (border SC/NC). The ground is visible all winter long and if you plant them too early they rot. Too late, and they seem to die of the heat before you can harvest.

In NC, I planted Feb 1st and they rotted in the ground. Fortunately I only planted half and was able to plant again around Feb 22nd, and they grew fine. I also sprinkled some dirt from the roots of clover around as my innoculant the second time.

Clemson SC extension service said that for the piedmont, plant English/Garden peas Jan 1-15. I planted on the 15th and I'm still waiting...