Restricting the bask to directly under the heat lamp.I have been itching for a compost pile for quite some time. Like a couple of years. I grow all kinds of crap year-round.
And I hate waste, shy from throwing *anything* away and also despise stinky garbage taking up the whole alley. Landfills are sad enough without junking ‘em up. Also, buying dirt is stupid. You know.
When you share a yard, though, it’s hard to make your neighbors deal with a pile of rotting food and leaves no matter how much they’re into gardening (which they are). Tried a quiet depressed corner of the new yard, but a soggy cantaloupe was my own final straw. Leaving organic decay out in the open is Just Not Done. Plus, it was drawing over rats from the impromptu frat house on our other side.
So I finally got around to making this urban composter courtesy of You Grow Girl. Mister was pitching a fit about the scraps languishing and growing fuzz on the kitchen counter, even in this cutely countertop composter we got for our wedding.
Sadly all I needed to do was get my hands on a tub, an opaque tub with a lid on it.
Thanks, Menard’s, for a $3.33 sale last week on a blue plastic tub with lid. Believe it or not, the thing’s made in the U.S.A. Dug out the drill, and within about 10 minutes, I was in business.
With two reporters in the house, there’s newspaper galore lying around. And we cook a ton, so there’s lots of scraps, too.
All my plant clippings, all the junk that falls off the trees in the neighborhood, all the coffee grounds that otherwise just end up in the stinky alley garbage, and all the scraps from beautiful summer produce will now make my growing richer.
I feel so much better about getting rid of things when I know they’ll be useful and not wasted.
Georgie-girl refusing food; we later discover she's full of Egg.
Seems I’m not the only one creating these days. Georgie-girl has been generating eggs, then stuffing herself full of lettuce and turtle food. More eggs, more food. Never at the same time.
She’s a Single Sort of Gal, so said eggs are duds in the reproductive sense. At least we know why she’s been turning up her nose at krill.
Poor Georgie, living in the hands of amateurs. A month ago when I found the remains of an egg in her tank, I figured that was it for a long while. She stopped eating again, and I figured she was reacting to the slight chill in the air. I don’t know when the eggs will stop, but I did feed her disgusting amounts of floating turtle food last night.
As soon as I figure out how to embed videos, I will.
Meanwhile, watch her frantic efforts here.
Filed under: Do it, Fixed it, Grew it, How to do it, Love it, Made it, Refashioned it | Tags: Chicago, garden, how to, Life on Hoyne, Mister, Ukrainian Village, vertical gardening, Y axis
My Mister and I came up with an idea to maximize our small gardening space we share with neighbors in our apartment building in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village: We’d grow goodies along the Y-plane, utilizing endless airspace overhead.
finished terra cotta tower using broken pot on top
But instead of buying these fancy Y-plane kits (expensive), or building raised beds from scratch (too cumbersome and permanent), we’d make some plant towers ourselves using the giant plastic pots we already have, and some basic plumbing pipes and flanges.
See what you think.
Then try it yourself. Check out your pots. Terra cotta with a giant hole are all ready. Plastic pots usually need drilling. We used 4 pots each, a 1/2-inch by 60-inch length of metal pipe (Home Depot), a 1/2 flange (ditto, in the plumbing aisle).
1/2″ flange bought in plumbing aisle
The bottom pot has to be the biggest, then 2 medium and a small one, or three medium ones. Make sure with terra cotta that the pole will fit through the drainage holes.
plastic tower on left; terra cotta on right
So you put the flange, flat side down, under the bottom pot, drilling a hole in plastic if necessary. If you drill, you need the kind of bit that bores a big hole.
start the hole gently, then increase it
set the flange into the hole, flat side facing out
Screw the pipe into the flange.
screw the pipe all the way into the flange
Weight the bottom pot with bricks or rocks or something heavy that doesn’t take up all the pot space.
use bricks or rocks to weight the bottom of the tower
Fill with dirt, tamp down really well, and add more dirt if necessary. This is your foundation for the tower.
tamp the dirt down really well so your foundation is solid
Thread a medium pot onto the pipe, and tilt it as far to one side as you can. Fill it with dirt, tamp, etc. Thread another pot, tilt it to the other side as far as you can, fill with dirt. Repeat until you’re out of pots or out of room.
finished plastic tower to be planted with tomatoes and peppers
That’s it. We’re now growing on four Y planes.
It’s five if you count the wooden tower I experimented with for little herbs — nothing anchoring the wooden dowel in the center except for dirt.
anchor the wooden dowel as best you can
thread pots one at a time, tilting them as far as they’ll go
finished terra cotta tower of small herb pots
Cross your fingers…
Filed under: Do it, Grew it | Tags: garden, sprouts, vertical gardening, Y axis, Y plane
Who knew squash would be the belle of the ball?
These baby pepper sprouts make me feel unsettled, as if I were looking at maggots or something equally icky.
And heirloom tomatoes – a present from my Mister’s beermaking buddy – also are coming up in an old terrarium.
My chamomile is popping up in the papaya pot, so tiny I almost missed it. Too tiny to photograph at this point — the seedlings all come out way too fuzzy.
We’re going to garden on the Y axis this year, trying to plant up and down instead of covering all our shared yard with our pots. My Mister’s dad gave us a planter last year — a pole with a flat anchor that we placed in the bottom of a large terra cotta pot, weighted with a stone and filled with dirt to the top. Then threaded two smaller pots through their holes onto the pole, tilting one all the way right, and the next one all the way left. did the same for a small pot on the top, filling all with dirt. It looks something like this.
I think we can buy a few more poles and some kind of anchor from plumbing supply, and string up more of our pots this way. Vertical gardening types believe the air circulation is better than planting flat on the X plane, and yields better, healthier plants. I’m more concerned with avoiding the irrational wrath of our sometime landlord. Plus, I want to grow as many edibles as we can in Chicago’s short growing season.
Will post photos of the planting structure when the next one’s done. Will post tutorial, also. Will do all this and more once it stops threatening snow.
The sun has shown its face in Chicago after a dreadful winter. Time to think again about the Growing. Couldn’t do it before – it was way too depressing to think about green stuff when it was still so far away.
Sunday Tribune claims it’s warm enough to start growing greens – spinach, arugula (rocket), and the heavy lifters – kale, collards and all.
O happy day! Last Saturday, while it SNOWED and SLEETED, I fired up the old pots and planted. By this past Saturday, teeny seedlings were up and flourishing in their starter homes.
Basil in a glass pickle jar.
Cherry tomatoes in plastic pretzel jars. Heirloom tomatoes in a small terrarium.
Squash, zucchini, sunflowers and cucumbers in little terra cotta pots. Squash already looks strong enough to choke me in my sleep.
Spinach, mustards, spinach mustards and beets in a long window box.
Dill, lettuce and cress in whatever was left.
I *know* it’s a while still before the plants – save the greens – can go outside. Gives us time to master hypertufa crafting so the bigger stuff will have containers to grow. And our mamas will enjoy homemade Mother’s Day fare.
And I *know* we only have containers to plant in our shared Chicago backyard. But those mama gifts will need filling, too.
