Expanding the garden for more organic plants

Recently I expanded the garden area by our pepper plants and grapevines. I think it created another 40 feet of growing space. I dug down about 18" and back filled with home made compost, alfalfa hay, bone meal, blood meal as well as native soil. I also added corn meal to feed the beneficial microbes in the soil.

I now have three different varieties of potatoes, many shallots, onions, garlic, two types of green beans, herbs, carrots, snap peas and a few other that I can't remember right now.

Cat food bowl turned into catnip feeder - Growing cat nip, catswort, cat...

2.5 pounds of worm castings total after 3 months

Here is a photo while we were harvesting our worm castings. We got a total of 2.5 pounds of worm castings and have since started to make worm tea, used the worm castings in our indoor garden and have mixed the worm castings into a home made soil mix consisting of perlite, vermiculite, peat moss and worm castings.

We will be starting our raised gardens this coming week!

Many people claim that you should have your raised garden beds going by now, however we waited for our extreme Arizona heat to pass. If you've been keeping track on our Arizona weather you will know that we have been setting new record heat temp.'s for quite some time. If Arizona didn't  break a heat record, we tied it or came within a few degrees! This summer has been a very HOT summer without much relief. With this in mind, we decieded to hold off on planting anything in our raised garden beds until the heat broke; next week should be the time to plant.

Here is what I'm going to do with our raised gardn beds as far as the soil:
(I have two raised garden beds about 10' x 4' x 18")

The bottom of the raised garden bed will be covered in 1"-2" of newspaper.
Next layer will be a few inches of alfalfa hay.
I will be adding about 1' of natural soil on top of this with a bunch of earthworms and kitchen scraps mixed in.
After this I will be adding our entire compost pile that we have been building up for a few months.
To top off our raised garden beds I will be filling the rest of the bed with "garden soil" from a local rock supply yard.
(Depending on what is in the "garden soil" from the rock supply yard,  I may be adding in bone meal and blood meal.)

I believe this combination will provide us with great tasting produce. Please comment if you have any suggestions :)

Corn sprouting out of egg carton

Look at that corn sprout shooting up to the sky! OK, that might be a little much, lol. But take a look at that. After only a few days in a egg carton filled with soil we have one sprout growing. Not bad for a test run!

The others have yet to produce anything worth reporting. I think this corn seed packet that I bought might have been water logged for some reason. I was having a really hard time finding corn seeds in the local home improvement stores. I found one package under the seed rack and it felt a little wet. I didn't care since I had been looking for these seeds for sometime...anyway, it looks like only a few will make it to give us food.

Let's COMPOST!

COMPOST!

What could be better than home-made compost - FOR FREE!

Well, not much else can compare to the benefits of compost. The best part is that anyone can do it with a little effort. I'm going to build a compost bin out of some cage wire, with the four corners supported by 1" pipe I had lying around from an older project.

Follow along or add tips and corrections, as I am learning all this hands on by myself :)

Here is what I started with: 

- Cage wire (Great for air flow)
- Lock cutters (A pair of dikes works best actually)
- Zip ties
- Hammer
- Band aids (optional, lol)

And all your yard cuttings, leaves, grass and kitchen scrapes (all except dairy and meats).

Here it is after wrapping three corners.

Use the zip ties to hold the cage to the poles. I added one at the top, middle and bottom.

All done! So nice and clean, lol not for long I suppose. Soon it will be filled with great looking compost!

If you layer the browns (dried leaves, grass, hay etc.), with your greens (kitchen scraps), you should not have any odors. Your compost will smell like fresh apples when done correctly, or so I've read ;) Notice I have it located next to the trash cans just n case, lol

Here I have added what I could find around the yard. Some citrus leaves, misc. plant cuttings, newspaper/junk mail and random kitchen scraps. I honestly didn't thin I would have enough items to fill our compost bin, but you soon realize how much you've been throwing away! It's really fun for kids too!

This was completed last week. I will add further photos that were taken today approx. 1 week after this was completed.