Wormhunt 2010 And Some Chicken Chat

I've been behind on blogging lately because I have been on a wormhunt of magnitude proportions.  Kojak style. Old fashioned police work- phone calls, cold calls, google searches...ok google is not so much old fashioned but it replaces the phone book so I'm counting it.

A week ago I bought all the necessary supplies to start a vermincomposting bin...except for the worms.  I figured I could just run into a fish bait store and grab some red wigglers/blood worms.  Red wrigglers are best suited for vermicomposting because they don't mind being contained. *I'll be calling these woms red wigglers instead of blood worms because blood worms is disgusting*

To my surprise, there are NO legit fishing stores near me. "Fishing stores" in Northern Virginia are all hat and no cattle.  They're pretty and high end, not at all like the fishing stores I went to with my grandpa when we went fishing/I went sleepwalking at 4am.  Those ones smelled like fish guts and had coolers upon coolers of worms, ahh, those were the days! If only I'd appreciated the amenities then.

I guess no one is interested in catching the three-eyed, sexually confused, trippin' out on pharmaceuticals and pesticides fish in the Potomac. Tranny fish, it's the wave of the future whether we like it or not! Here's a NatGeo article circa 07' about how Potomac pollution is creating hermaphrodite fish- http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070122-sex-change.html

Second idea- pet stores! People feed reptiles live worms so I called every pet store within 50 miles and discovered that pet stores only carry freeze dried or frozen worms...meh, I need them ALIVE.

Third idea, WAL-MART. I called a worm distributor for the MD area (like I said, this was a serious search) and they suggested I try Wal-Mart because they wouldn't be selling worms until summer. This too was a bust. I trucked all the way out to the megastore only to find that they only sell Nightcrawlers and that's just not what I need. Sorry Nightcrawlers, it's not you, it's me.

Finally, I accepted the fact that I'd have to order worms.  The idea of paying for worms to be shipped when worms are everywhere seemed really rediculous but I do live in a world where we pay for water in bottles that's been shipped across the world so hey, why not worms? That's where Uncle Jim saved the day!

www.unclejimswormfarm.com makes starting a worm composting system easy AND they have free shipping AND they are the nicest people ever because they agreed to ship my worms a day early without flinching.  It's a fact that I love descriptives. Details are the way to my wallet, something Whole Foods realized long ago and apparently clued Uncle Jim in.  I didn't just buy "worms" from Uncle Jim, I bought, "Healthy Red Wrigglers raised in the beautiful Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania". SOLD. 2,000 worms please!

SO- why compost with worms you ask? Lemme tell ya bout black goooooold! Worms thrive in a damp environment where vegetables, coffee & tea grounds, eggshells and bread decompose (NO meat or dairy) because they feed on the microrganisms that break down the food.   

Here's where worms are truly magical, their poop/castings contain seven times the microrganisms as the ones they eat! Worm casts also contain five times more nitrogen, seven times more phosphorus, and 11 times more potassium than ordinary soil.  The casts are rich in humic acids, which condition the soil, have a perfect pH balance, and contain plant growth factors similar to those found in seaweed. Which is why worm castings makes for really powerful natural fertilizer referred to as "black gold". 

Below is a photo of spinach seedlings grown in (from left to right) chemical fertilizer, powdered horse manure, vermicompost, and nothing. Pretty amazing!

Regular composting is also referred to as black gold but it's hot and smelly and takes forever.  Using worms is tidy and doesn't smell and is waaay faster. I'm in a hurry to start the process so that I can add the castings to my little seedlings when I do a mass planting in a few weeks. I've started growing some lettuces and peppers indoors but am still, STILL, waiting on a huge seed order I placed to arrive.  From now on I will order seeds in December because I'm not good at waiting on them.

My red wrigglers should get here tomorrow or Saturday and I'm really excited to move them into their new home of moist newspaper bedding.  I made a huge veggie meal tonight and saved all the scraps for them. The 2,000 worms I ordered can eat 1lb of food scraps a day and the worm population should double in a month if they're given enough space and food. I'm hoping to be able to throw a good amount of garden waste at them in the summer so I hope they do double!

