My brother, Ryan, came into town so we got busy. He did an energy audit on the house and we found a huge air leak along the rim joists in the basement, so check your rim joists!
We also got busy outside preparing the bed that will be home to 3 pawpaws, 2 honeyberries and 2 hazelnuts. We threw down the layers in this order:
- A sprinkling of Espoma Bio-Tone
- 3-6 layers of newspaper (sprinkled with a watering can)
- A winter’s worth of worm castings (from the worm bin in the basement)
- 1 layer of corrugated cardboard (sprinkled with a watering can)
- Some aged horse manure spread evenly
- Some year-old compost also spread evenly
- A bunch of leaves I saved from the fall
- Another sprinkling of Espoma Bio-Tone
Check out some of the pictures:
Here is the spot before we started. The big bin in the middle is half full of the horse manure we used, the compost is in the black bin and the leaves you can see.
Here are some of the raw ingredients.
Ryan scoring the ground with a shovel.
I sprinkled Espoma Bio-Tone all over the site making sure to get it into the shovel holes Ryan had made.
Obama is doing some heavy lifting too!
As Bill Mollison would say, we were turning bad news into good soil
There I am watering the cardboard, looking like a champ.
Spreading out the horse poop.
This one is just cuz I can:
Special Note: As my worm bin filled up over the winter, I moved the finished castings into a 5 gallon bucket with layers of newspaper in between. The bucket had no holes in it and I figured the worms that got moved over in the transfer would have a hard time surviving. When I emptied the bucket it was full of worms, worm babies and worm eggs, so I was wrong, they did quite well.
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Hey guys,
Looks good. Last year, I grew two pawpaw seedlings from 12 inches tall in April, to six feet tall in October, by treating them with a compost made of early Spring grasses, turnip tops, etc., dead leaves, top soil, and chicken manure, spread in thin layers about 3 inches each. I stacked the layers in a barrel that looked like your worm barrel and set them in the hot sun and kept them moist, with a loose lid. After a few weeks, I would apply the black compost to the pawpaws and spread straw over the mound. And water heavily to perk the nutrients down to the root zone. I kept adding to it all Summer until it got too cold to compost.
This Winter, Ive been keeping busy raking old drifts on the River and filling paper grocery bags with fresh worm castings. When I get home, I sift the castings through a 1/4 inch mesh hardware cloth sifter I made from scrap wire. The sifted castings and worm eggs fall into a wheelbarrow, the undigested leaves, and small sticks, get caught in the sifter. I use the worm castings to start, and re-pot, seed tomatoes, onions, etc,. I spread the undigested leaves around blue berries and pawpaws, and other fruit trees in my Permaculture project. I can usually gather about five to seven grocery bags of worm castings per day, on a five mile route. If I don’t gather the castings soon, heavy Spring rains will wash them all away.
Thanks for all the good info Ron! Sounds like I will be throwing some compost down throughout the season then.