Comments on: Water Socks?

By: Larry D.

Larry D. — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 03:49:11 +0000

You could call that one”The Boston green socks” or “Tea party”.
That is what our feet feel like all summer down south! Hope you don’t get too toasty up there! Now i know where our weather men moved to.We got one who had a window installed in his new broadcast location a while back.He doesn’t even go outside any more.I’m better at predicting weather than he is.He predicted snow one year and was right.He hasn’t been right since.And that was in the eighties! LOL!

By: David

David — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:38:39 +0000

I have used a similar trick for slow-watering particular plants that need deep watering, such as celery. For each celery plant, I take a plastic gallon milk jug and poke a small hole in the bottom corner. It is easy to fill this jug with a garden hose and it will then take several hours to drip. If the flow is too slow, it is easy to enlarge the hole with a stick or screwdriver. I haven’t tried using compost tea, but as long as the hole doesn’t get plugged, it should work well. The sock approach allows you to use more concentrated vermicompost while a milk jug allows you to quickly see if a refill of water/tea is necessary.

By: Bentley

Bentley — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:38:36 +0000

Thanks for the input everyone!

JULIE – The material left over would be nice, rich humus and would certainly be an excellent material for your soil. A lot of the nutrients and microbial potency will be gone by then – but it will still improve the porosity of your clay soil and help to boost/support the soil ecosystem.

If there are cocoons in the material I suspect they would hatch out before too long and if the worms don’t find any food value left in the material they’ll likely find some way to get out of the sock (pretty good at squeezing through small spaces).

By: julie

julie — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:13:45 +0000

i like it too 🙂 it’s the little things. I was reading this and going : wow… duh…so simple… so common sense, when you think about it, yet, I haven’t …

curious to see how it evolves over time and the effects of soil, plants,etc around it… can’t wait to try it out too in my container tomatoes and in my clay garden

I’m already sifting through a bag of clothes I didn’t dare donate but didn’t want to throw in the thrash either.

also curious, what happens to the vermicompost after having been soaked, watered, and leaking all the nutrients out for a long time… what’s left, is it re-usable? does the micro-fauna/flora replenishes itself? does it die out? do worm cocoons hatch and do worm live in it happily?

By: Sharon

Sharon — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 01:30:42 +0000

Hey, I actually think the vermisock is a pretty good idea. I think I might try that. it would be more convenient than making the tea and each plant could have their own sock. At the end of the season you could just dump what was left in the sock in the plant pot and start again next year. Yes, I like this idea Bentley!

By: John Duffy

John Duffy — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 01:30:14 +0000

Waste not, want not…Seems like a reasonable idea to me