My worm compound will be in the laundry room of the house because worms are like humans, they prefer 72 degrees. They get slow in the winter and could die if exposed to mid 80's.

I was going to talk about the type of chicken I've settled on ordering but this worm post took on a life of its own!  I'll keep it short and just say that the Red Star chicken is the way to go.  They are quiet, good in fenced areas, friendly and high production, large egg layers AND people are selling them near me.

Red Star chickens lay brown eggs because their feathers are brown. The feather/egg connection is something I've just learned- fascinating. 

I'm going to build them a warm weather moveable pen as well as a winter house.  It's hilarious to me that their winter house is guaranteed to have more thought and style put into it than the house we'll live in!



Speaking of egg colors, I really want to order Ameraucana chickens at some point because they too are friendly, quiet, egg layers and their eggs are BLUE and GREEN! How cool is that?! Feast your eyes on the chicken of a cool color lover's dream!

I may just have to get both kinds but I have no idea if they can intermingle, if not, I'll have to pick a side because I don't want two big chick McManions.  That has Capulet and Montague feud written all over it! Check out these eggs-

Soooooo pretty! I always loved finding robin's egg shells in springtime as a kid because they are a uniquely gorgeous shade of blue but these pastel hues are just lovely. I had no idea chickens laid blue eggs! We're so sheltered now that grocery stores run the world. I think I owe it to people to sell blue eggs....we'll see.

PS: When I was looking for a Kojak pic I saw this-

This picture stopped me dead in my tracks.  My jaw dropped and I actually rubbed my eyes for a minute. I'm sorry, WHAT?! THAT was the COVER of People magazine at some point in time?? It's amazing how much standards have changed over the past 30years.  You'd NEVER see Telly shirtless, hairy and all necklaced out in THIS decade. NONONO, times have changed Kojak. Enjoy that soft, fuzzy blast from the past!

The A-Team

If you've ever held a cast iron frying pan you know how unbelievably heavy they are.  Now imagine a bathtub made out of cast iron...two of them. The only way to get them out is to smash them to bits. The strength needed to do this is unreal. Superhuman. I took a couple of swings and the sledgehammer just bounced right off like nothing had happened. Like it was laughing and saying, "Is that all you got?!" with a smile on its face. I think I chipped the pink enamel and shook a filling but that's it.

SO- we called in the A-Team this weekend.  Our dear friends the Waleys. They love home improvement stuff just as much as we do and were all fired up to demo just like we used to be!

Mr. Waley KILLED the tubs.  They didn't stand a chance.

The hammering and smashing was so loud that anyone upstairs had to wear earplugs. I have no idea how he did it, even the small pieces I carried out weighed a ton. Tubs will be scaring each other with Mr. Waley stories around campfires for decades.

The pink tub carnage (taken from where the blue bathroom used to be):

The blue tub carnage: 

There was only one hiccup during this demo, which is pretty good considering a lot can go wrong when smashing up bathrooms when you still have the water and power on! Ms. Raley and I were downstairs working when we heard Louis yelling something inaudible and running down the stairs.  As he got closer it became apparent that he was yelling, "BIG PROBLEM, BIG PROBLEM, WE GOT A BIG PROBLEM" over and over and zoomed past us-

Backstory: Louis has a million stellar qualities but he loses his cool quick when faced with a plumbing crisis. One day in the apartment, our toilet started overflowing.  We were both in the bathroom so I turned to him and calmly said, "reach behind the toilet and turn the water off", but he didn't hear me.  In his defense it's pretty impossible to hear someone when you're yelling at the top of your lungs in a high pitched tone, "THE WATER IS GOING UP, IT'S GOING UP, (POO) WATER IS GOING TO OVERFLOW, OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, IT'S COMING!!" After the water rushed onto the floor he'd acquiesced to our fate and quieted down enough to hear my instructions. He had never faced an overflowing toilet and was shocked to find out that a handy valve was located close by in case of that very problem. It was a real learning experience. You're probably wondering why I didn't just reach down and turn the water off myself.  The answer is flailing arms.  I didn't want to get hit and knocked unconscious onto a floor that would soon be covered in an inch of "poo water".  You understand I'm sure.

