Curious if any of the succulent-lovers on Tildes have any tips/tricks for soil composition. I've been using the basic succulent mix from my local hardware store for years, but I've had some issues with rot. Reddit seems to think that soil composition is at fault for just about all succulent ills, so I've adjusted my mix to be about 50% perlite/sand 50% organic (a.k.a the basic succulent mix).

Still seems like the new mix doesn't dry out quite as fast as the internet thinks it should, though. Does going even more inorganic make sense? My guess from a few years of reading about succulents is that they would probably be happy in even 80-90% inorganic soil to keep their roots dry, as long as they were watered when they needed it. No clue if that's right, though.

For those who live in the Northern Hemisphere, this is an open thread to discuss 2024 plans and ambitions now that cold temperatures are waning.

I'll start off:

I'm taking a risk, but got my seedlings planted out yesterday. Officially, last frost date is May 16, but the rate of warming at 45° N has been so accelerated that we've got about 6 more frost-free weeks than in 2000.

My indoor seed starting wasn't as successful as usual for hot peppers, so I'll probably be buying plants. The tomatoes did fine, so much so that they were overgrowing their pots and the grow tent.

Unfortunately, goutweed invaded a couple of beds and I'm just going to have to tarp them until next year. That miserable weed will grow upwards through a foot-deep bed and there's no way to dig it out. Future beds (hoping to build another two or three this year) will be started on landscape fabric, lesson learned.

Spouse finished digging out the last of an invasive autumn olive hedge at the neighbor's fence line. We're deciding on Amelanchier (serviceberry) or aronia for replacement. Each has edible berries, it's just a choice between prettier flowers or bright fall foliage. There's a local native nursery with good prices on both.

We're also looking at replacing a badly placed non-native mulberry with a flowering crabapple. There are varieties that have both attractive flowers and good-tasting or cider-friendly fruit.

Please share your garden plans, including how you're factoring in climate variations.

Spent yesterday afternoon re-potting my little collection of succulents, and it got me wondering whether other people on here might have some. Curious if people want to share their favorites or tips/tricks, etc.

Please share your garden plans, ideas, and wildly overambitious green fantasies here!

Weird and treacherous climate change weather is distorting my garden sense. Normally, it's not a good idea to plant anything tender until late May here, but I'm betting we won't get frost past May 1 this year, or nothing that can't be handled with strategic use of row covers and cloches.

My fingers are itching to get the hot peppers started. I'm restraining myself from starting the tomatoes too early (again!), and the snapdragons and other slow annual flowers are starting to germinate. I could probably sow kale now.

We'll see which of last year's bulbs survived the critters until the spring. Reinforcement of the deer fencing is happening as soon as the ground is thawed deeply enough to set proper posts, and dry enough to work with wood frames and cattle panel.

I'm going to get a few logs set up for shiitakes, oysters, maitake, and maybe see if last year's happenstance wood chip pile morels can be encouraged. Fingers-crossed that December's wild garlic (ramps) test planting took hold - if that works, I'll get more slips and expand the patch in more of the shady areas that aren't suitable for much else.

Depending on how my hands and spouse's shoulders are holding up, there's a lot of digging in this year's permaculture expansion. A couple of Hugelkultur beds, some (mostly?) American chestnut trees, more berries and apples, planting the overwintered pawpaws, and another try at elderberries. I've got vague plans for building a grape arbor this year, but that's going to depend on availability of spouse's hands during the busy winery season.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

The growing season here in southeastern Australia is just kicking off, so I'd love to hear (and see!) your successes and failures, what you will repeat and what you want to change, what your future plans are, etc.

I've got an indoor stephanotis which got an infestation of mealybugs (bad soil I think). I gave it a spray of Safer 5118-6 insecticidal soap (49.something% potassium salts of fatty acids) and have been going around (and around and around) the plant with an alcohol soaked pad to pick them off. It's a pretty thick mess of vines, and after several days of hunting I've found a lot, but of course it needs to be zero. It's had a problem with scale as well in the past, but this seems to be pretty minor right now. I've encountered just 2-3 leaves with that, and alcohol-wiped them too.

