Spaghetti Squash in July

A Summer harvest of Winter squash.

Spaghetti squash is my favorite vegetable... at the moment :)

I consider it the undisputed Queen/King of All Squash.  It's delicious, nutrient dense, and can be added into many dishes.  It's namesake comes from the long, yellow, noodle-like strands that perfectly cooked spaghetti forms--soft but not mushy, with just a hint of crunch, and a mellow, buttery flavor that absorbs other flavors beautifully.  It's considered a Winter squash because of its hard skin, which means it will keep for months in cold storage--improving in flavor and texture all the while.  Ready to eat when the skin turns yellow, but have patience and wait until they become a vibrant yellow and just a tiny bit soft, and you will be richly rewarded.

 Washed and ripening in the shade for a few days.

We ate a fair amount of spaghetti squash last year, which in turn means our worms ate a lot of spaghetti squash scrapings.  The center of a spag squash is similar to a pumpkin--though not so slimy--and packed with dozens or even hundreds of seeds.  We scraped out a fair amount into our worm bin, and squash seeds break down very, very slowly, even in a productive worm bin.

In the Spring, I dug very shallow holes all over the gardens, and filled them with homemade vermicompost (a mixture of worm castings, composted worm bedding, and worms). 

Do you see where this is going?

Happy squashes.

Most of my attempts this year to germinate squash from a seed packet ended in failure.  The spaghetti squash seeds in the vermicompost, however, needed none of my help.  They sprouted everywhere, vibrant and super-fast growing.  We pulled many starts that were in an unfortunate place, but we left as many alone as we could, aside from a drink of water now and then.  The results have been stunning.  Sprouts are still occasionally popping up through the mulch.  

There is a deeper message and methodology to be extracted here, but for now, I'm wide eyed in wonder at the bumper crop of my favorite veggie.  

I've placed an ad locally to sell some.  This is more than we can eat, but we'll do our best to eat it, store it, cook it, freeze it, can it, bake it, or whatever else we come up with during harvest season.

Canning Summer Produce

Time to brush up on my canning skills.

Our neighbor flagged me down last week for a chat, and suggested that we come pick some fruit from his trees.  He didn't have time to deal with it, nor did he wish to see the fruit go to waste.  I'm pretty busy around the farm, too, but then I remembered something very important: the whole point of farming is food!  We work so hard to raise wholesome food, and get so caught up in the never ending projects, that sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees.  

We planted a dozen berries and fruit trees in the Springtime, but they are a year or two from producing food.  The Summer vegetable garden, however, is starting to explode with fresh peppers, cucumbers, spaghetti squash, tomatillos, and more.  The long term intention is to can, freeze, pickle, ferment, or just eat as much of it as we are able.

I don't mean to toot our own horn at Red Tail, but in all honesty, toot toot.  We spent most of our first year on the homestead fixing up the 1925 cottage, then we took a break during the Winter, and started gardening in the early Spring.  In just a few months, we've planted dozens of perennials and hundreds of annuals.  We built a chicken coop, fencing, rain catchment, irrigation lines, worm bins, and two large garden plots.  

Getting Red Tail up and running has been a huge undertaking, and it's easy to lose sight of the real purpose:  food!  Everything we do, even our worm operation, is about creating fertility and growing fresh produce.  So, when our neighbor offered us a huge harvest of plums and figs, it only made sense to accept.  The fruit trees are on the other side of the fence; so what?  The neighbor takes good care of the land--he irrigates and free ranges chickens--and the fruit was dark purple, soft, and falling off the branches.  

Plum jam success!  Moving on to pickles....

We hopped the fence that evening and picked about 20 pounds of plums and several pounds of figs.  The figs didn't last long, they are very popular around here, but the plums covered our kitchen table.  We decided to make plum jam; we love PB'n'J samwiches, and have been buying expensive jars of organic jam all year.  This seemed like a great way to save some money this year, and make use of the food growing fifty yards from our kitchen, albeit on the other side of the property line.