So- back to the "big problem". Louis runs down the stairs yelling, I ask what's wrong as he whizzes by to the utility room and Mr. Waley descends in time to tell me that a pipe broke upstairs and water is going through the floor into the ceiling above the lower floor bath.  The nice thing about having a crappy house is that you don't bat an eye upon hearing news like this. "Oh" I said.  The ceiling of that downstairs bathroom needs to be replaced anyway so it doesn't matter that much. No one hit the pipe, by the way, it was just old and upset that we had disturbed it by removing fixtures so it cracked.

After some mumbling in the utility room, they finally figured out how to shut off the main water valve and we all went upstairs to check out the damage.

You can barely see the aforementioned angry pipe in this photo (it's to the right of the far right stud) but water ran from there down the rectangle hole where the tub plumbing used to be.  We'd JUST bought a Shop-Vac the day before and it definitely proved its worth. I had rolled my eyes at the purchase thinking we should get a table saw or something more glamorous but lil' Shop-Vac definitely came in handy!

With that drama over and the water off, Louis ran to the Home Depot to buy a plug for the broken pipe and came back with a plumber!  He met the guy while looking around in the valve aisle- you gotta love the country.  Anyway, this guy offered to come take care of it and Louis took him up on it.  He capped off 8 pipes for us and for a lot cheaper that anyone else would have. We may call on him again if we need anything else done.

With the situation taken care of, we left the guys to continue their bathroom fixture demo and we returned to the lower floor where we were tackling the fake wood paneling in the rec room.

If fake wood paneling was a person, it would be ugly on the inside AND the outside.  It's made of the most brittle wood-like material on earth and it shoots daggers of itself at you when you try to bend it.  A truly menacing opponent.  However, it was NO match for Ms. Waley. While I chipped away at it with garden shears, attempting to break away small pieces - she would grab the top and rip down entire sections. It was awe inspiring.

What we soon realized is that the person who put up that faux wood paneling NEVER, EVER wanted anyone to take it down.  They felt SO strongly about the attractiveness of their design choice that they went so far as to nail it to boards behind BEHIND the radiators and then nail the backs of the radiators to it!!

Removing that wood paneling turned into an excavation job and has been, by far, the hardest, most labor intensive part of demo in that house.  Here's a view of a radiator end we moved to see that the wood paneling was wedged all the way down to the cement floor.

We had to find two sets of rusty screws (25years older than we are) and pry each one out of the radiator casing into the paneling and then from the paneling into the 2x3's nailed into the blocks. It was brutal. There was nastiness beyond compare behind that radiator system. It was the stuff of Kafka nightmares.

Here are our favorite finds-

Dinosaur puzzle pieces, a black pen, a red pen cap annnnnnnnnnnnnnd (drumroll please)

One of many NICORETTE wrappers we found, Mmm, fresh mint! Kudos to whoever was trying to quit smoking around kids (assuming the puzzle didn't belong to an adult trying to keep his nicotine deprived hands busy) BUT all the cigarette butts strewn about the property lead me to believe the gum wasn't working.

After a long, long time, we finally got the wall free of it's paneling and were able to move onto carpet removal!

Word of advice- NEVER remove old carpet without a mask on. It's gross. I regret a handful of things in my life and not wearing a mask yesterday during this task is one of them.

We cut it into strips and rolled it out piece by piece.  As we ripped it, clouds of muck flew into the air and a myriad of questionable stains were revealed. Carpet is SO heavy by the way, we had to throw it over our heads to get it into the dumpster and it was pretty tough at times. We might as well have had a dead body in it.

After we removed the padding we saw this-

There's orange and white checkered tile underneath. You just never know what design treasure we'll find next in that house!

We'll probably just lay something over that tile because the wood floors throughout the rest of the basement are an inch higher than that floor anyway. Do you see the curve of dirt on the left side of the picture above?  Here's what we noticed-

There's a dirt trail showing you exactly where the high traffic areas were...because people carried dirt in on their shoes and it filtered through the carpet where it sat for years and years!! AS IF, I needed any more reasons to never have carpet!