So my question is, is this insecticidal soap the most suitable thing to use (it does specify it targets mealybugs) or is there something better? I plan to give it a good saturation in a couple more days, really try to hit every spot.

I want to get into growing chilis and I decides I want to get started with Jalapenos. I want to grow chilis but the problem is it's already the middle of Summer so if I plant now I can only harvest in fall/winter. Because of this I need to grow the indoors in pots. So my question toward my fellow chili growers:

How hard is it to grow Jalapenos in pots?

I can get my hands on 20L pots so that's not a problem, I can also get nitrogen and good soil (I found a recommendation to not get high quality one). One problem I faced is that I would need heat lamps to help the growing process. My guess is I can't go without them because in my country in late fall, winter, early spring it's pretty cold. How quickly do they grow and how tall they get? One concern I have is they will get to big to grow indoors since I don't have a ton of space inside. I have heard that there are kinds of chilis that stand the cold better (the ones with hair on them) so do you recommend me to get them? Or do you recommend me to wait till january? I'm really excited to start growing them and I'm a bit inpatient. Thanks for the advice in advance.

A year ago I bought a bunch of chili seeds that I planted and then kind of left to its own devices on my balcony together with 3 other types of chili pepper. I watered the plants but I didn't give them any other love.

Despite my negligence the plants thrived and some of the chili peppers developed a very particular appearance.
Perhaps 1 out of 10 fully grown peppers kind of resembled a flower with petals around its base. They aren't suppose to look like that.

https://i.imgur.com/Km2GFu3.jpg

I saved the seeds from the largest and most distinct "flower chilis" and planted them to see if the odd appearance of the peppers would come back in generation 2...and so far 5 out of 5 developed fruits have the same flower appearance. Some only have 2-3 "petals" around the base of the fruit but some have 5-6.

My four gen 2 plants have perhaps 60 more peppers in development (out of 100 flowers) and this year the gen 1 plant only have 2 out of 30 peppers that have the flower appearance.

I have only found one pic on the internets of the same base variety that have a hint of a "petal" but none that look like mine.

I know that new chili varieties aren't considered to be stable until gen 6-7 so I have more planting to do :) but which steps do I need to take to solidify the variety except replanting seeds and growing new generations?

I have wasps building hives under the eves on my house. I'm looking for a way to kill them without Raid or other harsh chemicals. Right now there seems to be about 10 hornets starting on this hive. I see a number of other places they've made hives around the house that were removed before we moved in. My current options that I've found so far are spraying with dawn soap/water/garden sprayer or peppermint. It seems a little too high to get a garbage bag around them easily before pissing them off. Any other good ideas?

I'm on day 4 of a 4 day weekend (lucky me!) here in zone 7b, so I've been spending a lot of time out in the garden. The bunnies and deer have been keeping me busy chasing them out, and have entirely beheaded my tomatoes and peppers, but haven't touched the flowers and herbs at all.

We're on week 4 of very little rain (we got about 5 minutes of thunderstorm two days ago, but that didn't do much more than make the grass wet). I set up an automated irrigation system in my garden bed so it is extremely well watered and lush, and everything else is dry, the grass is yellow and the trees are starting to look wilty. I think that's part of what is attracting the herbivores to my garden, it's like a little oasis, so I can't be too mad about it. Luckily it looks like it's supposed to rain every day next week!

My peas are done for the year, so I pulled them out, and I have lots of tiny green peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers, but nothing much else. I'm thinking to plant beans where the peas were. Do you have a favorite crop that is harvested in June that can fill this gap? What sorts of things do you plant in June in your zone?

I've been struggling with herbivory indoors too - the stupider cat decided for the first time that transcendentia zebrina was the best thing ever, and took several leaves off. Luckily it's not very toxic, she didn't actually consume much, and she doesn't seem to be showing any symptoms of poisoning, but now I'm trying to figure out how to keep this plant in the same window but out of her reach. Any recommendations for shelves or hanging baskets that would work in front of a window in a bedroom/office?

I also gave my extremely leggy silver ann pothos a haircut, so it looks much better. I cut the trimmings into 3-4 node sections and they are all now in very damp soil to hopefully root - I got 36 sections so I'm sure I'll have at least some successes, although I'm hoping they aren't ALL successful or I will be drowning in pothos!

