Got a Plant Inn and compost tumbler today! Yay!

Went to town today to get some more materials, I was having trouble finding all my composts and found composted sheep and chicken manure and worm castings, hooray. On our last top to Menards to get vermiculite we stumbled on the composters and greenhouses. We spurged and got a tumbling composter and Plant Inn, does anyone use one of these. I am so excited to give my little seedlings a home outside! Then hardening off should go a lot smoother too!

Oh wow, I had never heard of a Plant Inn before so looked it up. That's pretty cool!

I'd love to get a composter, but it's cost-prohibitive at the moment.

I just found out I can get some worms for $35/1 lb, or $60/2 lbs, and I learned how to make a home-made worm bin from a plastic storage tub when I took my organic gardening class 13 years ago....we have some tubs here, so they're about to get repurposed so we can make a trip down to Orlando to get some worms...pick up some of our favorite local wine...and hopefully visit my husband's cousin the famous FL gardening specialist. (He's published several books, and used to do a radio show before he retired. I still haven't met this cousin, so my fingers are crossed they'll be around when we go down!)

Oh wow that's awesome, I sure hope they are around when you go down there too. I wish I lived further south like you for the longer growing season. That's partially the reason we got the Plant Inn to extend the growing season. If I had it through this winter I would have been eating fresh salads all the time (we had a really really nice winter). We got the Plant Inn for 279.00 at Menards and its about $379 every where online so I was pretty happy about that (we checked when we got home). At the compst tumbler was 69.00 but will be well worth it in the end.

There are up-sides and down-sides to living this far south. I grew up in WA (the state) and the cold was tough to take...but down here the heat is outrageous! I used to think the heat/humidity of NC and VA was bad...until we moved here! The growing seasons are weird here, too. I'm finding this out as I get started with my first garden. With very little really cold weather (it rarely goes below freezing for more than a week or two at a time, and then it's usually still at least in the 50s during the day) the cool weather crops are actually grown in the winter here! I had to skip over things like peas, cauliflower, broccoli, etc and go straight to summer crops. I was almost too late to plant any carrots or lettuce, and will probably have to shade those just to get them to produce anything. That's why I really want to meet my husband's cousin; I want to pick his brains, see his yard, and generally soak in his many years of wisdom.

I would love to pick his brains too, good luck I hope you meet him! I get a kick out of ready posts from people in the south and can't imagine what it would be like to start a growing season in Dec. I am still to chicken to put anything in the ground here, lol, we usually get a huge (a few feet) snow storm every April so I don't want to jump the gun. My seedlings are doing pretty well though!

Congrats on the score! Wish I could.

You definitely get that arctic blast where you are. We got a touch of that in Spokane, but it rarely went over 12"...which was the mark for when school would be called off. When we moved to Seattle and people freaked out over a dusting (it wouldn't even cover the grass!) I used to laugh. They would call off school for that!

In NC they called off school for a dusting too, but that was because it would melt a bit during the day, then turn to ice. That's probably why they did the same in Seattle, but I didn't understand how that worked back then. (Honestly, I just didn't care. Oblivious, as I said before.)

Anyway, at least you can start seeds indoors, then plant them out when the last frost is over.

That cousin is Tom MacCubbin, BTW. I just got one of his books, Month by Month Gardening in Florida. (You KNOW I'm going to have him sign it!) It tells about more than gardening veggies; it gives info on what to do each month for any class of plants you want to grow.

And believe me, I need that information! My house and yard were sorely neglected by the previous owners, who were elderly, so even though it's only 15 years old it needs work in a lot of ways. During spring break my husband finally got around to digging out the bushes in the front because they'd grown far too large and unruly where there's plenty of sun, and were spindly where someone put the wrong things in. Now I have a lot of work to do to fix it up. One of the first things I want to get is a big palm tree...after all, if I'm going to live in FL, I'm darn sure gonna have at least one palm tree in my yard!

Whoo boy! I'm writing a lot tonight!

Michelle,

We were just wondering why you had to wait 13 years?

LOL, I kind of explained that in the other conversation. When I took the class 13 years ago, I was living in a north-facing apartment. I've moved around quite a bit, went to a few different colleges, and my health declined. When I finally had some space in NC, I couldn't do more than small pots on the porch by myself. I was a single mom of a small child for four years, which puts a damper on projects like this. Oh, the list goes on. I'm dependent upon my husband's schedule to get big projects done; last week during spring break he built my boxes and filled them with soil. Now I'm in business!