After the tubs, paneling and carpet were removed, our amazing friends returned to their clean life.  We are still immensely grateful!

Then we removed the kitchen sink, the remnants of bathroom tile and drywall and cleaned up.

We're still waiting to hear about that new floorplan idea we want.  If we can find a remedy to the staircase issue, we'll be knocking down all the walls upstairs next week!

Corporate America Strikes Again

I learned something interesting last night when doing my "where to plant what" plan for the property...peonies should only be planted in the FALL! Some stores sell bulbs in the spring but if you plant in the spring you'll get a weaker peony because it puts the root under "severe stress". They're meant to winter over before they begin growing. Even then, they may take two years to fully bloom.

I'VE BEEN HAD!! *shaking fists* Nice one Home Depot, way to care about plant integrity. Now i have to research all the flowers I bought and make sure I'm not making any other mistakes. This is yet another moment where I wonder what people did before the internet, was everyone just a sucker? Who has time to drive somewhere and talk to a peony expert and who has gardening books about this stuff.  Thanks internet, once again, you've saved me.

Ugh, gotta return those bulbs.  No way do I want anything but the best for my peonies. Oh well, I'll just have to buy some cut ones from Whole Foods every now and then to rub on my gums and get me through.

Guess I'll just have to order more of something else, like DAHLIAS! Muahahahaaa

 SO many colors-

This one is like a purple rasta!

So light and pretty! 

Ok, I know, that's enough dahlia porn for today.  Sorry. Moral of the story is do your homework and have a plan before buying bulbs.  Otherwise it's like going to the grocery store hungry. I'll somehow manage without peonies but look out September- I'm prepared to place an embarrassing bulb order! 

Now I'm off to buy blood worms and dirt. Just a typical Friday! 

I Plead Temporary Insanity

I just LOST MY MIND at the Home Depot. I went in for a drill and came out, sans drill, but with $150 worth of flower bulbs and seeds. It's not my fault. I'd just met with our contractors who told us that they liked my floor plan but I hadn't left enough room for the stairs. I had a 5x4 foot space reserved and they need a 9x6 to clear the headroom needed, big difference. They also told me that there's no point in vaulting the roof because the pitch is so low that we'd only get an extra 2 feet and only near the middle of the ceiling. NOT worth the money. Skylights it is!

I have a LONG night of re-floor planning ahead of me so I just needed a little something to soften the blow. Besides, Home Depot had amazing prices as only a giant warehouse of a store can and more importantly, they had.....PEONIES!!!

Here's the thing- peonies (and hydrangeas) (and Peanut M&M's) are my achilles' heel.  I'd cross traffic to buy them, I'd walk down a dark alley in New York City in the 80's when it was New Jack City, I'd stick my hand in a bug infested wall to grab a peonie bulb like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, you get it- I heart peonies.  They are the Jackie O of flowers in my opinion.  Classic, understated, timeless. SO, I bought a couple bags of bulbs in every color they had annnnd I'm probably going to buy more from an online store with more color selections. Don't judge me, they're gorgeous AND they last 50 years or more once you plant them.  C'mon now THAT's an investment! Peonies, 1 - Wall Street, 0.

The light pink ones above are called Sara Bernhardts after an old timey French actress (she just rolled over in her grave). I think having a strain of flower (especially peonies) named after you beats winning an Oscar ANY day of the week.  Who even remembers who won Oscars after a while BUT people always know what kind of flower they're planting. Peonies, 1 - Oscars, 0.

I also bought them in white and another bag in hot pink- the color was just too vivid to walk away.

From there I can't really say what happened.  I bought seeds, more bulbs, muttered to myself about heights of flowers, ground cover, color schemes and so on and before you know it, my cart was full! Here are some of the flowers I remember buying:

DELPHINIUM! SO blue, the color radiates. They grow to be very tall.

DAHLIAS!! Lots and lots of them!!

Dahlias are so perfect and geometrical.  They remind me of this toy tracer thing I had as a kid where you put a colored pencil in one of a ton of holes on a plastic circle within a bigger circle frame and swirl it around to make perfect shapes of nonsense.  Dahlia's are a real world version of that!