I'm very on board with the concept of permaculture, and while I understand the concepts I don't have a good intuition for which plants fix which nutrients. For example suppose I grow basil in my herb garden.

How do I figure out which nutrients it will eventually deplete? How do I figure out a good buddy crop(s) to replenish those nutrients?

Any permaculturists out there that can point me in the right direction?

Anyone using a drip irrigation system they can recommend? This would be for watering veggies (and possibly flowers in the future) in raised beds. These are some of the things I’m looking for but I’m getting a bit overwhelmed with all the choices out there:

• network capability, whether that be an app (iPhone) or website I can look at stats and control from
• 2 different garden beds to start with (3’ x 8’), with possibly 2 more in the future
• drip is the only irrigation I’m really concerned with so no need for sprinklers or anything (I don’t think, at least)
• there is only one spigot available for the area the beds are in

I have an Aerogarden Harvest. It's a pretty neat little device I picked up a few years ago on sale, and I use it as a starter for my outdoor garden. My outdoor garden inevitably fails due to forgetfulness, rabbits, or bugs. This year, after my lettuce was ravaged for the third time, I decided I'd like to scale up my indoor growing solution. My wife is on board, albeit hesitantly as she knows I'm a utilitarian and give little concern to form once function is established. We have a relatively small space, and no out-of-sight-storage-rooms to utilize for the project.

In short: I'm looking for advice on small scale, low startup cost hydro/aqua/aeroponic DIY projects for leafy greens/herbs that can be made to be "cute" or at least finished-looking, rather than a heap of PVC and 5 gallon buckets.

My best guess currently is one of the single-tower vertical PVC pipe systems with a nice hardwood box built around the 5 gallon bucket sump (lipstick on a pig) or a stacked/tiered NFT system with a nice wooden frame and channels made from some "nicer-looking" gutter.

Has anyone here actually accomplished an indoor grow that they were allowed to keep in their kitchen?

Edit: There's been a lot of great input here. I'm still researching, and if anyone else is going down this road, this channel has been very informative: https://www.youtube.com/@KeepOnGrowin

I'm in zone 4b so it gets frigid here in winter, I'm thinking wood burning stove and I bought the thickest double walled plastic panels for the roof that I could find. I'm just finishing an insulated slab and I'm about to start framing. Please share with me any photos, plans, or guidance you might have! I have no idea what I'm doing!

(This is my first tildes thread please be gentle)

Hello, saw in another thread there was one person interested in boring hobbies of what we're up to so, brace yourselves! This is going to be a thread of me talking to my greenhouse plastic walls about literally watching grass grow, waiting for paint to dry and putting a puzzle together.

Would love to hear about your gardening and home inside/outside/building/demolishing/decorating efforts!

Maybe a sort of memorial thread for plants that died under our care. RIP little dudes.

I've recently been trying to get an area of my yard to grow with perennial wild flowers. For 2 years straight, I plant seeds and nothing comes up. I'm starting to think that the seeds the store sells are just a scam. Even when I tried to germinate them in potting soil, nothing grew. Anyone here have any sort of advice?

2 years ago we planted a lime tree in our backyard. It was already about 5-6 feet tall when we planted it. There's a lemon tree next to it that is probably 50 years old and produces more fruit than we can use. We're constantly giving away lemons to our friends and neighbors, baking stuff with the ones we keep and we still too many left! But our lime tree barely produces anything. The first year it produced 3 limes, all of which were hard and almost juiceless. This year, so far it has produced a single fruit which doesn't yet look ripe. The thing is that it produces tons of buds that look like they're going to become limes, but they either die or are eaten by squirrels, I guess. I've heard a similar story from a coworker about her lime tree. Is there any secret to getting a lime tree to produce fruit?

