Soil Blocks #4: Making and managing.

So at last we have arrived at the final post on making soil blocks. Unfortunately, I'm now separated from my blocks (a condition not quite as traumatic as being separated from one's newborn baby, but close), so I cannot give you a picture of them, dang it. Instead, I offer a photo of the high-tech tools needed to plant blocks:

But let us begin at the beginning.

Molding:

The official sites recommend adding water to the soil mix until it reaches a soupy consistency or slurry. One fills, or charges, a mold by pushing it forcefully downwards through this muck, twisting as one drives it to the bottom of one's container. Once there, a twist will release the suction and allow one to lift the mold clear.

I, of course, did nothing of the kind. I'm the kid who, in eighth grade art, used charcoal like a fine pen and laid a pen sideways to lay a broad swath across the paper. So of course I didn't follow the directions.

Instead, I dragged the mold repeatedly through the slurry, pressing it against the side of the container. (If one uses this technique, a rectangular container offers significant advantages over a conventional bucket.) Then I started using a trowel to press excess soil into the blocks. Finally, with the micro 20, I used my fingers.

The basic principle remains: the more soil one manages to pack into the molds, the firmer the blocks will be, and the better they'll hold together.

It's found sculpture—it's a 3-D Rorschach test—no, it's soil blocks!

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I had to look up (i.e., Google) how to spell Rorschach, of course, and amongst the results saw one claiming that most people have never actually seen a Rorschach inkblot. Well, I have. Not that I've taken the test myself; no, that might be dangerous. (Who know what might be revealed?) Instead, I bethought me of Dave Barry's caution regarding a potentially explosive procedure, which I will summarize** thusly: “Do not do this yourself. Instead, send one of your children.”* Yes, when our older son was just six years old, we let a young psych student who lived next door give him a complete Rorschach test. And that has made all the difference.

But truly, this is a post about soil blocks, and these (or those, by now) are indeed soil blocks being protected from cats.

Organic lawn care: a matter of definitions, or a moral dilemma?

I’ve got a question for all of you: Can an organic garden service that farms out toxic weed control still call itself organic? Has it sacrificed its integrity, its very soul, or is such language uselessly hyperbolic in such a case?

Let me explain how the question arose. Given the paucity of garden-related businesses that had booths at Bozeman’s poorly-named home and garden show (subject of one of my more acerbic posts), I had time for conversations with the folks staffing all three. Indeed, I swooped down on the two booths for organic gardening services, partly out of sheer delight that they existed, but in part to ask a highly pertinent question: How did they handle bindweed on a residential property?

Discount offer (& book review) for Growing Stuff

Blogging, like beauty, is of course its own excuse for being. However, perks are always appreciated, and surely one of the best that comes with blogging is free books. Case in point:  Asked if I would link to information about a new gardening book, I entered a counter-request: could I review it first? A week later, it was in my hands. Thank you, Jessica.

Even better, she has made an extraordinarily generous offer to all of you out there:

Quote the Manic Gardener review in an e-mail to  jess@blackdogonline.com, and get 40% off on this book!

If most gardening books leave you feeling utterly overwhelmed, try Growing Stuff, put out by Black Dog Publishing. It truly deserves its subtitle, An Alternative Guide to Growing, because where most books assume that you have money, space, and time, this one does not. You might guess that this book takes an unusual tack since the foreword was written by Guerilla Gardening guru Richard Reynolds, but even if you don’t, you’d figure it out as soon as you leaf through a few pages.

Open most gardening books at random, and you’ll find yourself in the middle of a chapter. Open this one, and you’ll almost always find a two-page spread devoted to a single topic, plant, or project. (One or two topics are given more space, while a few get less.) Illustrated with enticing photographs, drawings, and the occasional recipe (including a couple for herbal hair rinses), these short articles all emphasize accessible projects and inexpensive tools and methods.

Holy smokes!

Actually, it's steam, and what's steaming is the compost pile I wrote about yesterday. Now, I've often seen steam when I've dug into a compost heap, but I've never seen an undisturbed pile steaming away like a small volcano.

Hot compost, anyone?

Should you drop by to visit, some bitterly cold night, and find my house locked, and should you be so lacking in good sense or hard cash that you don’t just head for a hotel on Main Street a mile away, I invite you to climb into my latest compost pile. Granted, it’s both damp and dirty, but it’s several cuts above Luke Skywalker’s accommodations, the night he spent in the belly of the beast. And it’s guaranteed to keep you warm. In fact, you might get burnt: the temperature is over 140°F.

Whatever happened to autumn?

Having more or less skipped spring this year, the weather decided to go for a double and skip autumn as well. This it accomplished by delivering the hottest September on record—on a par with a normal July—and then plunging straight into winter.

Living off the garden

Well, the blogging pause lasted longer than expected, even by me. I posted my intention to go dark at the end of June, and here it is mid-August. It’s hardly the same garden. In fact, it’s hardly the same as it was two weeks ago, when I left for my second trip to Toronto this summer. At that point, most of this plot was bare dirt.

You’re feeding them WHAT? Well, antibiotics, hormones, and — HEAVY METALS?

Source: Bloody Brilliant!

It’s spring, time to dig in the composts and pile on the mulches, so the blogging world is full of advice and debates about manure. Stuart of Gardening Tips and Ideas has just weighed in on the side of sheep manure, while Elizabeth and Michelle of Garden Rant defend manure against all comers.

Me, I can hardly bear to think about the stuff. The minute I hear the word “manure” I start to twitch and moan; observers report having heard mutterings of  “No, no,”  and “Tell me it isn’t true.” I wanted to post on this topic (the manure, not the moans) weeks ago, but after the incident with the broken blood-pressure cuff, my doctors warned me not to write about it for at least a month.

It’s all about the stuff they add to animal feed. I stumbled over it when researching the compost article (how else?) and haven’t entirely recovered. Here’s what happened.

Readers’ Questions: Arsenic from pressure-treated wood, Part II

Welcome back, everyone, and in case you just tuned in, we’re talking with Jen about her vegetable garden and the unpleasant possibility that she may be growing toxic vegetables and feeding them to her family.

Unfortunately, the best place for the garden turned out to be right by an old telephone pole, which was probably treated with the wood-preservative copper chromate arsenate (CCA), and we all know what that means: it means that arsenic (along with smaller quantities of copper and chrome) could be leaching from the pole into the soil, where it would get taken up by vegetables. Which are eaten by her children. That’s pretty scary.