How can anyone NOT buy something as beautiful as this??

I bought bright green dahlia seeds that are almost neon at the center when mature.  

Next up- ZINNIAS!

Zinnias look similar but are very different.  Butterflies LOVE them and they grow very tall which makes them perfect for the back row of a border like the ones along the fence in the picture above.  

Then SNAPDRAGONS! I grew Zinnias and Snapdragons back in California and loved them.  The pink snapdragons smelled amazing.  The flowers look like big cartoon lips and if you squeeze the sides the flower opens and closes like a dragon mouth snapping shut. 

They bloom continuously from the bottom up so there's always a new bloom when one drops off.

FREESIAS! I'd JUST read an article about freesias and how unbelievably good they smell in bloom so I was kind of set up for the fall on that one. 

RANUNCULUS aka peonie dopplegangers!

Ranunculus' look like little knock-off peonies but with zinnia-like colors, SOLD!

LILLY OF THE VALLEY- you had me at hello!

Who can resist a name like that?! 

They look like little bubbles effervescing out of the earth with springtime happiness! 

DAY LILLIES 

These grow like weeds once you plant them- I need to find the right spot for everybody! Indeed, my next step is to make a "planting plan"for where everything should go based on sunlight needs, water needs, soil needs, etc.  I can't remember what other flower seeds and bulbs I bought but there's a bunch more. 

On top of all these seeds and bulbs, I have an even larger shipment of vegetable seeds coming any day now. Again - temporary insanity - but who knew there were SO many kinds of tomatoes?!  I can't NOT try them, what if they're my favorite and I never knew it? 

GREEN ZEBRA!

The description read:  

"Green Zebra' is an unusual and exquisite tomato chosen by Alice Waters for the famous California restaurant, Chez Panisse. Fruits ripen to yellow-gold with alternating dark-green zebra-like stripes. Flesh is an emerald color and of good flavor. A choice tomato for colorful salads or as a slicing tomato." 

RAINBOW TOMATO! 

 "This is the most visually spectacular tomato we have grown. As fruits ripen they resemble a rainbow: green on the shoulder, yellow in the middle, and red on the blossom end. When fully ripe, the fruits are gold on the stem end and red on the blossom end. Early fruits weigh over 2 lbs." 

A WHITE TOMATO! Who knew?! 

"'White Wonder' is one of the varieties chosen for Alice Waters' famous Chez Panisse restaurant. It has a creamy white color and a sweet flavor. We like to serve it as an ingredient in a multicolor tomato marinade (tomatoes, garlic, vinegar, oil, pepper, and herbal seasonings)."

All anyone needs to do to get me to buy a food is tell me that Alice Waters, the mother or the slow food movement, likes it. I'll take 10! 

CURRANT TOMATO! 

"Excellent production of sweet tasting fruit. 'Sugar Cherry' is a large currant-type tomato with 3/4" orange-red fruits borne in clusters of 12. The berry-sized fruits are larger than true currant tomatoes and are intensely flavored and sweet. 'Sugar Cherry' is especially suited for salads and is of special interest to specialty growers and the restaurant trade."

Sugar = good, cherry tomato = good, SUGAR+CHERRY+TOMATO= AMAZING!

Then there were the beets, beets that look like psychedelic flowers when cut! 

"'Chioggia' is a beautiful bicolored scarlet red garden beet with interior rings of reddish-pink and white. This specialty Italian variety is notable for its earliness, attractive color, relative absence of bleeding, and its ability to compete with weeds."

And HOW about this EGGPLANT? 

"Heirloom originally from Turkey and more recently from Italy.] Miniature orange-red fruits (2 oz) look like tomatoes. Tall 4' plants are spineless and are very attractive when laden with fruit. Harvest before fruits turn red, otherwise the skins will be bitter. At edible harvest, the fruits are green-striped and sweet flavored. Bite-sized, may simply be cut in half for cooking."

I have never been an eggplant fan, mostly because I don't have a lot of eggplant recipes but THIS one is too interesting to ignore! 

Life is way too short to not eat good vegetables. If I believed in graves I'd put that on my headstone, as it stands I think they're a waste of good earth. I'd rather be cremated and thrown over a field of.....you guessed it, peonies!! 

