sweet verse, SSG. thanks

My choristers right now are a few different frogs and toads, so happy they sound with the warm wet evening!

Lovely article SSG, our spring has been limited to the birds song, for some reason or another the peepers are still quiet, even though their counterparts in the ponds have joined the chorus.

Ric - think you missed the peepers, rather than they have yet to "peep".

Well they must have all whispered this year.

I hate to think of the alternative, that we lost that many to winter.

oh we surely had peepers here!

has anyone else watched the video from the home page about that tower planter with worm compartment down the center? Pretty cool, but I can only guess how $$$ it is.

$350... plus shipping.

Looks to be very well manufactured, though, and great concept!

It'd be great for someone living in a condo with a tiny balcony, but it's awfully expensive.

For those $$s, I could build a pergola for the wisteria.or ... (use you're imagination).

add that to the cost of seeds, or plants, and soil... yeow. I look forward to Dave's user review later, just out of curiosity. And it has me thinking again about some way to add active composting to a large pot or right in the vegetable plot. Maybe take a few bottomless five gal buckets, install around the veggie patch, get soldier fly larvae going, and then use them for my kitchen waste through summer. Just some way to contain it rather than a pile of rotten garbage on the ground

PVC pipe with holes in subsurface portion. Drop kitchen waste down pipe, worms crawl in, eat, crawl out and poop in surrounding soil.
Photo from this website via Pinterest

Cute! You could stick those about anywhere.

I have a good supply of the buckets already so may try one. Just a bunch of holes in the lower part, so I can move it around. My goal is getting the compost working right in the growing zone, rather than piling it one place, and then having to move it again. This would be for summer compost with BSF larvae, quick and wet.

My other goal is not having a lot of trashy looking tacky five gallons buckets around the yard... sigh. Spray paint...camo, or pretty? Sigh again, another project...

My parents use trench composting for kitchen scraps.

They simply dig a hole, drop kitchen scraps in it and then bury it. The soil organisms gobble it up and it's almost fully composted within a season. If you bury it about a foot deep, you don't get any animals digging it up, either.

I can't do trench composting, though, because digging is such a chore in my rocky clay.

That's a great method too, when you can do it.

I "dig & dispose" also. Look up "keyhole garden" for another method -- basically a compost "tower" in the middle of a garden bed. I really like the PVC pipe method... may incorporate that here and there, especially if I can figure out a way to make the pipes artistic, maybe as the base for plant-saucer birdbaths or decorative spheres, something not too heavy to move.... or just paint them (anything other than white!)

Pipes do not have to stick out as high as in the photo. Could extend above ground just enough to cover with an inverted pot.

Good idea... and if you have more to compost, use more short pipes rather than a couple of tall ones. I still want to build a composting "tower" in my deck bed so I can just toss stuff over the railing if it's raining or I'm feeling lazy.

Our system is by no means efficient since we handle our composting kitchen waste 3 times. It goes in a compost bucket by the sink, to the compost tote in the working section of back driveway, and finally spread it the compost pile and covered with greens and browns already there. Every spring I push the pile to one side or the other with the tractor to screen the finished product into carts to distribute to the beds needing more amendment. As I said not efficient, but the finished product is black gold for the gardens and beds. I do some other things to enhance the composting, like adding feed grade black strap molasses, any manure available, and as much urine as I collect. Our compost is as good or better than anything I've seen in a garden supply.

In my neck of the woods - this is how I spent my Saturday night