DIY Trommel Sifter for Compost

My composting method makes compost with very little effort, but it needs sifting to separate the undecomposed material from the compost.

The first sifting method relied on rubbing the compost through a wire mesh placed over a wheelbarrow - that was way too much work. 

Then I found this instructable on making a rotating sifter, called a "trommel". The one I built from this idea used a wooden frame that could rest on my garden cart.  It was OK, but having to lift the trommel and frame off the cart to move the compost to the garden and then set it up again to continue sifting was a nuisance.

First trommel with supporting frame

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Tilling and Plowing Tips for Gardeners

Everything I know about tilling and plowing gardens I learned from a horse. He was a darned smart horse.  I learned to use a garden tiller in my uncle's 1-acre garden plot, walking behind a small, horse-drawn cultivator. It was not easy, but the horse was twice my age, knew 10 times more about cultivating than I did, and he plowed the way he knew it should be done.

Farmer plowing in Germany. Photo: Ralf Roletschek

Unfortunately for suburban gardeners, their garden tillers don't have the brains of a plow horse guiding them through the process. Let me pass on what I learned from that old horse (and my uncle).

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DIY Cheap Compost Bin

Twenty dollars in materials and a handful of paperclips is all you need to make a sturdy, functional compost bin that holds almost a cubic yard of material.  This will make one wire bin, about 3 feet in diameter and 4 feet high. Wire compost bins will not produce compost as quickly as solid-sided bins that allow frequent turning and they can be untidy looking. However, "cheap and easy" is my gardening motto.

You will need about 8x4 feet of space for the assembled bin to allow room to rake around it and room to remove the compost later.

Compost bin, almost full

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Mary Kay Ash and the Missing Marriages

Mary Kay Ash said, "A woman who will tell her age will tell anything." She never told her age. She also never mentioned other details that might have interfered with her carefully crafted public image as the plucky divorced single mother of three from the wrong side of the tracks who founded a cosmetics company to give women like her a chance. Somewhere, somehow, she managed to lose track of several of her five (or seven) husbands.

Mary Kay Ash had seven husbands? Yes, it appears that Mary Kay Ash had seven of them, not the three that are usually acknowledged in her various biographies.


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Watching Grass Grow: Week Eleventy To Mow or Not to Mow, That is the Question

 It's Fluffy!  It's Green!

I came back after a summer's absence to find that the lawn had not missed my care.  This is  what dethatching, fertilizing, and a few heavy rains can do for a lawn,  It was fluffy and green and dense.

Buffalo Grass, Sept 21, 2014,
Mowed 6+ Weeks Ago

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Gimme Shelter! Queen's Wreath (Antigonon leptopus)

We needed shade for the west wall of the house to keep the electric bills down, so we built an arbor. Then came the discussion of what to grow on it.

• We wanted pretty flowers, if possible.
• We wanted native plants if possible.
• We needed a thornless vine
• We needed heat loving vines that would cover the arbor for the summer.
• We wanted a perennial vine to come back every year.
• We needed a drought tolerant vine in case we slacked on the watering.

TAH DAH!!!!  The winner was Queen's Wreath Vine (Antigonon leptopus), an  incredibly hardy, fast-growing, flamboyantly blooming native from the lower parts of the Sonoran desert.

Unlike the "other native", Cat's Claw (Macfadyena unguis-cati), Queens wreath is frost-tender and dies back to the ground every winter.  It's a less aggressive grower and can be controlled with occasional pruning.

Except for the trees ... It goes from the arbor to the old orange tree and covers it like a hat. This doesn't appear to harm the tree, and the oranges ripen under the vine.  We pull the vine out when the oranges are ripe.

Queen's Wreath Covering Orange Tree
(the tree is the mound at the left)

Are Bees a Problem?

Queen's Wreath attracts bees, dozens of honey bees and wild alkali bees - it's a great way to attract pollinators to your garden all summer long. 

Because it's growing on an arbor, the flowers are all "up there" and so are the bees. You can sit under the arbor and listen to the bees, but they stay with the flowers.

Self-Seeding

This is a prolific seed-producer. The quail and other seed-eating birds forage under the arbor most of the year, gorging on seeds.  They don't find them all, and those that land in a moist spot will germinate.

They pop up all over the yard, but they are easy to recognize and pull up.

Volunteer Queen's Wreath Seedlings
(after a summer of unusually heavy rains)

Removing the Dead Vines

We need to remove the vines every year or they build up a heavy, ugly dead mess on the arbor. The stems tend to lie on top of an arbor instead of twining through the mesh. We left space between the top of the vertical mesh and the side of the top mesh to make vine removing easier, and there is a foot or so between the top mesh and the wall of the house.

Removing the old vines in early winter is easy. Don't let them get dry and brittle.

1. Trim off all dangling vines at the top and edges of the trellis or arbor.
2. Roll up any mat of vines that is on top of an arbor and toss it in the compost heap. A rake works well to get the mat going.
   You may need to clip a few stems, but Queen's Wreath is more of a sprawler than a clinging vine on a horizontal lattice or mesh.
3. If you have room, get behind the trellis and cut the stems that you can find passing behind the trellis.
4. If the trellis is large, cut the stems to divide the growth into vertical sections 3 or 4 feet wide.
5. Start pulling the vines down from the sunny side.  I use a rake and pull from the top down, rolling the vines as I pull.  This removes most of the growth. 
6. Cut the stems close to the roots.
7. That's it until next year.

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The Yahoo Files: Coming Soon

When Yahoo!  (aka Associated Content)  shut down its article publishing, they returned rights to the authors.

I'll be reposting the relevant ones here over the next few weeks, as I have time to reformat and find good pictures.
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Garden Fox on Candid Camera

We moved the camera and got a better head shot. The ears do not look large enough to be a Kit fox, so we'll call it a grey fox.  The desert foxen are less fluffy than the ones in colder climates, especially with summer coming.

It appears to spot the camera, bobs it head up and down - a common tactic to check something out - and strolls off.

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Do Arizona Foxes Poop in the Woods?

I don't know, but they are pooping in my garden.  We were curious about the source of non-feline feces repeatedly appearing in the side yard and set up a trail cam.

One or two foxes stroll into the camera's field of view and take advantage of my facilities.  The clips were taken a few minutes apart, so it may be one fox making a loop around the side yard.

This also explains a chewed-up leather work glove and probably the disappearance of the tree rats.

It's probably a kit fox (Vulpes macrotis)  or maybe a small Gray Fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus).  It's hard to tell with the infrared images.
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Watching Grass Grow: Blue Grama Grass

Another Experiment

This is a total experiment ... I over-seeded the buffalo grass with another low-care native grass from the short-grass prairies, Blue grama grass, (Bouteloua gracilis).

It's supposed to sprout in 5 or 6 days, so for a couple of weeks the lawn is getting a couple of minutes of water 3 times a day to encourage the seeds. Then we'll cut back as the Blue Grama gets established.

Blue grama. Bouteloua gracilis at Minnesota Landscape Arboretum
Photo by SEWilco from Wikimedia Commons

If it works, I'll know when we see seed heads pop up in the late summer.  The birds will love it, and maybe it will help choke out the Bermuda grass.

Blue Grama grown as an ornamental accent in Japan.

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