Yellow?

So our first successful eggplant was white...we thought that the new one would be purple since it started to come in green. It turns out that there are yellow eggplants too.

Harvesting tomatoes

I can only think that the worm castings have really helped our veggies along this year since we essentially planted them in Florida sand without much rich soil.

Ashtyn working in the garden

One of the tomato plants is more than 5 feet tall, and the others are not far behind.

The greenbeans have just about finished producing, but we planted more seeds, so it shouldn't be too long before we are enjoying them again.

Today we collected the last of the greenbeans, our first tomatoes, a jalapeno and our first white eggplant.

Ashtyn with today's harvest

And growing...

We are having so much fun in the garden with this beautiful weather!

The eggplant just kept on growing, but never turned purple. After consulting with my brother in Virginia, he informed me that there is another type of eggplant that is white. ( http://whatscookingamerica.net/Q-A/EggplantWhite.htm )

Caitlin is showing how big the eggplant got right before it got a small rot spot. We will try cooking it up next week.

There is also a purple eggplant growing on another plant. This one is still small, but it is growing fast.

Caitlin with the new eggplant

The green onions just keep on blossoming. If anyone wants seeds, let us know and we can gather some for you.

Tomatoes And Eggplants Are Coming In

Wes is inspecting our baby tomatoes in this picture. There are only a few so far, but there are lots of blossoms so we know more tomatoes are coming!



We also have our first eggplant growing! It has grown so much in a week! Check it out!

The Beans Are Back

Well, the beans have come back in full force. We have been able to pick a couple of handfuls every other day, and I must say, green beans are a great healthy snack and they are so tasty!

The green onion blossom opened up and put out some seeds. Once the seeds dry out we can try planting some.

The onion blossom opened up to a beautiful white bloom! It almost always has one bee on it, and it smells like an onion cooking...mmmmmm!







We also have a tiny baby tomato!

Here Piggy Piggy

We found another way to recycle our old newspapers....



Piggy Banks!

Each kid got a balloon, and dipped the newspaper in a flour and water paste. They put the slimy paper on the balloon and added pieces of toilet paper rolls for the feet and snouts. When it was dry they painted it the color of their choice!! Now they have a place to keep all their money!!

Our tomatoes are starting to get big, and should be bearing fruit soon! There are 3 plants currently growing along the trellis.



Our green onions, which we planted from our leftovers last Chinese New Year, have gotten a blossom on top! Look for more pictures once this blossom opens.

Winter Freeze

The greenbeans are still trying to come back from the damage they suffered during the two chilly days we had last month. We had one more great harvest right before the freeze.....

But then the cold weather really stunted the plants....


Our harvest has been really small ever since, but the plants seem to be generating lots of new healthy green leaves, and the greenbeans should be back soon.

Wes with our most recent greenbean harvest

The eggplants, beets, and turnips really seemed to like the cold weather and have been growing really well.


Eggplants

Turnips and Beets

One of our eggplants even has a couple of blossoms on it!!

Fertilizing

Justin and Will helped fertilize the garden today with some fresh worm castings. Why worm castings?

According to http://www.thetastefulgarden.com/...
1. The humus in the worm castings extracts toxins and harmful fungi and bacteria from the soil. Worm Castings therefore have the ability to fight off plant diseases.

2. The worm castings have the ability to fix heavy metals in organic waste. This prevents plants from absorbing more of these chemical compounds than they need. These compounds can then be released later when the plants need them.

3. Worm Castings act as a barrier to help plants grow in soil where the pH levels are too high or too low. They prevent extreme pH levels from making it impossible for plants to absorb nutrients from the soil.

4. The humic acid in Worm Castings stimulate plant growth, even in very low concentrations. The humic acid is in an ionically distributed state in which it can easily be absorbed by the plant, over and above any normal mineral nutrients. Humic acid also stimulates the development of micro flora populations in the soil.

5. Worm Castings increase the ability of soil to retain water. The worm castings form aggregates, which are mineral clusters that combine in such a way that they can withstand water erosion and compaction, and also increase water retention.

