gardens mostly put up other than weeding one small
garden (saving that for tomorrow).

the last two rounds of planting of winter wheat and
winter rye are unlikely to amount to much (it's been
very cloudy the past few weeks). still i'll keep an
eye on those gardens and see what happens. the birds
have discovered the grains and are picking at them.
enough is planted deeply enough that they aren't going
to get all of those seeds. in the gardens i planted
earlier they look so nice that Ma is very happy with
them, nice green grassy cover. wish i hadn't gotten
so bloody sick as then all would be at least up and
sprouted and green instead of fairly bare. i guess i
will have to mulch them for the winter instead if i
get more goodies brought by.

in the realm of very good news, every garden was able
to support worms for the entire season (for the first
time since i started working on them several years ago).
the clay is certainly improving. making sure that
there is some organic materials buried down deeply also
helps to make sure the worms have a place to be during
the hotter and dryer periods of weather.

all of the worm bins inside are chugging along --
right now they are finishing up the last of the apple
cores from the two car loads of apples we processed.
there was no way i could get all of those through the
bins. a half dozen buckets of cores went into the
gardens down deep to keep the worms happy, but what i
could stuff into the bins here in my room seem to have
made the worms very happy. plenty of chompers going
at it now. i have a mid-winter snack of chopped dried
greens from the green manure patch on hand to mix in
with whatever other veggie scraps. they'll also have
a good supply of squash innards and peels this winter.
i could easily expand to 30 bins with the population
of worms now on hand, but i have no place to keep
them.


songbird