Saturday, October 31, 2009

A Fall "work outside day"


Last week, Terry dug up most of our compost and I explained that we have a two section compost. Well, today was the day to fill it all back up with yard stuff. What do we put in our compost... well. dead flower pots killed by frost. Dead and dried up vines and leaves from the yard.


As Terry dug out all our good compost to use later on, I dragged over all our old plant pots which were filled with dead flowers and saturated with rain water.. They were so heavy I had to wheel them in the wheel barrel. When I was dragging over my big pots from the fire pit, I noticed that the fern type plant was still as green as it was in the summer. I noticed it a few weeks ago, but figured it would be dead any day. This was what it looked like in August, and then the frosts came and reduced them to mush... Anyway, I decided I was going to save these ferns... and dug them out and repotted them. I was amazed at the roots.. and the weird lumpy things coming out the bottom.. pretty gross. I potted up both of the ferns and I will bring the smaller one to work for my office and the other will stay home. When I was potting them I came across a tag which said they are Foxtail Fern. I read a blog about a lady who had one that was over 30 years old.... and it sounds fairly easy to grow.. Once Terry got the big side of the compost completely emptied out, I took the opportunity to snap a shot, to show how a compost works. This is like a dissection of our bigger one, and we have lots of good loam in our small side, which we will need to figure out what to do with. Now to fill the bigger half with all the yard waste... it will be black soil by this time next year! Look who is hiding under the BBQ hoping I would forget that she was outside... "can't see me, can't see me!" Ah, geesh, how did you know I was there....

2 comments:

cpm said...

bahahaha! Steph must love the cat pictures! You capture the perfect shots everytime!
Awesome composting system! You are a very good environmentalist! and you were one even before it was "cool" lol!

Anonymous said...

I do love the cat pictures. Also she has a look on her face like "hey, spiders aren't very tasty, did you know that?"