It's been years since I've canned; we've been renters, with minimal gardens and regular jobs, for years before moving to Red Tail in July 2017.  It took me a few rounds of making newbie mistakes to get it right.  Overfilling jars, over tightening bands, checking the seal before the jar cools, over- and under-cooking, spilling bits of boiling water and jam on myself, trying to can in a disorganized kitchen.  It was like learning all over again.  On the first day, I ruined some lids, and a had a very low success rate.  On the second day, I cleaned up, got organized, corrected mistakes, and finished the plum jam.  

I went straight into making pickled cukes and peppers.  I must have regained some canning mojo by this point, because the pickles came off without a hitch.  Just as I was cleaning up, Meghan showed up with about five pounds of blackberries from her mom's house.  Once again, we didn't grow it, and it was destined to rot on the vine, so why not?  I started rinsing blackberries, loaded them into a stockpot, and they are cooking as I type this the next morning.  Around lunchtime, I'll start canning again, once my morning farm chores (and blogging) are done.  

Red Tail pickles!

Aside from the immense pride in seeing a cupboard full of organic, fresh, homegrown food, what I really gained from relearning to can this week was an appreciation of the food growing all around us, which frequently goes to waste.  Plenty of folks have productive fruit trees and berries, but not all have the ability to harvest and process it.  If you can work out a deal with the owner of the trees or vines (I've got a couple jars of jam I promised the neighbor who gave us the plums and figs), you can actually achieve the entire goal of homesteading--food!--while bypassing most of the work and investment that usually goes along with growing food.

Time to stop typing, refill my coffee, go pull some weeds, and Meghan brought home a packet of swiss chard seeds the other day....

'Til next time.

How To Get Worms: The Truth About Worm Farming and Buying Online

If you're ready to start worm composting, then you've probably started looking for red wigglers (aka eisenia fetida).  Don't bother with the bait shop:  they will probably have much larger earthworms that, despite being red and wiggly, are not the right species for composting.

You have several options available.  I'll tell you up front that the smartest, quickest, and most ethical way to acquire worms is to find your local worm farmer.  However, in the interest of full disclosure, lets explore some other options.

First Full Disclosure on buying worms:  you can collect worms for free.

The basic formula for red wigglers is decaying organics + topsoil + water + time = worms.

Just find an overgrown area of Earth (weeds and grass work great) and pile up a couple yards of pastured animal manure.  Add a little water, cover the mound with cardboard or paper, and wait.  Over time, it will attract red wigglers, you can dig them out and condense them in a worm bin, or just continue composting in the open dirt.

This method requires some initial labor, and it might be many weeks or even months until the worms move in, but it does work.  You might only get a hundred worms, but that's enough to get started.  Red wigglers are a force of nature, and as such, can be found everywhere on the planet where decaying organics cover the topsoil.

Second Full Disclosure on buying worms:  you can buy worms on Amazon.

They'll ship you a little cloth bag full of shredded paper and big, fat worms.  They'll probably charge a competitive price to the local worm farmers, too.  This is actually how I got started, years ago, from a very famous mail order worm farm.

Mail order wigglers have their own set of problems, though.

First major problem, they send you only mature worms, usually in a sterile bedding medium, like non-composted coco coir and dry shredded paper (both of which can be great additions to a worm bin, but are not enough by themselves).  This is done for marketing and shipping purposes, not because it makes healthier colonies.  First time worm farmers generally expect a big gob a fat, mature worms, and commercial sellers will send you just that.  Proper bedding is heavy and can be, frankly, kind of gross (to the uninitiated, I think it looks like solid gold).  The extra weight of real, edible worm bedding drives up shipping costs, hence the skimpy, lighter substitutes.  More to the point, sending the average Amazon buyer a box of rotting manure and vegetables might not go over so well in the reviews section.

