Vermi-Pit Garden – 7-27-19

Back in early June I wrote about a “Super Simple Vermicomposting Pit Garden” I set up very quickly as an illustration of the fact that you don’t need to dig a massive trench in order to reap the rewards of this type of in-ground vermi-gardening!

It’s been a bit of a weird season for sure. Damp cool spring weather seemed to switch over to hot dry summer weather – neither has been exactly ideal for growing squash-family crops.

Things have come along with my my cucumber plant though – and I’ve been getting some nice cukes (like one pictured below), and the plant is continuing to spread. I absolutely love growing cucumbers – we eat a lot of them, they tend to be fairly expensive at the store, and they always seem to do very well in worm-kissed garden beds!

What’s great about the plant itself (similar to many other cucurbits) is that it can be planted in one spot (close to a trench, pit etc where it can get nutrition), yet will spread all over the place and drop cukes all along its length.

I’ll admit the cantaloupe hasn’t done all that much yet – but in my experience these sorts of plants can just start taking off at any time – especially likely if we do end up getting a stretch of wetter weather (while it’s still nice and warm).

Now that the plants have grown quite a lot, I can see that my choice of location for the system might not have been ideal – it was a bit of a pain moving the barrel and accessing the pit to check on things.

I’ve only actually fed the system once since starting it, but the level has still remained fairly close to the top (isn’t a sunken depression).

Digging around a bit down below, it looked as though the worm population is thriving. I saw lots of juvenile Red Worms. I am a bit iffy about the quantity of coffee grounds that has been ending up in the pit – I think I will aim to add only fruit/veggie scraps and comfrey moving forward (as I’ve touched on elsewhere, I’m convinced that larger quantities of grounds can impede plant growth).

Speaking of comfrey, I tossed some in…

…before adding a bag of frozen kitchen scraps I grabbed from my freezer.

There was no strategy involved in using frozen scraps – that’s just what I had available. If anything, I would have preferred using thawed material, or scraps that hadn’t been frozen at all. Not too concerned about fruit flies or even optimization in general with a system like this.

Once the block-o-scraps was added I put the cover material back, along with the barrel.

Should be interesting to see how things progress from here.


Stay tuned!
😎



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