On 10/7/19 6:14 AM, songbird wrote:
T wrote:
...
Ya. I have heard the bad stuff can ruin your garden!

I will make sure and get something that has been hot
composted.

some chemicals are unaffected by hot composting.


Seems to me that scat would be so full of grass seeds
that hot composting would be the only safe way.

I have tried burying table scraps, but it does not
depose. Seriously.

decompose.


What Happens When You Bury Kitchen Scraps in the Garden?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQFB9M2UdK0

Did exactly as he said.

Could not figure out what those balls rolling around my
garden were. Then I realized it was avocado pits from
two years ago that worked their was out of the soil.

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

an avocado pit is a big chunk of pretty hard
organic material so it takes some time to break
it down.

the other thing is that most gardeners have
more moisture and soil to work with to begin
with. in an arid climate things are going to
work much more slowly.

in a moist bucket with worms if you put a
fresh avocado seed in there it will sprout. i
dry mine out for a few months before putting
them in, or if you have a way to crush them or
cut them into pieces then they will turn into
humus faster, but i see no real reason to add
work to the process if i don't have to. i like
to keep things simple here.


No wonder I have no worms!!!!

they need moisture and organic matter and
enough depth to the soil to escape the heat
(if they are earthworms) in the middle of
the summer. for me it freezes solid here too
in the winter so they also like to get down
below the frost line if they can. if they
can't they'll hibernate or leave cocoons
behind for the next generation to continue
when the conditions improve again.

in the middle of a prolonged dry spell you
can dig down and find them curled up in little
balls waiting for the rains to return.

the common composting worms (the red wrigglers)
live near the surface and you may not even have
them in your area other than in some woodlands,
but then perhaps not if those woodlands are
isolated enough that they were never introduced
there.

when i first started worm composting here it
was during a spring dry spell - i could not
find a single red wriggler even under logs or
at the bottoms of some of the ditches. so i
did use the belgian night-crawlers to get going
and they have done pretty well, but eventually
i did get some red wrigglers for the surface
layer of the worm buckets and i also found a
few other species of worms here to use in them
so i have around 4-6 species of worms in them
and around the property.

i like worms so when i come across a good
book or article about them i'll put it on the
reading list.


songbird


From what I have heard on youtube, a good garden is
basically growing on top of a worm bed.

My avocado pits were whacked with the hammer side
of an ax.

I should make sure over the winder to occasionally
water my worm (singular) and my microbiome.

I had a little frog for a time last year!

Thank you for the tips!