ShLUbY
Well-Known Member
Nice! that tub of soil is coming along nicely! I kind of do a similar thing that you do; in my fabric 20 gal of soil i have cooking, I like to bury my aloe scraps/living mulch trimmings/pruned leaves and they seem to disappear relatively quickly a few inches below the surface.Yeah good call, with the worms that hi nitrogen stuff gets processed more quickly. Whereby there may be another possibility too
So outdoor is like one of those cadaver farms where they study decomposition processes haha, it's 5 or 6 different scenarios I have there.
Indoor I have leaves in my wormbin. I've recently started using a leaf-woodchip-cardboard mix as bedding that I presoak to the right humidity before adding it in over the newest feeding.
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Works like a charm, the wormcasts are nicely aerated and fluffy, and I've got a good fungal population in there too. Really looking forward to amending my soil with that in a month or so!
Indoor but in the cellar, I am starting a "soilifiying" experiment. The idea is to reamend soil with fresh plant matter. So a sort of living-matter ROLS. You just mix a good soil (as in, contains a good microherd) 1:1 with chopped kitchen scraps.
Since in my case I need to make good soil for my future container garden to begin with, I mixed up clay-heavy garden soil, good store-bought compost, coco coir & moist dead leaves as a base. I amended that with coffee grounds, kelp, neem, eggshells, rock dust and let it sit a while before adding the first round of chopped kitchen scraps.
this was after I mixed it all together:
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this is 2 months later, 1 month after adding the kitchen scraps to the left side.
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no more scraps to be seen
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Admittedly, I haven't really been cultivating this one yet, as I've been adding the scraps to the soil outside in the garden as long as the ground wasn't frozen. Meanwhile, it has frozen, so this shall be getting more attention.
So that's why I'm so happy to see you are exploring in the same direction!
Cheers!
I added some more leaf matter to my bin today, along with some soil that has been cooking to try and get the good micro heard going again, as well as some fungal dominated soil where i was feeding some oats and brown rice over the last few days, just scooped a handful of the fungal mass out and dropped it in the compost bin as well. I'm hoping the leaves will soak up a little of the excess moisture, and if i still have problems with odor in a week or so, i'm going to add some dry peat to the mix as well, this will also soak moisture and contribute more micros to the bin.
just trying to keep active in producing things so i dont have to buy them. i made a nice load of compost this year, which made me have the best vegetable garden i've ever had, plus extra for the indoor plants as well. But i'm noticing the runs of soil i put together with wormcastings and homemade compost were superior in growth compared to the straight homemade compost with some ancient forest added for diversity. So, in the next week or so i'm going to get some worms ordered and get a bin together so i can start making that good ol' black gold myself. I mean really, at wormpower you get like 60lbs of castings for 125$ shipped to your door which isn't really a bad deal. they are super high quality and i really like them... but if i can save myself the money i might as well, and help eliminate kitchen scraps while im at it!. I eat enough veggies for scraps even this time of year i should be able to support a nice heard of them and process some worm castings regularly.
i think the castings just add so much microbial diversity.... they're really necessary IMO from what i've noticed growing a run or two without them. i have a mix still that doesn't have them in it, so i'll be buying a bag and topdressing with those instead of the pure homemade compost.
The next thing i'd like to work on is applying top dressings of select nutrients forms during flower to try and enhance flower production a lil bit. need to figure out timing, and products. I'm thinking the first couple weeks i'll just use Neem meal and let that get eaten up, and then I have this powder calphos from BAS that i'm going to utilize and try and partner it with some fishbone meal or something to provide a little extra flowering boost. just some light top dressings. Need to do a little reading around here cause I know someone has already got it figured out i'm sure lol.