I went to college in Massachusetts, and after awhile the winters began to get to me. A study-abroad trip to Paraguay helped me fall in love with palms. After I graduated, I explicitly looked for work in areas of the Southeast where I could grow palms, eventually settling in the Midlands of South Carolina (USDA Hardiness Zone 8a), which can grow a reasonable variety (our state tree is the cabbage palmetto, Sabal palmetto, and it is incredibly common in the area). I’ve currently got two potted palms: a European fan palm, Chamaerops humilis, and pygmy date palm, Phoenix roebelenii (the latter needs to be housed in the garage during the winter).

The following are ramblings from my garden. I would love to here the ramblings from other people's gardens.

It's spring where I am, and I absolutely love spring! The last full moon (the one in February) I call the Angry Goose Moon, because it's around that time that my male goose turns into a monster, and I need to pull out my shield (a garbage bin lid) to move around the yard while warding off his attacks. His change in demeanor signifies the onset of spring for me.

Some people divide spring into early spring and late spring, but I live in a cool, wet environment that has a very long spring which is why I prefer thinking about the garden in terms of the moon cycle. The beginning of spring is Angry Goose Moon. During this phase, the hummingbirds start visiting, waiting for our native red flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum) to bloom. Everyday it gets closer and closer (I expect it to be in full bloom any day now). My hated Burkwood Osmanthus (Osmanthus × burkwoodii) begins rapidly trying to turn into a tree, and I'm reminded that I still haven't figured out what to plant in its place as I trim it back down a manageable level. And OMG the freaking cranesbill geranium (Geranium sanguineum) has once again gotten into everything, but I loathe to get rid of it all because the bees love it so much. This year I am being way more ruthless than years pass and have filled several bins of it for the yard waste collectors.

Usually this is also when I start seeds, but I'll be leaving for six weeks, so the seed catalogues will be collecting dust this year. Instead I'm checking out my propagation efforts from last year. I need to move a beautiful hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla) that gets way to big for the area it's in, but I've been afraid to move it case it dies, so last year I took 30 cuttings, which all rooted. It looks like 29 of those made it through the winter. I have no need for 29 more hydrangeas, but I now know I can move the mother plant, and if it dies, I'll have something to replace it with. In the mean time I'll plant the new ones in bigger pots to give away next year when they are more established.

Last fall I divided up some of the lemongrass (Cymbopogon citratus) I planted last year, plopped them into 10 pots, and brought them indoors to winter over. It looks like five of them made it. It won't be late enough for me to get them in the ground before I leave, but I will put them into bigger pots and get them under artificial light. Hopefully they will still be alive when I get back.

I'm not much of a rose fan, but outside my back window is a shrub rose (Rosa glauca) that has beautiful red tinged foliage and purple stems. It only flowers for a short time, and the flowers aren't anything to write home about, but they are followed by nice plump rose hips that I harvest for tea. It is absolutely in the wrong spot with its large growth and overly thorny stems. Last year I took a lot of cuttings of it and some natives roses that inhabit the same area, and it looks like most of them made it. Once they are large enough (another year or two) I'll plant them in a spot where their flesh ripping thorns won't be bothersome, remove all the large specimens, and replant the area with berries (I'm thinking about a mix of blueberry and honeyberry (Lonicera caerulea). Another potting up project before I go.

I enjoy plant medicine and started quite a few medicinal plants from seed last year. I started a bit late so nothing got in the ground, but it looks like most of them were able to winter over in the potting shed, but not all of them. I sowed 30 seeds of skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensis) of which only 6 germinated. I was going to move those six into the house to winter over, but I ended up with a spider mite problem in the house from having earlier brought in my toothache plants (Acmella oleraceae) and didn't want them to get infected. Unfortunately none of the skullcap survived. The toothache plants in the house didn't survive either, and I wish I had extracted their medicinal properties before their death, they were certainly large enough. But this paragraph started like it was going to be about wins. The biggest win, the one I'm most excited about, is that all of my mountain meadow arnica (Arnica chamissonis) made it! Their first leaves of spring are pushing through the soil, and their roots are pushing out of the holes of their pots. I don't believe there is a better plant for muscular aches and pains than arnica, and I am looking forward to harvesting it to make salves. I did seed way too many than my garden can hold, so as soon as I determine whether or not they they also are infested with spider mites, I will offer them up for other people to add to their gardens. I'm also excited that all the elecampane (Inula helenium) made it through the winter, though once again I seeded way too many. The added bonus is this plant can tend to be weedy in my locale, so I will only plant a couple down in the weedy medicinal area to let them compete with each other.

