Plans for the spring?

[gumbogumbo]

What are you all planning for this spring? I'm thinking cucumbers, radishes, lettuce, and strawberries for me. Marigolds to fend away a bug or two. I only container garden, so I have to get myself a decent trellis before the season starts. Maybe this year I'll actually use compost. What about you?

Comments

[cyprinella]

I have compost! So much compost! I actually have a problem where my compost is too N heavy because it's all poultry manure and straw. I'm really hoping the couple of bags of bone meal I've dumped in there will help balance things out. Last year my tomato plants were huge and leafy and never set any fruit.

But otherwise I haven't looked at my seed spreadsheet yet. I usually wait until I get the seed catalogs after the first of the year.

[bridgetmkennitt]

*crosses fingers* Good luck with the composting!

[tielan]

Oh man, I need more poultry manure (I have two chooks and they do an okay-ish job, but right now I also have an entire woodchip mulch pile decomposing on my lawn).

Unfortunately anyone around here that keeps chooks also keeps the poop for their own gardens. Hm. Although I have a friend with five chooks that might not have a use for the straw bedding of her chooks. I might give her call.

Compost is AMAZING, though, when it comes to getting gardens sprouting...

[cyprinella]

I mean, raising 40 ducks and 20 chickens over the course of six months on a townhouse lot is a quick and easy way to get lots! ;)

(they have since moved onto more appropriately sized pasture and I just have two secret ducks shhhhh)

We also do kitchen scraps and the husband is a big coffee drinker which adds a good amount of N too.

[tielan]

That would indeed be an effective way to get lots of poultry manure! I might start by contacting my friend, though. :D

The kitchen scraps go to the worms or the broader compost, but you've just reminded me to contact the local coffee shops and roasters in the area. I just have to get them to fill up some big buckets with the used grounds...

[jottingprosaist]

I still miss the big compost bin at my parents' place. But I'm determined to continue composting at my rental home, which means... I've been chucking my kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and powdered eggshells off the side of my front steps. Behind a big cedar that hides the mess. Hopefully in the spring I'll dig it all into the dirt and have nobody be the wiser.

[cyprinella]

So I have a couple of largeish Rubbermaid bins (they're the Roughneck 25 gal) that I compost in. I drilled holes in it following these directions and it works really well! Obviously not quickly as my big bedding pile does since it doesn't get hot the same way a big pile would but it does reduce the suburban trash pests getting in it.

I also seem to end up with soldier flies in it every year which is both a blessing and a curse: Great poultry food and churns through organic waste FAST but also gets anaerobic fast and you have these wasp-looking flies around.