Second big problem, a mail truck is not a worm bin.  Worms don't want to be there.  They may die from heat or cold exposure, depending on the time of year you order your worms, or lack of water, if your shipment gets delayed.

A gob of mature worms (ie nearing the end of their life cycle) in dry, inadequate bedding, after being cooked/frozen/shaken/crushed for a week in a mail truck, is not a great way to get started worm farming.

Third Full Disclosure on buying worms:   "1000 worms" and "1 pound of wigglers" are good marketing, but they are a terrible way to judge the health of a colony.

I sell worms using these slogans, because customers feel more comfortable having a metric for what they are buying, and it makes comparison shopping easier.  I do my best to honor these promises, but it's impossible--or rather, very impractical and counterproductive--to separate out individual worms, count them all, or provide a specific weight.  The worms wouldn't like it, it's a waste of time, and it will result in a stressed, unhealthy colony.  Worms don't want to be removed from their bedding; it is more productive to find active areas in your colony, and remove the heavily populated areas with their surrounding bedding.  Obviously, this ups the weight a lot, and makes it impossible to determine the exact number of worms, but it is a much healthier way to separate and buy worms.

It's not possible to quantify a healthy colony with a simple metric like population or weight.  Don't worry too much about the total number of worms.  It's a very difficult thing to determine in a healthy, properly fed colony.  A healthy, well fed, diverse colony with only a few hundred worms can easily overtake a poorly set up colony with thousands of stressed, elderly, mail order worms.

It makes a for a better photo-op when you see a wiggly, squirmy ball of worms, but it doesn't necessarily mean your colony is healthy.  Often, it means a shortage of food, or problems with temperature and humidity.  Worms don't want to live in solid gobs; they burn through their food source quickly, and are vulnerable to mass die offs or escape attempts when they are overcrowded.  They need to spread out a bit to maintain colony health.

Instead of worm-counting, look for signs of colony health, or colony distress.  Are the worms active, red, and wiggly?  Or do the worms look lethargic, glassy, or slightly melted?  Are they crawling through the bedding, or trying to escape up the sides of the bin?  Are there mature worms, adolescents, babies, and cocoons in the colony?  Is the bedding cool and slightly moist, or is it hot and dry, or cold and soggy?  Is there an excess of finished castings?  A lack of fresh worm food?  Is the bedding loose and oxygen rich, or compacted and anaerobic?

Fourth Full Disclosure on buying worms:  if profit is your endgame, think twice.

Worm castings are a very valuable commodity, as are the worms themselves.  There are plenty of people in this world who make a good living with worms.  I make money doing it, but it's not my only income source.

However, if you want to get deeper into worm farming than just processing your own kitchen and yard scraps, you need to be prepared for certain things.  For example, how do feel about being covered in animal and worm feces?  What's your feeling on shoveling up very large piles of rotting manure and vegetables in the Summer heat?  How do you feel about the ants, spiders, beetles, flies, grubs, and various critters that really put the "vermi" in vermicomposting?  Most importantly, are you willing to stick your hand straight into a worm bin and pull out a handful of live, crawling compost, pick through it, and maybe even give it a sniff?

People sometimes ask me if I'm worried about a customer "stealing" "my" "idea" (big quotes around all three words) and becoming my competition.  My answer is always the same, "No, I'm not worried at all.  In fact, I wish a lot more people would farm worms."

Worms are good for Mother Earth, plain and simple.  In the end, all worm farming comes back to that.  If your love of money is greater than your love of a happy, healthy planet, then professional worm farming is most likely not going to work out for you.  There is money to made, yes, but there are trade-offs, too, most of which involve feces.

Fifth Full Disclosure on buying worms:  wigglers are a seasonal crop.

Red wigglers don't do much during the Winter, because they don't like being cold.  They often die off in large numbers after the first frost, leaving your bin with a skeleton crew to get through the cold months.  They will continue to eat, though much more slowly, but they wont breed until temperatures rise in the Spring. 

