3 2009-08-30T04:44:13+10:00 false Last week I entered a blog contest on May Dreams Gardens to win a cobrahead weeder. The company that makes the cobrahead decided to give one to everyone who entered. I've seen this tool on gardening blogs, but I've been a bit dubious. How could it possibly be as good as everyone says? It's just a hook. But it's really great. I haven't really used it for weeding, but I used it for cultivating and mixing worm poo into my beds, and it was really, really great for both of those things. I was able to cultivate around my self-sown volunteers. My summer greens are all looking really tired and stunted, so I decided to remove a lot of them in preparation for fall. I took out all the beets and chards. I know I could have let these go, but I've harvested a lot from these plants -- probably 10 times or more for each plant -- and they were looking scraggly. I also removed an overgrown komatsuna and trimmed and cleaned my sorrel, argula, agretti and perpetual spinach (the one chard I let stay). I also removed all the Osaka purple mustard plants that I had let go to seed. I also removed this crazy looking radish -- I missed it in the spring and had decided to let it keep growing in the hopes that it would go to seed. I love radish pods! But it never did. It's had its chance. Since I had all that bare dirt showing, I decided to trench compost all the greens I had just removed, a bag of greens trimmings I've saved in the fridge, my partially finished compost from my outdoor bin, and a yogurt container of scraps I haven't feed to the worms yet. I buried all that stuff, then decided to harvest a tray of worm castings and work it into the soil before fall planting. So I went downstairs and grabbed the tray, divided it roughly between my two old beds, and used the cobrahead to scratch the castings in. This is my first harvest of a full tray. I had thought the stuff in the tray was finished, but it really wasn't, at least not completely. It was wet, but not muddy. There were unidentifiable chunks in it. I just pushed those down into the ground. There were also a handful of worms. I'm sorry to lose them, but there are plenty more in the bin, and those ones did what they were supposed to and migrated up! Sometime soon, I'll plant seeds for Fall greens. I think I'll probably test the soil first and add any necessary amendments, then plant. 7 false 67666 false false false Entry 2009-08-29T14:00:00+10:00 DMY 80569 Public 2009-08-30T04:44:14+10:00 1713 Overcast 86 F