Side talk about garden pests. Besides slugs, which if I allow the ducks to move through the garden, don't damage too much of my garden, my gardens are fairly pest resistant. I spent a lot of time last year moving through it with a magnifier taking pictures and videos of the smaller insects that live among the plants. It's a whole other world living just out of reach of my normal vision! Of particular interest to me were a few of my phlox plants (Phlox paniculata) that had deformed leaves. On closer inspection I saw what I assume is spider mites. A few weeks later, taking video again, I saw what I assume are predatory spider mites, and a few weeks after that the phlox started growing correctly. There are so many predators out there doing "gods" work, and if any of you gardeners are ever bored, I suggest rabbit holing into garden predators.

I'm rambling, where was I?
Oh yeah.
I also use this time to severely prune stuff back that missed my list the year prior. In my culinary herb garden there is a bay tree (whether it's Laurus nobilis or Umbellularia californica I do not know). It's a monster that should not be planted where it is. I know I could hack it it back almost to the ground and it would come back, except that its branches cover my bathroom window in a way that gives me privacy from the cabin on the other side of the creek, while letting light in. It's this constant battle between keeping it small enough that wildlife can't use to get to the roof, yet large enough to afford me bathroom privacy. I just hacked a bunch of it off and I suspect I'll be doing the same again in the fall.

This place has a lot of problems, and I have to remain vigilant in celebrating the successes and not getting lost in lists of things to do. But there's a lot of beauty in our property, and I do enjoy experiencing it. Angry Goose Moon is the time of year when I am filled with the most hope for the future.

Anyone in here interesting in plants (growing, propagating, maintaining, etc). Figure we can get a forum started to exchange tips.

On a side note, some of the side categories seem overly broad. Hobbies for example is going to get pretty bonkers.

Now that it's legal in Canada to grow cannabis, I decided to try my hand at growing a few plants indoors. I started with a simple setup and a couple of seeds in a closet. As I did more research, I slowly started upgrading my equipment and methods. There is so much more to growing good cannabis indoors than I originally thought, and it's become a very interesting hobby for me. There is also a lot of misinformation and pseudoscience out there, which can make it difficult for new growers.

Anyone else into this hobby? What's your setup like? Anyone thinking of getting into it?

A few people have expressed interest in my indoor, semi-automated growing setup so here's the lowdown.. In a corner of my workshop is a cupboard with a footprint of 1.6x1.2m, 2.2m high. This is insulated with a mixture of glasswool, foam board and expanding foam (depending on what I could install where), and lined with diamond pattern aluminumised mylar (the diamond pattern provides diffuse reflection to avoid hotspots).

Inside the cupboard I have 750W of full-spectrum LED lighting, a 500W oil-filled radiator, and a small fan to keep air moving around. There's a vent which pulls air from the outside and a extractor fan which also vents outside. Being able to pull cool air from the outside (even in summer) is extremely useful as the lights can put out quite a lot of heat.

My main growsystem is an Amazon low-pressure aeroponics system, and I've also got some airpots to do some soil-based growing in. Aero on the right, pots on the left. If you're not familiar with aeroponics, it's a system where the plants roots hang in open space and nutrient-rich water is sprayed or misted over them. High-pressure aero uses mist and low pressure uses sprayers. High pressure aero is currently one of the best known ways to maximise plant growth but low-pressure is pretty good too and you don't need anywhere near as much gear like pressure vessels and solenoid and so on. I just have an aquarium pump which drives the sprayers. In my experience aero is considerably more efficient than soil, non-soil media or other hydroponics - but on the other hand it's very twitchy. If your nutrient balance is off or your pH is wrong or worse, you pump fails - things can go wrong very quickly.

The airpots are totally new to me. People say they're good but I have no idea. I have a mixture of compost, perlite and coco coir to go into them so we'll see how that works out. I'm going to use organic nutrients only on them, I have some seaweed derived stuff which should be good throughout the entire grow process.