It can be helpful to keep your bins warmer in the Winter:  put them in a sunny spot, cover them with a tarp, and avoid adding water.  However, unless you make the jump to keeping your worms in a controlled environment--indoor worm farms can be expensive, energy intensive operations, and will invite lots of insects inside a building--then the bulk of worm farming happens from late Spring to late Fall.

If you are planning on setting up a worm bin during the cold months, don't expect too much action in the bin until Springtime.

Final Full Disclosure on buying worms:  The difference between $10 of worms and $1000 of worms is not necessarily money, but always time and energy.

You don't have to buy a huge amount of worms to get started; they will multiply and eat faster than you probably realize, though only if you feed and care for them properly.  With the right kind of care, a few hundred worms in March can breed into many, many thousands by September.

You can get more done faster with more worms, yes.  However, worm composting is always a long term project.  In the long run, even if you started with just a handful of worms, you can still accomplish great feats of vermicomposting.

GO LOCAL.  Find the person(s) in your area raising worms.  Check your local craigslist, farmers markets, and gardening clubs.  It's probably somebody with 20 bathtubs full of worms in their backyard, or someone with 50 plastic tubs in their basement, or a horse owner with rows of manure covered in burlap, or someone with a shed full of 5-gallon buckets, or someone with rows of barrels half buried in the ground.... Worm farmers come in lots of varieties, but most have the same thing in common:  they are more than happy to sell you a reasonably sized, healthy, diverse colony, as well as provide you with some information, direction, and inspiration.   You won't find that on Amazon.





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Red Wigglers in the Summer: Keeping Your Worms Alive in the Heat

This week in Southern Oregon, we've had 100+ degree weather nearly every day.  Lucky for us at Red Tail Homestead, we've been mulching and soaking the gardens like crazy; when the heat wave hit, our plants were ready.

Unfortunately, our worm bins were not ready for the heat wave.  On the first day, we checked on the worms in the evening--when the temp was about 102--and found the same thing in every bin:  all our worms were trying to escape!  

I didn't take a picture, but this image from tannie.nl is a great example.  The worms start crawling up the sides of the bin, clearing away any bedding or castings from their bodies.  They stretch out as long and thin as they can get, and get a wet, glassy look.  Any nooks and crannies in the bin, especially around the lid and handles on plastic tubs, will be filled with wiggling gobs of worms.  If you ever discover this situation in your bin, put your hand against the bedding--if it feels like your worm bin has a fever, then you better get a hose, stat!

Our worm bins live under a tree in the summer, out of direct sunlight, in an effort to keep them as cool as possible, but shade alone is no match for extreme heat.  Plastic tub worm bins retain extra heat, like a little greenhouse; a blessing in the Winter, but in the Summer heat, all of our plastic tubs were in crisis.  The wooden and metal bins were doing better, but also had their share of escape attempts.

The first thing to do when your worms are trying to escape is add cold water.  Make sure you run the hose for a minute to get cold water:  blasting them with boiling hose water wont help one bit.  Rather than trying to push your worms back into the bin with your fingers or a stick, just gently spray them back down into the bedding.  Then give them a patient, gentle soak, until the temp of your bedding comes down to under 90 degrees Fahrenheit, preferably closer to 70 degrees.

Usually, I don't advise watering a worm bin unless it gets dry; the natural moisture in food and yard scraps is usually plenty water.  Too much water leeches out nutrients, creates muddy castings, and causes the bin to go anaerobic (low oxygen), which can make the bin less productive and smelly.  However, when the alternative is having all your worms try to escape, or worse, expire from the heat, then don't hesitate to give them a rinse.

This is also when you will discover if your drainage holes are working properly.  If your worm bin starts looking like soup, better get those holes draining fast!  Worms can handle a little swim now and then, but they are also quite capable of drowning.  Proper drainage is crucial.

