Search Results for: label/water%20conservation/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

820 results

Straw Bale Garden Part III: Adding Fertilizer

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Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
31 Comments
...l does not have much nitrogen in it.) Choosing the organic approach, we’re watering in two cups of blood meal a day to each bale for days four to six. Days seven through nine, we’ll cut back to one cup of blood meal per bale. By day ten the bales should be almost ready to plant. Once the bales are conditioned I’ll need to add a balanced organic fertilizer to provide potassium and phosphorous. And I discovered that taking the time to level the bale...

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What’s in Worm Leachate?

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Composting, Gardening, Vermiculture
4 Comments
...leachate (the liquids the flow our of your worm bin) from a home vemicompost setup. It’s pretty strong stuff! Gillman concludes, this could be a great liquid fertilizer if it were used properly. I’d recommend diluting it somewhere between 1:1 and 1:5 worm juice : water before applying it, and I’d only apply it once every week or two. If you want to use it, try it on something that you’re not too concerned about first, just to make sure that it doe...

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Straw Bale Garden Part IV: Almost Ready to Plant?

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Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
18 Comments
...been “conditioning” my straw bale garden by adding blood meal and a lot of water. During the conditioning process we had both a freak rainstorm (helpful) and a freak heatwave (not so good). The bales did not heat up as much as I expected–as of this morning they are around 80° F, around 15° to 20° higher than the ambient temperature. Several sources I checked, however, suggest that this is hot enough. The test will be when I plant seedlings. If the...

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Radish Surprise

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Gardening, Miscellaneous, Permaculture, Vegetable Gardening
15 Comments
...he radish plant really is quite pretty, the equal of any ornamental flowering shrub–but as bad is the picture is, it gives you some scale. See the bales of our straw bale garden behind it? I think it must be pulling water from there, which accounts for its size and longevity. It’s gone a little past its prime now– a couple of weeks ago the blooms were thicker. By the way, radish blossoms are tasty food for people, too....

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