So that's the hardware, now on to the fun bit - the automation...

On top of the cabinet is a board hosting a Raspberry Pi model A - these days I'd use a Zero W but they didn't exist when I built this. In it's mostly-bare state the board looks like this. Quick explanation - the red board is mains-rated relays which let me switch the connections above it on and off using the Pi. This is where the lights, fan and heater are wired to. The small junction block left of the relays is connected to mains.

The block up and left of the Pi is 5V, which drives the Pi, the relay control electronics and provides power to the junction block on the right. There are various sensors wired in to that block and connected back to the Pi.

Wired up on my bench for testing it looks like this, and in situ it looks like this (this was on a previous iteration of the cupboard but it's basically the same now). The orange cables on the left are lights, fan and heater. The black cables top are the sensors.

Temperature is monitored using five DS18B20 sensors, which are cheap and reasonably accurate serial devices so you can run a whole bunch of them off a single pin on the pi. I monitor my water temperature, the temperature at the plant stem, at the wall, inside my workshop (but outside the cupboard) and outside temperature. The wall/stem temperature is the important one, that determines whether heating or cooling is engaged. I monitor the exterior and interior temperatures to know how effective my insulation is being. If water temperature gets too high I might add an agent which protects against microbial infections that like warmer water.

I do have a DHT22 humidity sensor but they're hella flaky and it's currently not working. I will replace it at some point but past experience suggests humidity is high whatever I do.

The Pi has a python script which runs every five minutes. It reads all the sensors, decides what (if anything) to do, then logs everything in a sqlite database. If it's 'night' (which is actually day outside, for temperature management reasons) it turns the lights off, if it's 'day' it turns them on. If it's cold it turns the heater on, if it's hot the fan. There's a bit of smartness where it actually aims for a midpoint of temperature because otherwise it's always aiming for highest temperature then immediately cooling again, then heating and so on - a stable temperature is better for the plants. At 'night' I tend to run the fan to drop the temperature: plants often like it cooler during darkness, get some fresh air in and attempt to lower the humidity a bit.

There is a web interface which lets me see what's going on - current temperature and status, plus some lovely lovely charts (who doesn't love a nice chart?). I can also turn the lights out from here in case I need to go in an do some maintenance for anything. 750W of LED light is painfully bright, it's much more comfortable (and safer!) to turn them off while topping up reservoirs or changing water or whatever.

It would be relatively trivial to add sensors for moisture or pH to add an auto-watering or auto-adjusting nutrient systems, but I haven't felt the need to do that yet.

Happy to do my best to answer any questions anyone has.

I've enjoyed the challenges of gardening in zone 5 -6 and zone 10 - 11, and am wondering about others' experience.

Climate change, with migrating pests/diseases and more erratic weather, are definitely noticeable trends.

While it's interesting to grow ornamentals and food crops that wouldn't ordinarily be available, it's also disturbing to find falling yields and utter collapses of formerly successful "easy" plants like basil and temperate climate tomato varieties.

There are limits on how much can be accomplished with purely "organic" controls - I've had to experiment with soil ecology (MycoStop for fungal infections, etc.). Allergenic plants are an increasing problem. There are brand new animal pests where I live as well - iguanas, pythons, and other hot-climate reptiles.

I'm curious about others' gardening results, and suggestions for improving adaptability.

Cross-posted with /r/composting

I'm pretty proud of the results of my first year of serious composting (before this year, my method was, "dump kitchen scraps in a pile and turn it occasionally"), so I figured I'd share. Here's a picture of the pile, opened up yesterday for turning/dumping fresh kitchen scraps. Closer view, and even closer. As you can see, it still has a ways to go. It consists of mostly kitchen scraps, grass clippings, and oak leaves, and I guess the latter of those takes quite a while to break down. Here's a picture of it covered with a tarp after I was done, yesterday.

This is actually a combination of eight different smaller piles I worked on throughout the year while I was teaching myself to make compost. The first piles I made were basically just the result of mowing some tall grass/wild plants in the spring--I had thought that since I was mowing up both leaves and grass that the ratio would be just right for composting. I was wrong. Those three piles didn't really go anywhere. I should've added far more leaf matter, kept them wetter, and combined them into one rather than three.

