Working with nature

It doesn't take much nowadays to get me excited about the prospect of a few hours in the company of other adults (excited beforehand and then I fall asleep, huh?).

A council-run composting and worm farm workshop. Riveting, don't you think?

Well, it was. Even more riveting was the fact they were giving away free compost bins and worm farms. What a fabulous thing for a council to organise.

The local CWA hall was packed on Wednesday. Full of people who wanted to learn and go home with a freebie for their garden. The room had a beautiful energy about it. There were people – like the gentleman sitting beside me – who kept an immaculate lawn but knew nothing about composting or worm farming. Others had tried to compost in the past but ended up with a sludgy mess and gave up as a result. Surprisingly, I was one of only three people who use a compost bin and keep a worm farm.

I feel quite confident about composting now, having done Nicola Chatham's online gardening course earlier this year. Our worms do their jobs well, and even though any niggles I have about harvesting the castings will get covered in Nicola's next course*, I went along because I knew I'd learn something. I'm in my element when I can delve deeper into something that inspires me. It's why I ask lots of questions. It's the one thing people always say about me...

Anyway, aside from feeling very sad at one point when it was pointed out that over a third of everyone's bins is made up of fruit and vegetable scraps filling up our landfills, and how all this needless waste gets converted to ozone-depleting methane, it was a worthwhile morning.

Here are some notes I made for you.

• Composting is really quite easy. The reason why people give up is they add too much nitrogen-rich matter (kitchen scraps, fresh lawn clippings, manure, mushroom compost) and not enough carbon, or poor layers (newspaper, brown leaves, dried grass, hay). I follow the 2:1 ratio for layering – 2 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen or thereabouts. I keep it in mind, but I certainly don't lose any sleep over it. As long as there's enough carbon in there, your compost won't turn smelly or wet.
• If you fill your compost bin right up (the way I do it, layering with as much variety as I can get my hands on), and you turn it, say, once every 10 days, you will get beautiful rich compost within 10 weeks. How exciting is that?
• If you just want to add your fruit and veg as you go from the kitchen, you'll still get to make 'food' for your soil; it'll just take longer. Always finish with a carbon/poor layer which will keep any flies at bay.
• As for worm farming, you don't need to go and buy one of the expensive kits. All you need is a polystyrene box or two. I might be making one of these myself to extend our little worm family. (I promise I'll try and get out more.)
• You generally start off with around 1000 worms. You can buy worms in garden centres or get some from someone with an established worm farm. Or get your little tikes to harvest worms from the garden – they don't need to be special composting worms. Ordinary earthworms will do the job just as well (according to the workshop).  
• Worm juice, which is actually their pee, is liquid gold fertiliser. Just dilute with water to a ratio of 1:10 and it'll make your garden (and your indoor plants) very happy.

Luca and I spent the next day starting to fill our third (freebie) compost bin. We cut down the last of our winter broccoli and cauliflower and tore them all up ready to go back into the next cycle.

I came home that day and looked at my worms in a slightly different light, now that I know a little more about these spectacular creatures' anatomy and how they breed.

I discovered melon is one of their favourite foods, so that day they dined on melon skins and their usual banana skins. I made up two watering cans of diluted worm juice and drizzled one lot over the tomatoes and basil, and the other can went over my leeks to perk them up after the aphids almost got them.

I love working with nature. I really do.

Do you like composting? Do you skip in the garden knowing you're turning waste into magic? Do you squeal with delight when you turn that tap on the worm farm and it all comes gushing out?

Perhaps you think I ought to get out more too?





*I'm joining Nicola Chatham for her next course on organic gardening in pots. Nicola's also covering worm farming – yippee! I'll post more details soon, but you can get her free Organic Veggie Patch Kit here in the meantime. 

Garden update

It's been a full on week. It isn't just Christmas that's causing chaos. Kian's 1st birthday is in under 3 weeks. Grandparents' birthdays are at this time of year. Graeme's birthday is a few days after Christmas and I'm also planning something special for Luca's 4th birthday in February.

Plus the garden's been keeping me busy. I realise now that I haven't posted anything on the garden since we built the beds and put the plants in over a month ago.

The beds looked like this at the beginning of November. Small tomato plants at the back with clumps of basil. Rosemary, thyme and chives on the right-hand side, with different lettuces scattered around the middle. The black kale was doing OK at this stage as was the watercress in the bottom right-hand corner. There's also some sage on the left and strawberry plants at the front.

A close-up of the tomatoes, basil and cucumber plant which I later had to relocate to a pot - oops!

In this bed, it started off with (starting clockwise from the left) small plants of mint, coriander, baby spinach, French tarragon and parsley.

Fast forward four weeks and it now looks like this!

The oregano and parsley have gone mad and the baby carrots and beetroot are almost ready

The tomato plants are now staked

Heavenly mint and marigolds

One of the main reasons everything is doing so well is because they get a good dose of worm juice every week. Luca has been lovingly tending to his worms and looks forward to our hour of pottering in the early evening when Kian has gone to bed.

A spray of water to keep the worms' blanket nice and moist

Happy worms give us lots of nutrient-rich liquid fertiliser

Graeme's chilli plant on the left has just started flowering this week

I don't remember enjoying gardening in quite the same way in England. Maybe because Graeme was happy to do it all and I was content to just cook with whatever we grew. Or maybe it was because I didn't have a little helper who gets so excited when I mention it's garden time. Hearing Luca say 'look how bushy the basil is Mummy' and 'oh my goodness, the tomatoes have grown' (he really does say that) has made it so much fun.

I've been in my element picking herbs and salad leaves for our dinner every evening. I manage to pick a bowl like this every time I go down there. Tender beetroot leaves, lollo rosso, baby cos, spinach, basil and mint feature almost daily in our evening meal.

Luca isn't yet at the stage of eating anything green and leafy (though he's very good at giving it a try), but he's enjoyed the first crop of strawberries and happily shared the last one with Kian.

He checks the tomatoes each morning to see if they've turned red and shouts 'you're not welcome here!' whenever he sees a snail (I wonder if he's copying anyone).

What I've also been doing this week is thinking about what to plant in the patches I have left (read: where one strawberry plant died, where the watercress strangely disappeared), what to do about the pesky bugs eating away at my basil and how to save my black kale.

This led me to Nicola Chatham whose wonderful gardening blog I follow. Nicola was offering free 20-minute coaching calls this week and I was lucky to get in quickly. I can't believe how much Nicola taught me in 20 minutes.

I learnt how to get castings quickly from our worm farm by giving them a nice layer of cow manure to eat through; that pests attack weak plants so it's best to boost their 'immune system' with some compost or worm castings rather than adopt time-consuming pest control strategies; that it's best to get rid of a sick plant than try and save it; and that the best thing for a garden is a frog pond.

Sooooo, this weekend I'm erecting the black kale and serving it to the worms, and I'm going to look into how easy it is to build a little frog pond. Not that I need to add to my to-do list, but wouldn't it be nice to have little green tree frogs jumping about the place, feasting on slugs and other little critters?

Meanwhile, we have a lot of soil leftover and don't know what to do with it. Is there anyone on the Central Coast who'd like some organic soil? Seriously?