The Compost Bin

One the best things I did this year was hide my vegetable garden. It's still located in the same place and you can still see it but it's not as noticeable when your sitting by the pool.

There's nothing wrong with seeing a vegetable garden while you're swimming. The problem is that when you can see the garden, you can see that it needs some weeding. And who wants to think about weeding when your goofing off with your kids in the pool.

Someday, I'd like to surround the garden with a nice custom made wood trellis fence and have tons of vegetables and flowers growing up it. And while I'm dreaming, how about a great looking arbor that you have to walk under to get in the garden. That would be awesome. For now though, I'll have to settle for a few ornamental grasses, a butterfly bush, some petunias and a musa basjoo. And really, they aren't too bad at all.

Just wanted to share some pictures of my father's grapes today. He has over 250 grape vines growing on his property. Most of them are still too young to produce grapes but in a few years, he'll have a barn full of wine barrels to show for all his hard work.

For the second year in a row, I'll be participating in Blog Action Day. On October 15th, thousands of bloggers around the world will all be posting about the same issue and trying to raise awareness and get people talking.

Last year's topic was the Environment and that was very easy to fit into a gardening blog. This year will be a little more difficult because the topic is poverty. But since I've got a month and a half to think about it, I'm sure I'll come up with something.

Hey does anyone have one of these things? Being a big fan of compost and gadgets, it looks like it's right up my alley. It's priced way too high but it's still looks pretty cool in an AeroGarden sort of way.

Please leave a comment if you have any experience with the NatureMill Automatic Composter

Did you ever spend all summer taking care of a weed that you thought was a flower? Well I did.

Last year we had petunias in this hanging basket and I'm always reading about people who have petunias that reseed like crazy, so that's what I thought was going on in this basket.

Even though not one single petunia has ever reseeded in our yard, despite buying a few flats worth of them every year, I was still optimistic. It probably just needed some fertilizer and then it would start to flower.

My wife, who dedicated her summer to making the yard look good must have asked me about 15 times what was growing in this basket. And each time I scoffed at her and said something like, "you silly woman, don't you know the difference between a weed and a petunia?" Or "I'm a world famous compost blogger, don't you think I know what I'm talking about?" I think I even said these things with a French accent, just to sound more annoying.

Well the summer is almost over and still nothing. It doesn't look like this plant will ever have petunia flowers on it. At one point I was tempted to run to the nursery and buy some to save face but being a man (who sometimes speaks with a phony French accent) I fessed up and told her I was wrong and that she was right. Damn my weed identification skills.

Yes, my name is Anthony and I'm from New Jersey and I have ducks in my pool.


But I'm not the Tony that you're thinking off.

If you've been following me on Plurk you may have noticed that every few weeks, I pack the wife and kids into the car and head off to my parent's house in CT. The kids love spending time with Grandma and Grandpa and I enjoy checking out my father's wacky projects. My father has become a mad scientist since he's retired and is always working on something that seems way too hard for a retiree to get done by himself.

But he does get them done. For example there was the 20'x40' post and beam style barn (two stories) that he built last summer and the 250 grape vines and trellis that he planted/built also come to mind. And be sure to check out his Dandelion Wine recipe that I posted a while back. But I think that his latest project, the 40 Foot Tall 2 Kilowatt Wind Turbine will look the most impressive on his mad scientist resume.

This project was a long one though. Getting all the permits, pouring the 4 foot deep concrete slabs for the turbine and the 4 guy wires (and a few months to cure) digging the trenches and running the power line to the house, getting all the inspections and getting the 40 foot tall pole in place have taken about a full year.

Most of the time was spent waiting for a missing inverter or something that was being shipped from China. I'm guessing the people shipping his missing wind turbine piece must have been busy preparing for the Olympics. Probably one of those people running around the stadium on wires actually worked at China's version of UPS.

All that's left now is to connect the blades and tail piece, do some final electrician work (and get it inspected) then hoist it up. He could be spinning his electric meter backwards within a few weeks.

Besides the obvious green reasons for doing this, he's also going to be saving lots of money by reducing his energy bills. And I'm sure that money will be better spent on projects that he can add to his mad scientist credentials. Hey if this is what retirement is all about, then sign me up. Go Dad go!


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Beets Rule!
Beets are another one of those hated vegetables that I'd never touch when I was young. But now that I'm an old fart, I absolutely love beets. And when I saw these cool looking Chioggia Beets in a seed catalog, I knew I had to try them.

Chioggia Beets are an Italian Heirloom beet that has red and white rings inside of them. Slices will look like a bullseye and who doesn't want a bullseye in their salad? Often when I'm eating a salad, I say to myself, "I wish that I had something to shoot this carrot at". Chioggia Beets were the answer that I was looking for. Plus as a added bonus you can add the beet greens to the salad too.

As far as taste goes, this beet has a more smooth, mild flavor to it. Besides slicing them up in a salad, my favorite way to eat beets is roasted. Cut them into bite sized pieces, drizzle with olive oil, add salt and pepper, dried basil and garlic and let them roast for about an hour at 400 degrees. Yum! A lot of people like to roast them with rosemary but I'm not a big rosemary fan. But if that's your thing, then give it a try.

Handling most beets will make it look like you murdered someone. Your hands get all red and stained and then your spouse yells at you for putting red dots all over your kids and telling them they have the measles. But since these Chioogia Beets are only half red, there's only half the mess. And less yelling in my house is a good thing. Thanks Chioogia Beets!

