New...residents? employees? pets?

Last night, I scurried up to Madison for a class at Olbrich Botanical Garden about Vermicomposting. It was an interesting class. She demonstrated setting up a worm bin using a small storage container and talked about caring for and maintaining the worms and bin, as well as finding supplies around town. With her description, it would have been quite straightforward to get the parts together and set up a worm bin, but she had sample bins for sale for $10 at the class. I figured that the convenience of not having to run errands up in Madison to collect parts and to find the time to put the pieces together made the price seem like a pretty good deal, so I came home with a worm bin complete with worms and a first bit of food for them to eat.
The bin:

and one of the residents:

We added some coffee grounds and scraps from prepping tomatoes for canning tomato today. We will still be feeding our compost bin in the yard, but picking out the choice bits to feed the worms. Especially this time of year when there is a whole lotta canning going on, we generate a ton of compost! All three kids are pretty excited about it, but my bug boy Beeb is especially taken by them. Before bed last night, he came up to me and said, "Thank you for getting us worms, Mommy."
So are they merely new residents in our household? Employees who are producing some fantastic soil amendments in exchange for room and board? Or pets that we have to check on and talk to regularly throughout the day?

Creative Energy

As the school year winds to a close for the public school kids, we have been sticking a littler closer to home that usual. EVERYBODY is taking end of the year field trips and some of our favorite places are unusually crowded with large groups of kids whose spirits are already on summer vacation, even if their bodies aren't! Since none of us really enjoys too much chaos, we'll wait them out and enjoy our favorite places again in a couple of weeks.

Even though we haven't been out and about so much, we have been busy! Here Bean models one of two new mama-made dresses. Over Memorial Day, we got a lot of good stuff on sale at JoAnn's and I also had two 40% off coupons, so I got two pieces of shirred fabric to make her two quick and easy dresses. I got most of both done yesterday, with just sewing down three more strap ends on the second dress. The straps on one dress have taken longer that the whole rest of the two dresses combined, but they are still pretty cute, instant gratification projects! The other is lime green with bright lady bugs, but pink with froggies will probably be her favorite of the two.

The boys got their summer hair cuts, so all three posed for a picture. I got a cute picture of Bug alone, but didn't have the same luck with Beeb. He didn't want to stand still, so one is focused and has his eyelids at half mast, so he looks stoned and the other is blurry. But the group picture turned out nicely for all of them!

Another project that has spun off of the loft project is a new flower press. We have lots of odds and ends of plywood left over, so I cut a couple of pieces and got bolts to make this:

After getting it put together, we made a trip out to a nearby state park and picked some wild flowers to press. Now I need to remember to ask at the grocery store for some corrugated boxes to make more layers! Then we can carry it with us when we go to the park and have some nice flat flowers to use in some of Bean's art projects or other activities (I have some ideas percolating...more later, I'm sure)!

Want some pot?

Oops. I mean pots. Pots. You know, for planting seeds. One of the conference session was making seed pots from used paper. We made four Dixie cup sized pots in the session, but only three made it home (one got kind of smooshed).

Aside for the tomato saga:
We planted tomato seeds in March to get ready for the garden. We used the store-bought peat pods and had them in the kitchen. They went from seeds to seedlings with two leaves about two inches tall quite rapidly, but then just stayed there. They were also pretty pale, so the problem seemed to be not enough light. So after we harvested seeds from our FastPlants last week, I immediately re-purposed the bottle-pots and light box for tomotoes. I decided to start from scratch rather than further abuse the spindly little seedling. By the time we got home from Oshkosh, many of the seeds had sprouted and are a bright, healthy-looking green, so they will need to be separated soon so we don't end up with one big mass of roots! So we need pots. Back to the actual blog entry...

So, as I said, we need pots. So last night I decided that we could make some more paper pots. The session leader did a brief explanation and then we got to observe parts of the process (not necessarily in order), so what follows is my take on making paper seed pots.

Last night I pulled some shredded paper from the recycle bin under the paper shredder and and covered it with water and left it to soak. The very elegant bucket is a repurposed empty kitty litter bucket.

This morning I started the pots. First, I drained the water off the (now mushy) shredded paper. Then I added some water to the blender container and added a lump of mushy paper shreds (it's a technical term...deal with it). I had to experiment a bit with how much water and how much mush. Too much of both and it slops up the sides and leaks out around the lid. Too much mush and the blades make an air bubble and whir around in nothing so you have to stop and start to get it smooth. I found I could get a bit more in the blender if I started at a slow speed and then jumped to faster speeds.

Blended pulp. Mmmm...yummy!

I poured it into a strainer and shook and tapped it to get as much water out as I could. I also squeezed a little more water out with my hands. If there is too much water it doesn't hold its shape and takes forever to dry. If I squeezed out too much water, it didn't want to mold nicely. So I left it fairly wet and squeezed more water out as I pressed it into the "mold." For the conference session, we used Dixie cups. Today I used yogurt containers rescued from the recycle bin. The bottom of a milk carton or jug would work, too, for bigger pots.

I just kept smooshing in more pulp like play dough until the inside was covered evenly. Then I smooshed out as much water as I could and put them out in the sun to dry. The Dixie cup ones from Saturday weren't completely dry, but they were dry enough to pop out of the cups and I think they will finish drying in the sun quickly. I'll leave the new ones until enough water has drained/evaporated so they aren't mushy and then pop them out of the cups to finish drying.

Here is one of the cups from Saturday. I think the last bit of dampness will be gone after being in the sun today and it will be ready for seeds or seedlings! Then when it's time to go out in the garden, the cup can just be planted directly into the soil, where it will degrade as the plant grows. For this reason, it's not a bad idea to think about how the donor paper has been treated. Newspaper made from post-consumer waste with soy ink is probably better than those shiny, multi-colored sale flyers and coupons, if ya know what I mean.

This has also gotten me thinking about trying out some paper-making with the kids. Yeah, I'm definitely an "ooo, shiny" kinda gal.

I'm also thinking that this will make a great dead-of-winter, no-sign-of-spring-in-sight project. We can start thinking about what seeds we'll want to plant and the resident artist can draw pictures on the pots so we'll remember what to plant where when the time comes.

The best part of the project is, for my cheapskate self, total project cost: $0