How to make an earwig trap

I seem to be getting a lot of earwigs in what passes for my garden, and while I wasn't aware they caused damage, I've since learned that they chew leaves, and can also be a problem on citrus trees.

My lemon tree is looking a bit battle scarred, partly because of a hail storm we had a while back that gave it a pummeling, but I have a feeling there's some new scarring too, and I've seen earwigs on the tree.

And some flowers I planted with the boys have also been given the once over by a chewing insect, some leaves are down to the midribs, and I have seen earwigs sometimes when I move potted plants.

A remedy for earwigs was presented to me when I was watching Gavin from The Greening Of Gavin.

Gavin was giving a tour of his garden for a local gardening show, when he mentioned his home made earwig traps.

After leaving Gavin a comment and getting the info straight from the man himself, I set to and made a few traps myself.

How to make an earwig trap

Take a small glass jar and pour about an inch of water in the bottom.

Next, pour about a bit less than an inch of olive oil on top of the water.

Like so:

The theory is they are attracted to the olive oil, then they get coated in it and drown

This is an old baby food jar, back from the days of my first babe before I knew better. These work perfectly, salsa jars or small jam jars would work well too.

Bury your jar so that the top lip is level with the ground and leave it alone.

Send the kids to check it every couple of days, mine love to do it.

There ya go, easy.

So far, we've caught earwigs, cockroaches (YUCK, my least favourite bug, so I'm pretty happy to be snaring them, that means there's less to come inside), a few millipedes, the odd slater and what looked like a couple of house flies.

We reset the traps today, after a weekends worth of rain overflowed one of them and put a new one right underneath the lemon tree.

Can't wait to see what we catch.

More wormies on the way....or...Free nutrition for your garden!

The worm farm I bought a few months back is in full production, I have both trays going and the worms are doing a great job. I get worm juice from it regularly to put on my plants and I've been digging out some of the castings lately to add to plants I'm potting up.

I love the fact that I'm not having to purchase fertiliser (organic or otherwise) and I also LOVE the fact that there is less green foody type waste going out in our bin.

But I haven't been able to put all our fruit and veg scraps in there, solely because we produce a lot more of them than my two trays of worms can get through in a reasonable time.

And, I would like more castings. I have been potting up a lot of plants (all fruit trees are going in pots so I can take them with me when we move, hopefully in the next year or two. The moving deadline has been put waaaaay back.) and have been having to purchase soil to do this. I have added castings to some pots which pads out the soil I've bought, as well as adding more nutrition to the pots. But I would like to increase this.

So, very exciting hehe, I've just taken receipt of these babies today:

Two more trays to add to my worm farm!

I am ridiculously happy that they've arrived (not sure what that says about my place in life, that I'm jumping for joy at two plastic trays) and can't wait to set them up.

And the kids are getting a lot of mileage out of the large cardboard box they came in, so we're all happy.

Wanna see my pets?

I think I promised a picture of all my molding, worm chewed kitchen scraps a while back, so here it is/they are....

You may want to enlarge it to see properly.

Or maybe not.

Those bright stripes are sunlight, and the worms disappear into the muck pretty darn quickly once they're exposed to it. I may have to relocate the whole shebang during the summer, I'm not quite sure how much sun this particular corner gets.

Very cool, huh?

Or is it just me..........

Squiggly squirmy, luverly wormies

Living in a small house on a smaaaallllll piece of land like we do, means we have not much room for a traditional compost bin. Nor an ongoing need for one.

However, recently I have decided to make more of a concerted effort to grow some of our own vegetables and fruits. Now, unless I want to be buying bags of compost and cow poop on a regular basis (which I have done in the past), I need a way of feeding my crops.

Enter....vermiculture. Or worm farming as it is otherwise known.

Perfect for our small property and gardening needs, no smell, and helps cut down on the amount of rubbish our family sends to landfill.

Knowing that I could buy a worm farm and worms from my local council cheaper than I could at our garden centre or hardware chain, I packed up the kids last week and we traipsed off to our local council rooms.

It's now set up in a dim corner of our front yard and is already producing 'worm juice'.....actually worm pee but I know my 5 year old would have nothing to do with it if I called it that.