The fourth pile was a combination of kitchen scraps and leaf matter. I had about a 1/2:1 ratio of leaf matter to kitchen scraps. It turned out okay, but of course, I should've added more browns. The fifth pile (featuring a guest who liked the "fresh greens" that I often went outside to spray onto the pile, if you catch my drift...) started out with probably a 1:1 ratio of browns to greens and ended up with a 2:1 ratio, since I started actually figuring things out. I used both mowed-up leaves and mowed-up household paper waste for my browns, and kitchen scraps and grass clippings for my greens. The pile did end up getting fairly warm. I turned it every 2-4 days.

The sixth and seventh piles were nothing but oak leaves mixed with grass clippings. I wasn't great about getting the ratios exactly right, but they were both probably close to 1 1/2:1 browns to greens. Both heated up after I turned them, every few days, and turned out great. I think I do have some pictures, but can't find them.

I started using a tarp with my eighth pile, and that tarp, as well as the increased amount of browns--always at least 2:1--made a huge difference, as previously I had a hard time keeping piles at the right moisture level. Either they'd dry out in the sun or they'd get soaked in the rain. The tarp protected from both and helped insulate the pile, enabling it to get to the right temperature despite being fairly small.

I tried to follow the Berkeley method closely (other than that I added to it every time I turned it). If I added new scraps, I let it sit for four days; otherwise, I turned it every other day. I started adding pretty much anything to it. One time while I was turning it, I found a dessicated dead robin nearby and tossed that in. There was no trace of it the next time I turned the pile.

Fairly recently, I combined all of my piles into one, as you saw above. This makes it a lot harder to turn, but it seems to be going well. Instead of making a new pile and letting this one sit, I've continued adding to this one every week, when I turn it (now that it's this big, it's hard to find time to turn it more often than that). I'm not sure if I'll be able to do this through winter. I've been stocking up on coffee grounds from Starbucks (I have maybe 8 bags of them sitting in the garage?) to help me keep it going, but it gets pretty cold here in Michigan. Maybe I should start a new pile in the winter rather than keeping this one going; I haven't decided, yet. I'm happy to hear your suggestions.

Thanks for reading! Tremendous thanks to /r/composting; everyone there is incredibly helpful, and there are many very knowledgeable folks there. I couldn't have learned this much about composting without them. I've offered them my five invitations, so hopefully we can eventually get the same kind of composting/gardening discussion over here!

I'm hardly an expert after just one year of composting, but I'm happy to answer any questions you have about my methods, about composting in general, or about how you might get started.

Now for some bonus pics, just for fun:

A bear admiring my pile
That same bear about to destroy a bird feeder... D'oh.
Compost/Hugelkultur-in-progress (I'm not sure how people find the time to gather enough woody materials/grass clippings to make a hugelkultur all at once!)

I don't have the land to do it yet, but my dream is to build a year-round greenhouse in a back yard, so that I can have green all throughout the monochromatic bleakness of a New York winter. This is pretty much a daydream at this point, but I'd like to get some feedback from folks in the know.

The feature wish-list is as follows:

• a dug-out trench, shaped like a V with a flat bottom. Thinking something like 12' (or go metric and make it 4m) wide in the middle, with sides at a 60° angle going to ground level (total depth of around 10' or 2.5m)
• a double-paned glass or plexiglass roof, for insulation and lighting
• heating elements in the outer layer of roof, for snow and ice removal
• a space heater, to regulate temperature during the cold months
• an aquaponics tank (probably using goldfish, but possibly tilapia)
• aquaponics grow beds lining the angled sides
• compost-activated biochar beds on the flat part

The idea would be to run the aquaponic outflow to the top of the sloping sides, supporting herbs, leafy greens, and flowers. The runoff collects at the bottom of the slope, where it is returned to the fish tank. The flat surface would be used for root vegetables and bulbs like onions and garlic.

I realize that this is a tad ambitious (and that I may just be throwing the biochar bit because I think its cool), but part of why I'm posting this is to get the benefit of collective experience. Any thoughts?