6. Worm Castings reduce the acid-forming carbon in the soil, and increase the nitrogen levels in a state that the plant can easily use. Organic plant wastes usually have a carbon-nitrogen ratio of more than 20 to 1. Because of this ratio, the nitrogen is unavailable to plants, and the soil around the organic waste becomes acidic.

Justin

Justin

Will Feeding The Plants



Will also picked some greenbeans off the trellis. We have been getting enough for a side dish about every 3 days. Our crop slowed down for about a week because of the freeze, but it seems to be picking back up again. A bunch of the leaves got burned by the freeze, but the plants are still alive with the exception of the cucumbers which are rotting now.

Will

Brrrrr!

We had our first real cold snap last night and the temperature got down to 35, and lower with the wind chill. Unfortunately we did not have the garden protected, and we may have gotten some frost bite. Tonight is supposed to be even colder.
In order to protect the plants we borrowed some "cold cover" from Mike Cartrett (http://www.palmbeachbonsai.com/).
Wesley, Shoma, Haley, and Alan helped me (Bekah) cover all of the plants and anchor it down.




Now our garden should be safe from the freeze tonight.


Thanks everyone for your help!!

Bean Pole

The green bean plants are tall enough now for the kids to reach from their equipment or while standing! This is Ari helping to harvest the beans today.

We got a great harvest today with some really tasty green beans!

These bottles have beet plants and turnip plants. The red plants are beets and the green ones are turnips. We planted the root veggies in the clear bottles so we can see them growing underground when they get bigger.

A Winner is Named

The worms made it through the Winter break without incident! They are doing very well, and have really reduced the amount of waste in the green buckets. The buckets were almost full before break, and now they are down to about half. Some more good news is that there is no smell with the indoor setup, and no unwanted guests.

Now the outdoor experimental bins are a different story! The bin with just paper has a couple of worms still left alive, but the worms are not able to make anything useful with the paper. Basically they made piles of casting-shaped newspaper beads.

The combination bin (food and paper) was pretty nasty after the two weeks away. The worms had created a sludge out of the food and paper, and most of the matter is now unrecognizable. This would be great for the garden except that there were also hundreds of fruitfly families including cocoons, maggots, eggs, and the flies. YUK! The worms are really doing well though, and reproducing rapidly. There are too many baby worms to count.
Click to enlarge (but not right after lunch)

So here is my plan (unless anyone has any better ideas). I am ready to call the combination bin the winner. The question is what to do with the worms and babies. I can't bring them back to the main bin because I don't want to risk getting fruit flies inside. Ewe. I picked out as many adult worms as I could find with a plastic fork and put them in the 'newspaper only' bin. Then tried to get a few of the babies out too, but they are so tiny. I plan to leave the babies in the sludge until they are big enough to pick out. In a few weeks I guess I'll just dump the rest of the sludge into the garden for the plants.

Happy Worms Breaking Down Our Leftovers

What an exciting day in Wormville!!!

One of the cocoons hatched two baby worms today! I had the cocoons in a clear bag so we could see them when they hatch.
We got an awesome new toy called the EyeClops Bionic Eye! It takes pictures and videos at 100, 200, and 400 times magnification! The video below is of the second baby at 200X magnification!!

Wormcicles

We got all of the food blended up and ready for the worms and Shannon and Shoma shredded the newspaper. Before we could add the new bedding we had to separate the worms from all of their castings so there would be room for the new food and new bedding. With a whole lot of shaking we got the worms out and ready for their new environment. Unfortunately, since the fruit and veggies had been frozen it was too cold to add the worms. But what I didn't realize was that there were still about 20 worms hidden in some castings at the bottom of the bucket when we added the food. During a brave rescue attempt I fished them out from the frozen ground up food. They were a little cold, but with Wes's help, we warmed them up! So the worms had to spend the night last night in a little box while they waited for the bed to warm! This morning they made their way into their new home and quickly worked their way down into the bedding.

