Urban Farm roundup

I've had a T-shirt for a while proclaiming that I'm an urban farmer.  It's a cute notion, but until recently it's been mostly hyperbole.  However, this has been such a crazy busy week for our garden/feed ourselves/be green project, and it's not even March yet!  There's too much to make a full post about each happening, so here's a condensed (for me) version of the highlights.

- Today I got to say to my coworkers, "I have to go home for a bit.  My worms arrived today."  As much as I enjoyed the thoroughly confused looks on their faces, I'm even more excited about the reason we ordered worms in the first place - Vermicomposting!  As you know, we live in a condo with no yard in which to start a conventional compost pile, and honestly I've never really seen one work that well, so we've gone the indoor route.  A storebought Worm Factory 360 from Amazon, filled with shredded paper and some ordinary kitchen scraps (veggie skins, eggshells, tea and coffee grounds).  We mail-ordered 1,000 red wriggler worms, which arrived today to start turning all that organic matter into awesome compost for use in our garden.  The little guys looked a little peaked from their journey, but once we put them in the bin they (slowly) started to wiggle around.  Hopefully soon they'll figure it out and start to nom some of their food.  If you've ever seen one of those videos where they open up trash bags in landfills after 50 years and still find intact food scraps, you can imagine how exciting it is to be able to reroute that same organic matter to turn it into a fertilizer that can eventually help you grow your own food.  Stacia is doing an awesome job chronicling it on her site, but I'm definitely excited too!

- The grow light seems to be working, so we have indoor crops in addition to our livestock on our little urban farm.  It's not actually time to start any seedlings for transplant, but we didn't really want our first attempt to be one that we needed to count on.  Why not start with a "dry run?"  We have a ton of herb seeds, and we're bandying about the notion of keeping our grow light operational after the spring as an indoor herb garden, so last weekend we planted various herb seeds.  So far we have sprouted basil, thyme, oregano and sage, and we're still waiting on rosemary, cilantro, and parsley - hurry up, you guys!  At the moment, they're just little stems with two tiny leaves at the top but in another week they should be bigger, and maybe eventually we'll have plants right there in the kitchen that we can pull from while we cook!  And with the knowledge of how we got our herbs to work, I feel a lot more confident for next week, when we're scheduled to start some broccoli.

- Last time, I mentioned that we would be growing dry beans for the first time this year.  It's a fun idea, and we're excited about it, but realized that we have little to no experience actually using dry beans.  If we're gonna grow it, we better darn well learn how to use it.  And what's a safe place to start in the world of dry beans?  Chili, of course!  So we added a pot of vegetarian chili to our weekly meal plan.  It was awesome, and actually will likely become our new baseline chili for future cooking... whenever we finish eating the current batch.  You see, the recipe calls for 3 cups of cooked kidney beans and 1 1/2 cups of cooked black beans.  We had no idea to how much dry beans grow in size when rehydrated, so we bought about that amount in dry beans, assuming we could use up any excess beans that might exist.  Probably not the best assumption, since after we made the chili, we found ourselves with a total of 8 cups of leftover beans!  They've gone into a follow-on double batch of the chili, but now we have 12 cups of chili in the fridge.  It's starting to get repetitive, but I really like chili, and there are so many ways to prepare it.  So far we've had chili on its own, chili cheese fries, and chili over baked potatoes.  I have a feeling we're going to become the Bubba Gumps of chili before this is all over, but suffice it to say that we'll account better for bean growth with our garden crop.  It's kind of amazing, really.

I'll be back with some full posts soon, plus I'll try to keep you updated with all that goes on on our urban homestead.  If the whole season is as packed as this week, it will be quite the endeavor.  Keep gardening on to victory!