Red twig dogwood cutting being rooted
Garden time
We’re here. Even if we get more cold and even though we’re likely to have many nights of frost still. But the silver maple is redding up, the daffs on the orchard hillside are an inch out of the ground, and this grower has the need to be outside more hours than inside.
Seedlings that will go out in a few days (lettuce) and a couple of weeks (onions)
Sometimes the perennial flower beds get cleaned up on a sunny day in January but that didn’t happen this year. Clean up just means chop and drop, letting the dried stalks and such form a mulch. There’s good reason not to do more clean up than that. See below on the dried brown-eyed susan coneflower: likely a praying mantis case. I found three of them in a small patch of garden.
Dried brown eyed susan (rudbeckia) and a close-up of a praying mantis case
Vermicompost was harvested in December and has been kept moist in the cool basement, while more worms eat away at more half-finished thermophilic compost in their bins. Meanwhile, the vermicompost will go onto the plants, trees, soil, turned into an extract and then sprayed. And the vermicompost quality is terrific! I see lots of fungal hyphae of different sizes and colors, lots of different kinds of testate amoebae, and some bacterial feeding nematodes. Photos to come.
Living Systems Soil 