The summer will be over in a few weeks and so will my constant supply of greens for the compost bin. Grass clippings, vegetable garden waste and massive amounts of apples from my 30 plus foot apple tree will all be in short supply.

Once the leaves start falling and I start raking, those greens will be long gone. But Autumn means tons of browns. Why do I worry so much about greens and browns you ask? Well to get a compost pile cooking at an optimum rate, you're supposed to add green and brown contents at a ratio of about 1:25 respectively.

Truthfully, I'm not looking to set any World's Fastest Compost records so I just guestimate the amounts and as long as I'm at least at 1:3, the bin will be fine. It'll compost eventually is always my motto.

So the plan is to use my leaf blower with the vacuum attachment to shred like 10 bags worth of leaves and add them to this compost pile that consists of mostly greens. The rest of the leaves will go in another pile as reserve for next season.

Between the shredded leaves and the pile that's mostly grass and apples, it should be cooking in no time. It'll need to be turned a few times and that's never fun but I think I can manage to fit that into the schedule. If not, then see my motto above.

Have you ever gone to the nursery or a big box store and had a blackout? Happens to me all the time. When I wake up, I'm usually back at home with a car load of plants and no memory of how it happened. Well that's what I tell my wife anyway. But one of those mysterious plants that followed me home this year was a little fig tree.

I have a habit of buying plants that look like sticks. This adds to the need for the memory blackout explanation when my wife sees the price tags on these things.

"You wasted $15 on a stick, again!"
"No honey, I told you, I don't remember what happened. I might need an MRI."

Well this fig tree did great and as you can see it greened up nicely and grew to about three feet tall. The pot it's in has a 22" diameter to give you an idea of the size.

Now when my wife sees the fig tree she smiles because she loves figs. And eventually when the tree starts producing, she'll be able to go out to the yard and pick as many as she wants. Me on the other hand, I think figs are okay but I'd love to grow a Paw Paw Tree. And I just happen to know a website that sells them.

Whoa, I'm feeling a little woozy...

I'm definitely having an off year in the summer vegetable garden but instead of focusing on what I haven't accomplished, I'm going to talk about some of the good stuff that's going on in my yard. It's not like I'm living in a barren wasteland devoid of plant activity. No sir, there's some good green stuff going on that's definitely worth an update.

One of the most rewarding plant purchases that's I've made over the years was my hardy banana plant from a few years back. It was just a tiny little stick when it arrived in the mail but it really took off ever since. The Musa Basjoo is a non fruiting banana so Chiquita and Dole will still be my official banana suppliers for the foreseeable future but I bought the Basjoo because it's cold tolerant enough to survive a New Jersey winter.

It's also really cool looking and grows pretty tall. And who doesn't like having big tall plants, especially tropical looking ones? Not only did that original Musa Basjoo grow up to be a strong healthy banana tree (which as you can see in the picture above, it's about 12 feet tall even though it's growing in a pot) but it's also had pups every year since I've planted it. So now I have 9 of them.

Banana plants are heavy feeders and need lots of fertilizer to grow big and strong. And being that this is the Compost Bin blog, it's a match made in heaven. I feed them plenty of fresh compost and they grow tall and have babies for me. Good deal. An occasional helping of fish tank water helps out too.

And even though they're hardy to Zone 6, I don't force them to prove it to me. Each winter, I dig them out of the ground and wrap the stems in wads of newspapers for storage in my garage. I usually just drag the one in the pot in there too but this year it's a bit too tall. But I'll figure something out by the time the temps start dropping.

So sure I could sit here and wallow in pity that my tomato and hot pepper starts never got in the ground but I'm not going to do that. Instead I'm going to celebrate the fact that I have bunch of huge banana trees in my yard that will never produce a single banana, ever. And that's awesome!

I really don't have many nice things to say about this year's summer vegetable garden. Because of some personal stuff, the garden was totally neglected. I never got my tomato or pepper starts planted, never got my cucumbers growing up the trellis, didn't do any weeding (as you can see in this picture) and I really didn't even water it. So a while ago I officially declared the summer season an epic failure.

The most surprising part about this failure is that it followed my best spring season of all time. The spring garden was awesome. I had Broccoli Rabe, Swiss Chard, Bok Choy, Peas, Turnips, Beets and Blue Potatoes.

I've decided to finish the summer focusing on my fall garden. Can you believe that there's only three more weeks of summer? Where does the time go?

After a quick vacation I feel recharged and I'm ready to get back out there again. Since I had such success with the cool season crops, I'm coming back for round two. I've already got all the seeds that I need for a great fall garden so now I just need some place to plant them.

Usually, I'm too short on free space in my raised beds to get a real fall planting going. I'm used to several beds full of tomatoes and peppers and some completely green trellises loaded with cucumbers but ahem.. not this year. This year, after some weeding I'll have tons of free space.

I'll have enough room that I think I'll add a few vegetables like carrots, spinach, parsnips and lettuce. I've grown a nice Simpson lettuce in the past, I think I'll give it a shot again.

And with a good fall planting going, I'm going to try to extend it into the winter. With the help of some cold frames or mini hoop houses, lets see if I can grow some of these greens and roots through the winter. I plan on turning the epic failure of summer into a fall season to be proud off.