Oatmeal?

Anyone ever add dry regular oatmeal to the bin? Not talking about any big quantity, just the leftovers at the bottom of the package.

Sure, no problem. I use to pulverize oatmeal with a mortar and pestle then feed on the surface of the bin. I had several bins at the time and found some grindal worms in the bin. These are tiny 1-2 mm long white worms which made excellent fish food for my native fish collections. I placed the ground dry oatmeal on the surface of the bin and placed a piece of wet burlap over the top. Then I place a glass cover over the top of the burlap and a piece of black plastic over the top of the glass. Several times a day I would remove the glass cover with the bottom side completely covered with the grindal worms and immerse the glass cover in one of my twenty aquariums. Fish absolute devoured these tiny worms in a matter of seconds. Please excuse the anicdote.

there ya go morgan..feeding those poor worms to your fish..
LOL
starting to feel like fall here.. sigh.. oh well..
ive given my worms oatmeal too..
morgan is the man when it comes to taking care of his worms..
im ... not lazy..but..my worms tolerate me.. :)
i just pour hot water on the oatmeal.. stir.. and let cool..then
feed the worms..
wait.. morgan..u have 20 tanks??? omg..
i thought i was nuts.. lol
when i was breeding freshwater angels..i had 32.. and wow..
that was alot of work..
tomatoes are comming in strong now.. finally.. seems same with everyone
here.. vegy gardens were slow this summer..

Tomato program changes next year. I WILL have them in their cages no later than May 15 complete with blossoms and maybe even some tomatoes. All this talk about formulas for potted plants has given me some ideas on how I will do tomatoes and hot peppers in the future. Will be needing lots of vermicompost and starting with seed plantings no later than mid-February. I have selected three varieties of tomatoes for next season. Fourteen each of Stupice, Black Cherry, and Sungold. They will all be potted up in 2.5 gallon pots. Stupice go into cages and the cherry tomatoes will be allowed to sprawl with a plastic sheet cover for night time until mid-June which is about our last frost date. This year was the shortest season we can remember. Still waiting for the Stupice tomatoes to ripen in their covered cages and hopefull we will get some corn which has been really slow to develope this year.

I sold my two stands which held nine aquariums each a number of years ago, however I still maintain several aquariums Dave and I use the gravel siphoned water to water seedlings and potted plants. Currently I am using it to blend scraps for the worms. We have buckets full of garden refuse which will ultimately be composted with the worms. We just harvested four rows of potatoes and I found a few of the European night crawlers in the area where we dug the potatoes. Apparently they didn't like the outdoor compost bin and decided to try out the garden instead. They were all healthy looking so I'm waiting to see if they will survive the winter in the garden. Would be nice to have them establish themselves in the garden.

Cucumbers and squash are about finished. We have had several frosts and very few buds are left. Leaves are turning black on the zucchini and the cucumber leaves are just about dead. I will till that area shortly and I'm interested in seeing how many of the red wigglers are still in the holes I dug for these two varieties of plants. Occasional I find a few red wigglers in the spring in the areas where I have previously planted cucumbers, squash and tomatoes. They are a darker red color then the ones in my bin and they are never over an inch and a half in length. I usually don't find many in the spring when I till however, I am convinced they did their job in keeping the soil well aerated around these plants. I mulched with clover hay as well around these plants this year and did some shallow cultivating. No surprise to find a few worms close to the surface.

I still plan to add compost worms or red wigglers to the holes dug for these three plants in the future even if the Euro's take hold in the garden. I think that was one experiment that went very well and would encourage others who don't have any indigenous worms in their gardens to give it a try. It's sort of like the 'put and take' fish places I use to take the kids when they were younger.

wow. several frosts already.. i guess i should be grateful for just 50sF so far..
its been a real short season here too..:( one friend who grows probably 1000 tomatoes..
sells at flea markets/farmers markets... is lucky to pick 2 buchels of tomatoes a week..
thats nothing for her.. in a "normal" yr...
i took your advice and glad i did..started my own tomatoes from seed..
i planted all heirlooms this yr.. plants did great..and had WAY more than i needed..LOL
i gave away a bunch of plants..
i hope next yr brings a better growing season for us !!!
i keep harvesting my castings.. i'll save them up for next
late winter for potting up my tropicals..
tropicals did well this yr..despite the short season..
i will be getting help in next few weeks pulling everything out.. ohh..myyyy achingggg
backkkkkk...
LOL
did start a late compost..i used one of the compost tea as starter..and wow.. did it
get cooking fast.. might be pretty well done by nov..
yea..

