Batter batter swing!

In the past two days I've been to tried to go to three four five places looking for compost. 

Yesterday after work:

1.  Meadows Farms Nursery.  It's big and appears to be strongly oriented to landscaping.  They had Black Kow in 50 pound bags for $10 each.  Definite Maybe, but yikes on the price!

2.  Manassas Topsoil.  I tried to find them on the way back from the first place, and my GPS apparently lies, as I don't think there is a topsoil company in the middle of a ball park or the Manassas Museum.  I was unable to find a street address via their website, so I may try the phone number, as they supposedly have leaf/grass compost.

Today at lunch:

3.  Missed my intended target and wound up at a land development company.  They scratched their heads when I asked for compost, then kindly directed me next door, to....

4.  Shemin Nurseries, which looked wonderful.  The employees were very nice, and broke the news to me gently that they (sob!) only sell wholesale to businesses.  But they kindly referred me to....
 
Today after work:

5.  Neff Brothers.  Easy to find, but by the time I managed to get there, they were closed.  I'm going to call them tomorrow.

The sad part is this:  There are any number of places on Craigslist offering free, well-aged horse compost, just come and haul it away.  I have the truck....contractor bags would be the easiest means of transporting the stuff, I think.  But those locations are a good distance from here, and given gas prices and the terrible mileage the truck gets, it may make more sense to buy compost than pick some really good stuff for free.


Anyone got some nice compost?  Hmmm??  I need 10 cubic feet more!

Strawberry pallet

Here is how I built my first strawberry pallet.  It's not quite complete yet, as I didn't have quite enough soil (Mel's Mix plus straw, leftover from my potato high-rise last year) to completely fill it, but I'm very pleased with it nonetheless.

Backstory:  This all began with planning for my compost bins.  I don't like my plastic compost bin.  It's big, but very difficult to turn the compost since it's basically a huge bucket with a lid.  I'd much rather have something I can pitchfork into from the side.  Also, I want a "double-wide" bin so I can have compost finishing on one side, and filling in on the other side with fresh material.  And I also wanted it as close to free as possible.  The trick, though, was to make something fairly presentable looking.

I was at a complete loss on how to do "presentable" AND "nearly free", and had almost given up on the "nearly free" part, when I stumbled across a website that showed compost bins built with pallets.  That is nothing new of course... but what they'd done was to stuff the pallets with straw books and planted the tops with flowers.  Brilliant!  I likey!

So, I set out to improve on the original.

I got a number of free pallets from the business next to mine.  They aren't all the same size, but hopefully "close" will be good enough.  I started with the smallest one, which was 2nd best in terms of overall condition.  I sanded it down and rasped off the worst wood splinters (mental note: belt sander does nothing to remove huge wood splinters), then stained it to match the lumber for my (soon-to-be-built) raised beds, some of which you can see in the background here.

I stapled a double thickness of landscaping fabric onto the back and bottom, and wrapping it around the sides as well.

 From there, flip over, fill lightly but firmly with soil, and plant away.....then water lightly.
 

These are Ozark Beauty ever-bearing strawberries.  From what I read on the package I have actually over-planted.  The spacing is supposed to be 24"... but I'd left the 15-pack languishing indoors for too long, so I'll move some later if need be.  To help it settle, the pallet will lie flat a while.

This pallet is much heavier than the straw-filled ones I'm planning for the compost bin--for those, I hope to use plastic planting bag for the berries and/or flowers I'll be using--so it will either become a fixed side  of the bin, or it may find another home.  Yay for more strawberries!

I'm back!

I must apologize.  I found out last year that blogging took more time than I thought it would.  I'm going to try again, though, so if you are still reading after such a long hiatus, thank you kindly for checking back!

My garden from last year ended up doing very well.  I got a huge harvest, and with help from some dear net-friends, learned how to do water-bath canning, too.  My HOA was displeased with my front gardening adventures, but they were nice enough to let me finish out the season.  This year, the front yard will be flowers and herbs as always, along with some greens.  The "big stuff" is moving to the backyard, and expanding quite a bit in scope.

Up until now I had thought it would be impossible to garden successfully in the back.  It's the south side of the house, but just too dark.  That has changed, though, due to the removal of some huge trees earlier this spring.  I'm not keen at all on tree killing, but these had to come out.  The biggest one was diseased and was dropping big, dangerous branches, and the other one was knocking down a privacy fence.

Since then, I've done several full days worth of work back there.  Cleared 11 lawn/leaf bags, 3 contractor bags, have brought in lumber, most of my new Mel's Mix materials (some left to go) and have the boxes planned, stained and pre-drilled.  The biggest wrench in the works has been the weather.  We are into the rainy season here and tough to get 2 clear, warm days in a row.

I am working on a strawberry pallet that I'm eager to share with you, and if it works out I am hoping to extend the idea to my new compost bins.