Nature and Gardening

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All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.

See also our Environment community, which is focused on weather, climate, climate change, and stuff like that.

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This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

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What's growing on, Beehaw? (beehaw.org)

submitted 2 days ago by LallyLuckFarm@beehaw.org to c/greenspace@beehaw.org

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I spent a huge chunk of yesterday helping a friend transplant bits of his garden from his old house to his new house. We must have dug up at least forty irises and tons of peonies, marigolds, and various other plants. He was kind enough to split some of the clumps with me, and he's planning to split me some white dutch irises that are already growing at his new place.

What's growing on with you all?

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[–] wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I would have thought the same thing years ago when I was reading the humanure handbook. I used to only use fully rotted compost in the holes for the plants, and that usually wasn't available in anywhere near sufficient quantity (as I was planting hundreds of trees back then), so I'd need to go into the forest and scrape up the 1cm layer of topsoil and carry it back in buckets (usually uphill) to mix in when back-filling the holes. It's a wonder that I could sustain that as long as I did. Meanwhile I'd empty the toilet bucket into a ~1m^3 pile with metal mesh around it to keep it upright while allowing for aeration and a sheet of metal or hard plastic roofing over the top to keep the rain out, and I'd wait patiently for it to break down, only to have the neighbours' chickens or some other animal get into it and scatter it everywhere, and I'd need to start the pile again. Eventually I discovered that if the hole didn't hold water after a rain, and if there was sufficient dry organic material mixed in, composting in place worked quite well without it going anaerobic. Keeping it covered in the ground meant no chickens, no smell, no maintenance. As I get older, I crave simplicity more and more, so this method just makes sense.

I've since travelled around a bit, and it turns out that quite a few people also compost in-ground after discovering, as I did, that trying to compost the "proper" way didn't work very well in this climate. Some people even sheet-mulch with the contents of their toilet bucket, but I prefer not to do that in order to avoid any potential messes. (I have chicken trauma.) The only people I've met who continued to maintain aboveground compost piles long term (with underwhelming results) were those who had a fear of "germs" and ate cookery and took vitamin B12 supplements.

The one advantage of maintaining proper compost bins was being able to harvest tomatoes out of them. Now on the rare occasions that I eat tomatoes, the seeds get buried too deep to sprout.

Of course everything that I've written here only applies to the places I've lived in the wet tropics. Someone in a colder or drier climate would almost certainly need to do things differently.