Our planning meetings are scheduled for the third Tuesday of every month, so our July get-together is less than a week away. The meeting starts at 6 pm as usual, and Tish and Tim Ganey are graciously hosting again at their riverfront pavilion. Directions: 6104 River Terrace - park along the street from the garden to Tish and Tim's driveway, walk down their driveway and follow the catwalk path to the pavilion in the back. We hope you can make it.
From almost the beginning of our community garden, we’ve maintained a sizeable red worm bed to produce precious organic “worm tea” fertilizer for our plants. Lib Mitchell has dutifully taken care of these worms for a long time, and this month she explains what goes into the task. It’s simple but messy and sometimes a little icky, and we (and our worm friends) appreciate her diligence.
Look at my photos of this worm box… you can see the shredded paper we use had gone clumpy and thick with the recent damp rainy weather. Inside the paper, the vegetable mass was slimy with an unpleasant smell and a few flies. In the second photo, note that I moved the rotted paper to one side and added fresh vegetable matter.
Now the clumpy damp paper has been broken up and shaken out and spread over the fresh vegetable matter. This is the procedure at any time -- the paper is not usually so clumped.
Finally a light coating of fresh paper shred is sprinkled on top. It functions to moderate the dampness in the worm bin, keeping it a little wet in dry weather but soaking up moisture if there’s too much. The excessive rain had overwhelmed that function, but the worms were not yet troubled. A healthy worm box smells good, with no clumping or slime.
I took these next photos the following week, and you can see things are starting to improve.
The bins still have too much clumpy shred and not enough green matter to balance out the paper needed for soaking up dampness, but the worms themselves are flourishing.
More greens are added and the clumpy shred spread out over the top, with another light cover of shred also added. And that’s it… the worms are properly tended for the week. Worm tea is given to favored plants (and the worm dance enacted with hilarity and joy).
The presence of young people like 11-year old Vanessa is delightful. A major benefit of the garden is sharing the experience of growing our own food -- how useful this will be in these mad times of high prices and insufficient supply. Gardeners live in the ongoing present moment… the eternal present so to speak. Humankind is connected to a greater wholeness through gardening and nature; community gardening connects us to a historical and healing way of being in the whole and healthy life of our planet Earth.
Please don’t stack ‘em, because a stuck bucket
is a sticky wicket!
We’re culling some of the many plastic buckets we accumulated over the years for various tasks like collecting compost and spreading worm tea. The first buckets to go out will be those that got stuck tightly one inside another. They generally don’t come back apart even with a lot of effort, rendering them useless (in fact, they often end up breaking). So please don’t nest our buckets. Keep them separate. Also, open buckets should be left upside down or on their side to avoid trapping any hapless lizards or frogs.
Thanks, and see you on Saturday!
Back issues of the newsletter are now posted on our website - www.seminoleheightscommunitygarden.org