The next step is to figure out an alternative lid.  Nothing beats a solid lid for keeping out rodents and unwanted vermin, but they also hold heat in the bin.  At Red Tail, our chickens free range, and would devastate the bins if we left them uncovered.  Our solution was to cover the bins with a bit of wire during the day, then covering them with their proper lids at night.  Between the lid management and watering twice a day, our worms have recovered and are happily munching away and breeding again.

One of our experimental worm bins is doing the best in the heat.  Its a 100 gallon fabric pot, sometimes call a "smart pot."  The worms seem to really like this bin, and they've maintained a reasonable temperature and moisture level while all the other worm bins were cooking.  I just spray a little cold water on the outside of the fabric once a day, and it seems to stay happy.  However, I suspect the worms will eat through the fabric eventually and ruin the bin, but for now, it's working great.

Even with the watering and removing lids, the plastic tubs were still too hot.  Lucky for us, we have a covered concrete slab that stays cool and shady, and due to a central buckling of the slab, it happens to drain perfectly.  We were just storing some scrap plywood in there, and so it was, with a little rearranging and a few concrete blocks for support, our newest, biggest (temporary?) worm bin was born.

I haven't devised a wire lid for this yet, and the chickens haven't caught wise to the giant open bin of worm snacks (I guess I know what my next project/chore is...), but it worked like a charm.  The worms all retreated to the edges as the bedding cooled down for a couple days, but have gradually worked their way back out and returned to normal eating and "loving."

For now, the plastic and small wood bins are empty, but I'll be moving everybody back in when the weather turns cold, and possibly loading the bins into cold frames.  Every year, we try new things and adapt to what nature throws at us.  I'll let you know how that works out, later.

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Worms - Red Wigglers for Composting

At Red Tail Homestead, we love worms--specifically, eisenia fetida, commonly known as red wigglers, or composting worms.  We believe they are very important to health of soil, and by extension, the Earth.  Soils rich in organic matter and wigglers are more fertile, retain moisture, resist compacting, deter pests and disease, and contain greater numbers of beneficial microorganisms.

We breed and sell wigglers locally in Southern Oregon, mostly in the Summer and Fall, and with limited availability in Winter and Spring.  We don't ship our worms, all of our sales are face to face (with a free tutorial in worm care included), but we will deliver around the Rogue Valley for a fee.  

Our worms eat a varied diet.  The lion's-share of their food and bedding is aged horse manure, sourced from responsible horse owners in our neighborhood in Phoenix.  The rest of their diet is waste materials destined for the landfill--rotting fruits and vegetables, coffee grounds, eggs shells, yard debris, and paper.  We also give them a small amount of regular old dirt and grit, and of course, water.  Occasionally, they eat cotton, burlap, canvas, rope, or other fibrous organic materials.

We DON'T feed our worms meat, fat, dairy, grains, bones, processed food, salted or cooked food, garbage, non-organic materials, chemicals, or waxed paper.

If you'd like to buy some worms in Phoenix, Oregon, text Dave at (541) 531-7927.  We can deliver as far as Grants Pass or Ashland for a fee. 

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About Red Tail Homestead

Red Tail Homestead is an organic micro-farm in Phoenix, Oregon.  We are available by appointment, text Dave to set up a time (541) 531-7927

Our main crop is eisenia fetida composting worms, also known as "red wigglers."  We raise worms to sell locally to farmers and folks who want to do some serious composting and soil improvement. Our mission (the reason why we're shoveling through horse manure and rotting vegetables in the Summer heat) is education and awareness about the environmental benefits of worm composting.  Simply put, we believe worm composting is really, really, really important, and more people should do it--we aim to teach them how, and get them started with some worms :)

We also grow fruits and vegetables, raise chickens, cook, bake, freeze, dry, can, pickle, ferment, and eat food every day.

If you'd like to visit Red Tail Homestead to buy some worms or seasonal produce, contact info is at the top of the post.  Thanks!

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