Dave, fyi, I helped a DG friend in Bozeman start a compost bin with red wigglers and she has been telling me about starting her second bin using coco choir. She likes to experiment as well and is going to try composting some black soldier flies. Looks interesting. Maybe she can share some information with us in this forum. As ususal things really slow down here this time of year. I am still looking for some new ideas on using vermicompost and I think I have come up with one that just might be fun. More later.

very cool morgan!! i think we gardeners are very..inovative.....
your friend wanting to use coir.. tell her US orchid supply out of oxnard,CA is
probably the best price on coir..where we have to have it shipped to us.. in calif they
are lucky to have so many orchid growers easy to come by..i think on east coast and in south
same..
places i dug in coir in gardens(EE and bananas) the worm population is big..and there are some
nice fishin worms in there.. :) lol
i have couple friends.. fishing friends..that know they have a source of good worms here..
ya..things are slowing down here too..
ive stopped watering vegy garden.. we had rain alittle yesterday so im sure tomatoes
appreciated that..

Dave, is choir a generic term? I thought choir most commonly used was from cotton seed hulls. It seems to me there must be a variety of products of a choir nature which once composted make great plant additives. From the sounds of it choir seems much easier to work with than peat moss because of the overnight soaking and dewatering process I use to reduce acidity. I add copious amounts of egg shells to the blended food which I feed the worms so the 'spent media' which I removed from the surface at each feeding is virtually neutral pH.

Doesn't seem there is much going on in the vermiculture form so I don't think our friend busterharrel will mind a little deviation here in this thread. I wanted to update you on a new project which involves using spent media from my indoor worm bins as well as composted cow manure from the outdoor bins. I have combined information from a number of sources including tapla's formula for potted plants to come up with a Christmas project I am calling the indoor/outdoor pepper plant. The pepper seed selected is from the Maui peppers Ozark (Sam) sent me which change color three times during their development. The second or purple colored peppers are slim, conical shaped and point downwards on the plant. These are absolutely beautiful plants and the peppers are extremely hot. Bet you can't eat more than one!!

Anyway, the idea was to develop a layered potting mix which would allow the plants to be moved indoors for the winter and back outside when spring arrives. Pepper plants according to Sam and others can last for years potted up properly. So by combining about a dozen different ideas from various sources I now have 38 potted pepper plants which include Jalapeno, Cayenne, Jolorol and a couple of mild Banana peppers plants for some of the wife's recipes. I plan to start about two dozen of the Maui pepper plants for Christmas presents this year, I put together a short brochure to go with each one on how to maintain these potted pepper plants which is fairly simple actually. .

hey morgan..i think the term "coir" is a generic term yes.. and coconut coir the coir from coconut
husks.. most comming from sri lanka.. i understand many some locals there have made a going business
in processing the coco husks.. :)
i like coco coir for its pH nuetralality.. and staying around longer than peat... thru my experimentation
and readings..ive come up with my own mix..as i guess all of us gardeners do..what works best for us..in
our particualar location..
i understand same on peppers... great idea u have there morgan on keeping peppers over..ive read of some
doing it.. ? so do the peppers go dormant then pick up when the temps go up again???
if it works sure will help u with the short growing season u have up there...and for the likes of a growing season
many of us had this summer...
keep us posted >>>>

Not all peppers overwinter well. In my experience the sweet peppers do not, while the hotter peppers seem to do well. In a pepper thread I read that the wood stemmed peppers are more prone to overwintering in a dormant state, however, I want to see if they will remain productive. Last winter I experimented some with an idea on aphid control which is my biggest problem. All the sweet peppers became infested during a two week trip and when I got back even some of the hot pepper plants had aphids on them. The experiment after the fact seemed to help the hot peppers recover, but the bells were a complete loss. I incorporated the ingredients into the upper layer of media on my current batch of 38 potted pepper plants which will soon be moved inside. Two of the potted plants are sweet banana pepper plants which will be isolated with one kept active and the other allowed to go dormant. The sweet peppers are simply a test to see if the media will sustain these plants over winter. If so, I will compare the productivity against some newly potted sweet peppers to see what the results are. Cayenne and Maui peppers have done the best in over wintering in the past but I started with new plants this season instead of trying to replant the old. The triple layer of media idea is what I believe will allow these plants to continue producing over several years.

Thanks Dave for the feedback on the choir. Will spend some time this winter checking out some various choir media recipes.