I'm a "Verm-Mom"

Good luck with the worms, Godiva.

For herbs, I recommend French tarragon. Not available as seeds, you have to buy plants, but one will provide you with a lot, if it survives the transplanting, which it should.

For a combination of greens and a wonderful root crop, I suggest Burpee's Golden Beets. They lack the horrid indelible red dye of red beets, and I think they have a better flavor. if you cut out the crown (where dirt gets in and is impossible to clean) you can boil or steam the beet roots with the beet greens for one of the best garden treats ever.

 

I checked on "my" worms yesterday. It's been pretty chilly, and dryer than usual, so I thought I'd check on them. I dug carefully through the layers in the bin and found them right at ground level, which is closer to the surface than I thought they'd be this time of year. But it makes sense, because that's where the food was, and it also tells me they've eaten everything below that level. I mixed up the shredded paper and food scraps a little more, added a thick layer of newspapers on top, and piled some straw around the base on the outside. Now they're all snuggled in for the winter.

 

You've never tasted a tomato until you've had one fresh off the vine. Those bland mushy things in the store simply don't compare.

I tend to keep the mouldy stuff out of the compost, once it's started to develop new life forms, and not just decompose.

 

composting's brilliant, ain't it. Now that it's warmer I need to till and mix in last year's composted stuff. Composter's getting full.

 

its funny. i remember back in the early 70s they used to advertise. that you could make thousands of dollars by being a worm farmer.true. if you look in old issues of mother earth news from that era. have fun with your idea.

 

"Personally, you've never tasted lettuce until you've grown your own. It actually does have a flavor. The stuff in the stores does not."

So true! Although, I don't even bother growing it outside anymore. I'm able to succession plant indoors year round and can get much more consistant results and spread out harvesting then growing outside. Prizehead, Buttercrunch, Oak leaf, you name it. ANYTHING but the worthless iceberg at the store. Also, by growing indoors, there are NO bugs, it's all organic, and I can pick it as needed. Lettuce does very well even under cheap flouro tubes, provided you keep the light very close to the lettuce and have a fan periodically blowing on it.

For outside crops, I focus on things that can be stored. Potatoes are my largest and favorite crops. Then beans, which I freeze. I'm still trying to improve my broccoli growing, as we eat a lot of it. They are hard to protect from critters, and they seem to wilt real quick after harvest. They also seem to produce heads all at the same time based on the weather.

 

Darwood, how much of your own food to you produce? How big is your outdoor garden?

 

Well, Indoors, I have a 4 bulb shop light, and a 250 watt Metal halide that grows 95% of the lettuce we've eaten in the last 5 years. I also have room for a good portion of the carrots we eat, but I'm just ramping that up, since our carrot intake has grown with the kids, so I'm trying to catch up to that. I also have a 250 HPS that I use in March/April to prepare the outside garden. I grow lettuce and carrots inside only, since it is much easier indoors than out. At any time, I have about 6 of those 2' to 3' rectangular, window box stlye, planters active and a couple more in the process of seeding. It's pretty minimal effort and expense (electric, soil, ferts) for a constant supply of fresh mixed organic lettuce and carrots (once it's setup).

Outside I grow at 2 locations.
Cabin: I have a 15' x 15' plot that I keep on timers which produces most of the potato harvest and some beans for rotation. I also have 4 apple trees that I hope start producing this year (after 3 years of work) and some berry bushes of various kinds.

Home: I have 6 raised beds, about 8' by 3' and have about 4 more planned. I've only been at this house 2 years, so I'm still working out the layout and dealing with the issue I have with a large walnut tree which is detrimental to certain types of plants. This is where I grow broccoli, corn, peppers, tomatoes, and of course, some more potatoes and beans. I tried to plant a big strawberry patch, but I got in a fight with the local varmin about it. I now own a pellet gun and the rabbit and red squirrel populations are MUCH lower. They had also eaten most of my corn crop as well as the melon's I tried to grow. My neighbor's on all 4 sides were also interested in this effort due to all sorts of complaints, else I would not have done it.

It's hard to quantify how much I've produced. Not as much as I'd like, and my real struggle has been with preserving it. I put some potatoes in the fridge for seed the following year, and they make it through OK, but they take up too much room there. I really need a root cellar, but there's nowhere in my house that fits the bill, so my potatoes often get soft before use. I probably get a couple of laundry baskets of potatoes each year, a plethora of different berries, a couple of grocery bags of beans, and then the usual tomato, Broccoli, and other harvests you'd expect from a hobby gardener.

What I need is a small closet with an old fridge in the wall as a way to keep a controlled environment, esp. for the potatoes but also for carrots, melons, herbs, etc.. It'd have to have chambers since I expect to start harvesting apples and they can't share a room with potatoes. My freezer gets pretty full of venison each fall, but there's still enough room for frozen beans, and some blueberries I pick in the wild. I want to try freezing broccoli this year and possibly can some tomatoes as well. I don't like growing things that go to waste, like cucumbers. 1 plant grows more cukes than I'd know what to do with. Corn is essentially a waste since it is the HARDEST to defend, needs to be a big plot to pollinate and grow right, and then it all ripens at the same time and you have to give it away to use it up. Yet, I still end up growing it each year when I find an unused spot open in the garden. I'm a glutton for punishment and it tastes SOOO much better right off the stalk than storebought when it works.

 

Other random thoughts:

Currants taste like crap. I have 5 bushes and now I don't know what to with them unless I learn how to make jam.
Honeyberries: a pleasant surprise. Took a few years to get going, but they taste good. They look like cylidrical blueberries and taste pretty close to them as well.
Never mulch indoors, never skip the mulch outdoors.
Lettuce: Pick the inner leaves, leave a ring around the outside to regenerate. You should get 2 -3 pickings from a plant before it bolts. Rinse them, use a spinner, then put in the fridge. It tastes better after it's been in the fridge for a little bit then when warm off the plant. There's a certian rubbery texture on just picked lettuce that goes away quickly after the rinse/spin/chill process.
The lettuce mixtures are a good starting point, seed rather heavily (a heating pad helps) and then weed them out heavily. The seedlings will dampen off and die if you only plant the amount you want, since you are seeding a tub of dirt that won't easily dry out by itself. I probably spread 50-100 seeds in box and thin half those out, they are just to help establish the sowing. Then continue thinning down (using as field greens) until you have about 5 plants that will give you 1-3 bigger harvests.

Don't put plants right on the concrete floor, the roots will suck up the cold.
Do scratch the surfaces around your indoor plants with a nail once in a while.
Don't overwater. Overwatering can be just as bad and can lead to fruit flies.
Do use the clear covers for seeding and for seedlings to keep there humidity higher.

 

When cleaning out the gutters a couple of years ago, there were a lot of worms busy turning the Oak leaves and pollen into a worm condo. Now this is a two story house, so this really surprised me. I guess someone dumped a can of Red Bull onto the median somewhere.