Bean gets a new home

Bean has been doing so well I decided to reward it with a housing upgrade. Actually, bean was busting out of its original cup so I decided it was time to go Venti. I'm really curious to see if the clear cup makes a difference. Will it dry out faster? Will it get warmer? Will the sun hurt the roots? We'll see.


Plants have a way of finding the smallest spaces and making the most of them, huh?



Funny thing is this is the non-worm water bean plant, so that may not be working out the way I thought it would. Maybe the other one will make a push soon. If so I'll have to make another trip to my local Starbucks.

Let's see what worms can do.

One of the coolest features of the Christmas worm farm is that beyond delivering rich, dark, beautiful organic soil, it also produces a fertilizer tea. Using gravity and time, plant-loving worm juice/sweat/whatever makes its way down to a reservoir in the bottom of the farm. Every now and then you just turn the spigot and you've got yourself some delicious fertilizer tea. Then you mix it with some water and feed it to your plants.



I'm going to try an experiment in the stair well garden. One set of plants gets the worm water, and the other gets the regular old water.


And yes, "W" stands for Worm.

Bean is officially not messing around.

I made this mark on the string yesterday, and it looks like Bean took it as a challenge.

Good job, Bean.

I got worms. Wait, that didn't sound right.

I got a worm composter for Christmas, so I guess you could say I have officially geeked out on this gardening thing. It's called the Can-o-Worms and it was a pretty cool gift. The only problem was I had to order the worms separately and thanks to the snowstorms in the Northeast that took a while. Turns out worms aren't too fond of cold weather. But now I have them and they are settling in nicely.





My only knock on gardening is there's a lot of waiting while slow things do things slowly. Composting with worms is no exception. Although it's much faster than regular composting - or so I'm told. It may be a while before I'm adding the castings (fancy word for worm poo) to my garden, but I'm looking forward to it.

Monday morning check in

Since I've started this project I 've found Monday's a little more bearable because I look forward to seeing how much things have grown in my stairwell garden - it's the little things. Here's what welcomed me today.

Not too shabby.


Bean's on fire.


The Morning Glory's not moving as fast as I would have thought.


Tomato's on the move.

Red redemption

Looks like I spoke too soon.

Good job, Tomato.

Slow Tomato

My stairwell greenhouse theory may not be as tight as I thought. I put a tomato in two weeks ago and as of yet there's no movement. While the stairwell does get a lot of light and heats up most days, the outside door gets opened often and there's no heating in there. It's pretty chilly at night and early morning, so I'm not sure if tomato has the warmth it needs.

C'mon Tomato, I believe in you.

Gardens aren't just for the workplace, you know.

We had the backyard completely re-done so I got a late start on my own garden this year. Usually we'd be about halfway to a salad by now, but I think it's going to work out. Plus I'm really happy with the outcome of the yard. (The potted veggies took a bit of a beating in the construction though. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt before I just start over.)

Part of the upgrade was to give us this dedicated garden site. It came out so well I kinda wish we had gone a little bigger.

We have growth

The beans and the morning glories are on the move. The beans had a bit of a slow start but they have really taken off recently. The morning glories seem to be doing the opposite, though. This may have been the result of not getting enough water early on. One of the problems with doing this at the office is that when I have a long weekend or holiday the plants have to go without water for a few days. I'm committed to these plants and all, but a weekend is a weekend.

By the looks of it I'd say they bounced back just fine.



Struggle, struggle, struggle...


Then BAM, IMMA PLANT!


BTW, we're all caught up now and running in real time.

Let's start small

Every morning I enter the agency through an employee-only side entrance. Beyond being conveniently close to my office, it's also conveniently south facing with huge windows. On a sunny day - which is most days in Southern California - it gets pretty toasty in there. I've always wondered if it would be a good place to grow something, so a couple of weeks ago I decided to put it to the test.

The first step was to figure out a way pot the seeds. I decided to go low tech and use some things I could find around the office. It's cheaper and ultimately more fun I think. So as with most things I started with a sketch...

...and then moved on to the real thing. Since the area is in a stairwell I needed a way hang the plants, so drinking cups, twine and coffee sleeves seemed to make sense. And since my employers would frown on water being all over the floor, I went with the cup-in-a-cup approach.

So, what to plant? I decided to start with Kentucky Wonder Pole Bean and Grandpa Ott's Morning Glory. I chose these two for a couple of reasons: they're both climbers which makes sense given the stairwell's vertical setting, and since it should be nice and warm I thought I'd go with a couple of summer season choices. I also thought it would be interesting to have one that's ornamental and one that's edible. Not to mention the Morning Glory might encourage me to get to work earlier so I could see them in full bloom. We'll see.

And now, we wait.