THE LAZY BERKSHIRE GARDENER: Week of February 23, 2023

After a few weeks of cool home temperatures and bright eastern light, my flowering houseplants have popped!  Mother Nature cooperated with a little dusting of snow on Tuesday morning to provide a pretty backdrop to my window garden.

Have I mentioned that I love compost? The fact that something so useful can come from what I initially considered waste just makes me feel like I’m doing something positive for my little space on the planet.

You can find information online and in books about compost, how to make it, and how to find the best chemical balance. Also, vermiculture, or worm casting compost in worm bins, can be a terrific project with little ones and in an apartment. I do not want to delve that deeply in my lazy gardener perspective. But I can share the basics of what we do and don’t do. First, it is a team effort.

My husband and I separate the vegetable scraps, rinsed egg shells, citrus peels, apple cores, coffee grounds and teabags from our daily meals into a little takeout container. One of us carries it out to our bin every day. If there’s fish, chicken, beef, pork or other meat scraps, we keep them out of the compost, bag them and put them in the trash. Kitchen cleanup is all about source separation. I will say, clam shells and lobster shells have been rinsed, crushed and added to our compost in the past. Just make sure those things are clean or you’ll attract troublemakers.

I’ve already mentioned that adding to the bin in March through April can attract bears and raccoons in our neighborhood. We will not add at that time if the weather is consistently above freezing at night and the wild animals start to look for early food sources.  We continue to save the waste and take it to Meadow Farm composting in Lee.  Quick tip from a friend who witnessed this firsthand:  Use a five-gallon bucket with a lid to collect your waste but bring along a full water bottle to rinse your bucket before returning it to your car.  Reduces the stink!  You can also look into a couple of Berkshire food-waste collectors, https://tommyscompost.org or a new organization that I’ve heard about, www.secondchancecomposting.com

To reduce wildlife visits when you add food scraps to your compost bin setup, I recommend either a plastic tumbler type off the ground or what we use now: two heavy plastic cylinders with a cone at the bottom and cone lid for the top. More information on those appears below.

If your compost is mostly yard waste – leaves and grass clippings with the occasional sticks – a pile out of the way that measures roughly 3 feet x 3 feet x 3 feet will be big enough for material to break down. This can be made from pallets set on their sides and anchored with re-bar from the hardware store.

Ron Kujawski, retired columnist and gardener extraordinaire, would form an open pile and add to one side, continuously making a row. This let the starting side decompose for months before he needed it. Many don’t have that kind of space but it proves the rule. Compost happens. You can make it happen faster by turning, adding, and poking or you can wait and just let it do its thing.

For our first try many years ago, we made a simple bin from ¼ inch mesh hardware cloth to keep rodents from chewing through the sides. The cloth was 3 feet wide and formed into a cylinder 3 feet in diameter. We used wire to keep the cylinder in shape.  It didn’t have a top or bottom and the cloth was stiff enough to hold that shape. Sticks were piled in the bottom to help with air flow. We added leaves and vegetable scraps into the center every day, mixing in the wet material until it was buried by dry leaves. Initially, a shovel-full of soil helped reduce the appeal of food scraps until more leaves were available. We had this bin in the city.  Squirrels were the only pests and not a big deal. I think our frequent visits and mixing made it unappealing to most rodents and other pests.

By adding and mixing regularly, the material received enough moisture and air. Organisms processed the larger materials and all broke down into the easily shoveled and spreadable form of compost. Once a month, I would turn the whole pile by shoveling out the top into a wheelbarrow and revealing the rich, black compost at the bottom.  I would move the whole cylinder off of the completed compost, immediately adjacent to the existing pile, and shovel the non-composted material back into the bin. This way, we harvested the compost for use all season and kept the one pile active.

Now we have the two heavy plastic cylinders. We keep adding to one of the bins throughout the year until it seems full. Then we let it rest for 6 months. This ‘resting’ bin will be our compost source for the next year.

A tumbler can be great for smaller gardens or limited space. The trick for those is maintaining moisture, oxygen and microbial life because it won’t attract those ingredients from sitting directly on the ground. You will need to think more about the process each time you add to your tumbler. Have a source of leaves or newspaper, definitely add food scraps, tumble it, perhaps open it when excessively wet, and introduce a shovel-full of garden soil with each delivery of scraps.

Some get anxious to speed up that compost process. A gardener can literally use tons of the black gold. However, before those leaf piles decompose, they are already useful. A leaf pile, just like dead perennial stems and leaves, will host thousands of beneficial insects through the winter. I recently had a revelation that I kept a leaf pile next to my tomato plants for 15 years and never had a tomato hornworm. This past summer, the leaf pile was on the other side of the house and half a dozen hornworms ate chunks of my tomato plants. There’s more proof that I need to expand the habitat for beneficial insects like the parasitic wasp to kill off the hornworms!

Just spotted my Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Arnold’ Witch Hazel in bloom. First shrub out of the gate! This is a non-native ornamental hybrid. For spring pollinators, try the Hamamelis vernalis, it blooms around now as well!

What else am I doing while I wait for seeding and planting time? I’m reading. I have been searching online for herb uses and tricks for solving one issue or another. I enjoy finding new garden bloggers, and columnists in the Berkshire Edge or through the Berkshire Botanical Garden. All these writing gardeners have tremendous tidbits to share “over the garden gate.”

I dismiss things that seem fussy or too much bother for my reward. Still, gems can be found. This week through the Berkshire Botanical Garden website I learned from columnist Thomas Christopher about starting perennial seeds: https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/be-better-gardener-winter-sowing/

Now, I am mostly content to buy perennials in pots or let them self-propagate. However, I may want to expand my choices. Mr. Christopher explores the work of Dolly Foster, who uses plastic gallon milk or water jugs to make small growing greenhouses for native perennials. These protect the seeds and establish seedlings directly outdoors. No seed-starting shelves, lights, heating mat or apparatus required! A native perennial seed should be much easier to start if the seed is in its native setting, right? And I won’t have to monitor the light or the chilling or the moisture in my basement. Using this method, seed-starting can begin outside now.

Another discovery concerns Borage. This herb is so pretty, with star-shaped true-blue flowers. I started it last year and the seedling surprised me by not looking like a tomato or cosmos seedling. Ah, my limited experience. This guy was big and fuzzy.  Fun! I planted it out in the leafy-greens part of my vegetable garden. At first, I snipped the flowers for salad garnish; borage tastes mildly of cucumber. Then I used the young leaves, steamed like spinach. I steeped leaves for tea and iced it – very refreshing. But the three plants kept growing. I pulled out two, and what a monster the last one became! I couldn’t keep ahead of it. The flowers were setting seed and I thought, “That’s it. I’ll be overrun by this beast.” 

I pulled it and dumped the plant into a paper bag for the seeds to ripen. I didn’t want it in the compost; I was afraid! I started to write about borage as my latest mistake. But credit the writer Amy Stross and her site https://tenthacrefarm.com. She writes about permaculture gardening and edible landscaping in small spaces. Turns out that borage, very attractive to pollinators and hence a massive seed producer, also makes a terrific soil amendment. High in calcium and potassium, cut borage plants can be used as mulch in the garden and ultimately be turned in as an important organic addition to your soil!  I do not want that much borage in my garden and will take the advice to cut back some of the plants before flowering and using them as soil additives. 

Fear of more work almost ended my borage experience but a little research has gone a long way. I know what the seedlings look like, after all, and I’ll pluck the extras out of the garden beds at first sight to eliminate monsters. Then I’ll have all that natural organic plant mass to mix back into my soil – for free!

_______________________________________________________________________________