I still need to get that drill, the purpose of which was to build a little hothouse for growing seeds and to drill holes in plastic tubs for my vermicomposting stand! That's a whole other post. I gotta get cracking so I hope my seeds arrive this week.  The property is on the borderline of Zone 6 and 7 so there's no telling what shipping batch I'm in! 

As far as vermicomposting goes, I'm going to try and be very mature about my worms. Solo, a single worm doesn't bother me but a slithering mass may be too much to handle without getting the "heebee-jeebees" (clinical term).  I'll let you know how it goes. I gotta go do something productive now, like see what kinds of peonies are available online! I really want to add this kind to my menagerie:

 MUST. HAVE. 

 

The Destruction Continues

Demolition continues at the house and now the upstairs bathrooms are both down to the studs. It's crazy how much we like demo. I took a few days off this week to do research on greenhouses, seeds, fencing, landscaping, etc. while Louis worked on further ripping things apart.

The walls came down really quickly.  Knocking down drywall is easy but very messy, everything gets covered in dust. The toilets, sinks and tubs are still there because they're too heavy for just us to carry out.  We have friends helping this weekend so we'll have them help us drag out the tubs. I have a feeling that removing them is going to be pretty difficult.

I'm not sure what they're made of but it seems like lead!

I'm definitely making a mosaic table with some of the leftover broken tiles and I'm hoping to repurpose the weird little window that used to connect both bathrooms for something.  Maybe I'll add it to a wall in the shed out back. I like the idea of keeping odd little mementos, kinda like a bathroom serial killer.

We can see all the pipes now and have no idea why that big one in the first picture goes up into the attic. I'm meeting with our contractors early tomorrow morning so I'm hoping they can tell me.  We're so eager to move forward with a solid plan for the contractors but we keep changing what we want done!

The problem is that the floor plan as it stands is very odd and we hate it.  I've been playing with an online program trying to find a way to get what we want out of it without moving the plumbing around too much.

Here's what the current floor plan looks like:

As you can see, there's a huge master bedroom space on the far left of the house at the end of that center hallway. The master has a huge walk in closet, a small sliding door closet and the horrible tiny blue bathroom. Then there are two huge bedrooms and the pink bathroom along the main hallway that is narrow and dark and throws you in the center of the open floor plan.

The main problems with this are:
1. only the master has private access to a bathroom
2. that master bathroom is wayyy too small
3. the master bedroom wastes a lot of space that isn't useful/ there's nowhere to put a headboard
4. there's no half bath for guests to use and if we don't add one, guests will have to walk past both bedrooms to use the full hall bath
5. that damned staircase floating in the middle of the kitchen (not drawn)

Soooo, after much thought about how to remedy all this and still keep the plumbing in the same area, here's what I drew up:

This new plan gives us:
1. a solid wall where we can put a headboard in the master
2. two walk-in closets (guess which one is mine)
3. bigger master bath with a separate tub and shower
4. smaller bedrooms but more privacy and both have private access to a full bath
5. A WALK IN PANTRY!
6. A HALF BATH! (door NOT facing the main area for added privacy)
7. A PLACE TO PUT THE SWITCHBACK STAIRCASE!
8. MORE WALL SPACE FOR THE KITCHEN!
9. A SUNNY NOT-DRAB AND DEAD MAN WALKING-ISH HALLWAY!
10. A NEW CAR! (ok not that one)

The kitchen island would be where the stairs are now and the hallways are 4 feet wide instead of the 3 feet that the main one currently is. The half bath would be located above the utility room so accessing pipes "should" be easy.  The staircase will take up an unused portion of the utility room.

The only question now is if we can afford to put up new walls, relocate radiators and fix any flooring issues we create.  We had wanted to expand a full bath downstairs and redo a laundry room but we're willing to shelve those projects/let me take a stab at it, to make this plan happen.

On top of all that we still want to know about vaulting the ceiling in the main area. There are a ton of big cracks so that need to be fixed anyway and we figure why not vault it if it has to come down either way. I'll know more tomorrow!