After a couple of days, it occurred to me in a duh moment that I could quite possibly have made my own worm farm from materials I had laying around the place. And the internet tells me that is correct, I could have.
Not sure where my brain was that day.

Oh well.

Here is a great link that explains how to make a worm farm at home:

How to make a worm farm

You'll need compost worms, red wrigglers or the like, as regular earthworms will not survive in your worm farm. These are easily available in boxes of 1000 from hardware stores and garden centres. Or maybe online if you can't find them round your area.

Give them all your kitchen scraps, except meat, dairy, citrus, onion and anything with lots of sugar. They will get through it faster if you chop it up small, although it does feel rather odd to be hand chopping all my kitchen scraps with my wormies comfort in mind.

As well as worm pee which is apparently liquid gold for your plants, after a few months you will also have a tray of castings that you can add to your garden or your plant pots.
This is my plan for feeding my baby blueberry trees, my lemon tree that looks like it might produce for the first time in just about forever, my new feijoa tree and my baby spinach plants. All the above are in pots except for the lemon tree.

I'm wondering now what else I can add to my garden menagerie......plant wise that is, as hubby won't let me torment the neighbours by turning the rest of our front yard into a chicken run. He may have a point, the unit behind ours is for sale, not sure prospective buyers would appreciate a chicken pen as our combined street frontage.

Maybe a goat.....?

Watch this space:

Uh oh, there goes my garden....

We had a storm today, quite a storm in fact.

A roads-around-the-city-have-been-closed-because-they-are-deeeeep-in-water kind of storm.

A hail-was-so-big-it-smashed-windscreens-and-left-blooded-pockmarks-on-people kind of storm.

The sort of storm where you stay away from windows.

We were fairly unscathed, apart from wet carpet where a sliding door was left open. I was round at a friends place with the kids and DID entertain the thought of ringing hubby to ask him to shut that door.

Apparently I should have.

But do you remember the tomato crop ripening in the back yard I bragged about yesterday?

Well, here it is today...

(those are golf balls in the foreground, not hailstones :))

And my spinach?

Oh well, at least the ground is now nice and damp for a new lot of planting.

And, I've discovered it's magpies digging through my planter box. Not sure if they're digging out the seeds or snaffling the seedlings but hopefully moving the box to a different location might make a difference to their thievery.

Oh the joys of gardening! I do love it, even with wacky random events like this.

Container gardening - update

Well, despite my best (?) efforts, my container gardening did not produce quite the copious amounts of veggies I was after.

I did have a few tomatoes and I do have what appears to be a late crop ripening in the backyard, but no canning the excess will be needed. The spinach did a couple of rounds with no problems, though I have great trouble sprouting the seeds in 2 particular containers. I have a sneaking suspicion they are positioned in such a way as be attractive to birds, hmmmm.

What has grown though, are the capsicums.

Now, I DO know the reason for most of my failures, and that is the fact I didn't make a great effort to obtain seeds that are appropriate for growing in pots.

That, and I put two tomato plants in each container when they were probably better suited to one.

AND, I used some seeds that had long passed their expiry date.

But despite my best efforts, the capsicums are thriving.

Moral of the story:

-choose plants suitable for growing in containers

-don't overcrowd your containers

-use decent/recent seed.

Maybe I'll try pumpkins this winter....

A great use for plastic punnets

Do you ever buy cherry tomatoes or strawberries, or just about any other berry that comes in a smallish plastic punnet?

The punnets I get are clear plastic, with a deep lid that closes over the top and holes in the top and bottom.

Absolutely perfect, as my elder sister told me (see comments on the last post!) to use as seed raising containers. They are a mini greenhouse all by themselves, with pre-made drainage holes.

Brilliant!

My baby tomatoes are getting there....

Just.



I plan this year to try and preserve my own tomatoes in an effort to get away from the canned variety, which by all accounts have BPA leaching into them from the can linings. At least, I cannot find any source that says cans sold in Australia do not have BPA in them, so I feel fairly safe assuming they do.

According to Food Standards Aus, BPA is not a great concern, at least not in the supposed levels where it is most often found, but the fact that other countries are making moves to ban it is enough to make me wonder.