New Bedding

When I got to Potentials this morning I saw that a few (10 ish) worms were trying to escape the top bin of the original green worm bin, which again, is not a good sign. I'm not sure if they are the same worms that I just put in there from the "food-only" bin or some other ones. Either way, it looks like the bins have been completely composted now, and the worms are ready for some new bedding and fresh new food. The worms essentially need two things, bedding and food. The bedding can be newspaper, cardboard, or dead leaves, and the best food is fruit and veggie scraps.

I brought in my fruit and veggie scraps from home and we can chop them up today to feed to the worms. I keep the food frozen so that it does not smell while we are preparing it for the worms. This bag has used tea leaves, apple cores and peels, cucumber peels, eggshells and broccoli stalks. The food does not HAVE to be chopped, but it makes it easier for the worms to eat and digest. So this afternoon the kids will use the "Airlink" to turn on the food processor and chop up the frozen fruits and veggies. The Airlink is a piece of assistive technology that gives the children control over turning on electrical appliances. We just plug in the appliance, and set the dials and when the kids push the switch the appliance turns on for a predetermined amount of time. The switch is cordless and sends an infrared signal to the Airlink module. Being cordless allows us to bring the switch to each child with the restriction of a short wire.
The kids will also send some newspaper through the shredder and tear up some corrugated cardboard to make the bedding.

EWWWW!!

I had to free the worms from the "food-only" bin today. They were trying to escape from the nasty, smelly, congealed mess of rotting pumpkin! A bunch of worms had crawled up the sides of the container which is a tell tale sign that something is wrong. So if you voted for food only...sorry, that part of the experiment had to be aborted due to dying worms and mass quantities of maggots gathering!

Harvest Season

If only I had more time in each day...
Today I harvested the worm castings from the bottom bucket which has been working for almost a month. We got a great harvest, but I had wanted to put it in the garden while it is super fresh. I just ran out of time, and had to leave for the long weekend. In harvesting the castings I found something pretty exciting (for those of you who get excited about this kind of stuff)!

Any guesses as to what it might be?
Here's a close up......


It's a cocoon! There are so many of them in the buckets!
We're having babies!!

Actually we already had some! They are easiest to see in the bin with just paper, but unfortunately the picture came out pretty blurry. The baby is just about in the center of the picture. See it? Check back next week and I will try to find a baby and get a better picture.


**To clear up any confusion, I learned that worms DO mate. Any worm can mate with any other worm because in effect they are all males and are all females.**


The worms in the experimental bin have begun to really change too. The Bin with just food is pretty nasty. It is a stinky gelatinous mess where there seem to be more maggots surviving than worms. That bin may be aborted very soon. Thankfully the bins are OUTSIDE.

The bin with a combo of food and paper is doing much better. There is a nice supply of castings building up on the bottom, and the worms are alive and active.

The bin with just paper is pretty neat to. In this bin you can really see the castings because there are no coffee grounds to get confused with castings. The interesting thing about this bin is that many of the castings look just like paper... worm-poop-shaped paper!!
If it wasn't that we are thinking of using this experiment as our science fair project I would immediately abort the all-food bin, and add the paper only worms back to the original bin. I think that the worms need more than just paper to live on, but at the same time, need some 'bedding' to break up the food particles. Anyone else have ideas about this? Just leave your ideas in the comments so others can read.

Garden Progress

The butterflies have begun to find our flowers! Here is one on the lantana plant. Click on the picture, then look carefully to see the proboscis which is like a straw through which the butterfly eats.

The veggies in the garden are doing well. The pole green beans are doing exceptionally well, ,and have begun to sprout from the seeds that Jodi, Ashtyn, and Frankie planted during the garden party on the 14th of November. We expect that these plants will grow very tall, eventually covering the trellis along the sides and even across the top. From what I have read, we should be able to harvest some beans in just a couple of months.

If you look real carefully in between the two flowers is a tiny sprout. This is a baby eggplant sprout. If you click the picture it will enlarge and you may be able to see it better.
We look forward to watching our little sprouts grow.