And, home grown tomatoes taste sooo great!

Tomatoes are very easy to grow, and can be done so in containers with great success.
Get some seedlings in now, either some you've grown from seed or baby plants that are often available at markets and farmers markets. Baby them through the (hopefully) last of the cold weather if you're in Victoria, keep them watered by doing so in the morning to avoid fungus and with any luck you'll have a beautiful crop.

I've not yet done any preserving though, so that will be another adventure...

Come a-scavenging with me

It's hard rubbish collection time in our local area lately, and as I go on my nightly walk/run....definitely not just a run....I have been passing intriguing looking piles of stuff. Junk. Rubbish. Detritus. Things other people no longer require.

Now I have never been a scavenger before, certainly not of hard rubbish on nature strips, but my new frugal mindset has me looking at it all a little differently.

What do they say? Reduce, reuse, recycle.

So my hubby was not surprised when I huffed home after my walk/run last week carrying two freezer baskets. I have a small deep freeze with only one basket and would dearly like one of two more to help me organise the space. They turned out to be rather too large however, so will be put to use storing my fabric stash, which is currently occupying two disintegrating 'sposie nappy boxes which hail from when I used 'sposies with my first bub.

This morning being a weekend, I did a round of our block with the kids in the double jogger and picked up a perfectly fine clothes drying rack. My plan is to keep this one in the garage and try to use it instead of the dryer when the weather is wet. A friend of mine has three racks and puts them out on her covered porch when it's raining. Covered in wet washing, obviously. Smart lady.

And for my container gardening efforts, two large polystyrene boxes from beside the back door of a sushi joint. I asked, they said yes. Actually they looked at me somewhat oddly and said "you want, you want?!" in a fairly incredulous tone. Understandably perhaps.

So the boxes have now been put to work growing spinach and cucumbers.

I thought perhaps I might need to cover them with bird netting to keep our feathered friends from scratching in it, but it turns out my biggest problem is keeping my 17 month old dirt lover from sinking his little hands into the lovely black soil and throwing handfuls of it around.

Now, if you feel like going out perusing the nature strips during hard rubbish collection week, keep in mind that in my area it's an offense to scavenge and you can actually be arrested for doing so. Though I have never heard of that happening and there are many, many people doing the rubbish rounds before the trucks come.

Just do think long and hard about what you find and IF you actually have a use for it. There is absolutely no point in cluttering up your house/yard/garage/garden with things you'll just be wanting to put out for the hard rubbish collection when it's your turn.

Reusing cardboard toilet paper rolls

I thought this was a good tip, reusing the cardboard inner of toilet paper rolls to start seeds. When we EVER find a house that we like, I think I'll try this when I put the veggie garden in. I love the no mess at the planting stage bit.

Toilet paper roll seed starter.

Gardening in a small space

Do you love gardening? For health reasons, or maybe for mental health reasons? Or maybe you loathe it but find it necessary in today's economic climate. Whichever it is, you may be like me and have very limited gardening space. I remember my parents having what seemed to me as a child an enormous veggie garden, but these days many of us live in the city and suburbs on small blocks of land, covered mostly by what we live in. Meaning the house of course, in case you're asleep on your feet, hehehe
BUT, I've found a way to grow lots of potatoes in just four square feet of garden space. Or you could even do it on the balcony of an apartment too.

But why grow your own potatoes, when they're usually so cheap at the store? Well, if you believe everything you read, it appears that various levels of pesticides are routinely found in non-organic spuds. Check out this link at The Wedge, a natural foods co-op.

That aside, when you grow your own, they often taste better and you know exactly what has been used on them while growing.

The idea is to grow them upwards, instead of spread out, using a box system.

So, find out how it's done in Sinfonian's square foot garden. Scoot down through the article to where the pictures are, that's where the instructions are. Make sure you read some of the comments of people who have tried this, one suggests building up the sides with bricks, another says you can use straw instead of dirt.

Myself, I've used layers of straw and dirt when doing garden bed spuds in the past, which worked well. I'll be trying this out at our new house, which means hopefully in the not-too-distant future.


So, spuds anyone??