Two new chairs!

I found two more chairs to add to my collection of chairs to refinish for the dining room! They were even more of a steal: $5 for the darker one and $8 for the lighter one.



As you can see, there is a bit of a wrinkle in purchasing used furniture: Cats are not sure what to make of all the smells you are bringing into the house. I think this is mainly upside, but if you brought smells they didn't like it could be a downside. Imagine them marking the chairs (not that my cats do that, but I hear that many some late- or not-fixed tomcats do.)

These chairs fit in pretty well with the ones I bought earlier for $10 each, even though they weren't really supposed to.




And I have some Behr paint swatches to compare, too. I'm a little perplexed by paint, though. Even if it's still cost effective for me to buy a separate quart of paint to use on each chair, it is certainly wasteful to do so. There's no way it's going to take a quart to cover a single chair. What am I going to do with the leftovers? Aren't they hazardous waste?

Vermicompost harvesting lessons learned

Things I wish I'd known when I started:

• Leave the worm poop in a pile for at least 20 minutes -- no being impatient -- so that the worms all have a chance to flee to the center of the pile.
• Separate the poop from the worm, not the worm from the poop (poop is a lot less wiggly).
• If there's undigested stuff, just throw it back in so that you can focus on the black gold.
  
• Most importantly, ditch the utensils and just use your hands. It's worth it for the gain in efficiency.
  
• The worms are far more scared than you are.

That's it! A nice couple came to pick up some worms today. They have six kids! The boys are going to be excited. If I like worms, I am sure little boys like worms.

How does my garden grow?

No major point to this post! Just wanted to share some pictures of the herbs and vegetables I've transported up here and how they're faring.


To start with, I have two window boxes filled (left to right) with chive, chard, chives, globe basil, Fordhook giant swiss chard, and star basil.

• These chives are my phoenix plant: They have made it through three winters now, each time dying with the frost and coming back in early spring when melting snow revives them. They grow fast, and they are a great herb to use in your cooking if, like me, you hate onions with a passion.
  
• The Fordhook giant chard just keeps on coming. I have harvested about a dozen leaves four or five times for my favorite "Cheesy Chard" dish from my mom's 70s edition of "Diet For A Small Planet." And it never punks out on me like wimpy lettuce has in the past.
  
• The globe basil has disappointed me. It has grown nicely, but the leaves are tiny. I like big basil leaves that I can roll up and then do a chiffonade cut on. It is fragrant and tasty, though.

In this next picture you can see a succession of pots. From left to right, they are: Tommy Toe tomato plant, orange tree, tomato plant, more chard, cilantro (gone to seed), pepper, triple-curled parsley, more parsley, and another tomato plant.

• I wish I'd planted cherry tomatoes instead of real tomatoes. These Tommy Toe tomatoes are taking way too long! And I love cherry tomatoes. They have a lot more flavor, and I've heard that they are more nutritious too. And it's easy to pick precisely the amount of tomato you want to use.
  
• The orange tree loves it up here. I had to keep it inside where I loved previously because my balcony was too windy for this poor tree. In the past year I only got two oranges to maturity as a result. They were hilarious oranges -- green on the outside, orange and delicious on the inside. I made orange juice from them. But now I have a whole bunch of baby oranges as well as new tree growth. Fingers crossed these guys don't fall off. The only downside to keeping it outside is that you don't get the amazing smell of orange blossoms in your home.
  
• It's my fault the cilantro went to seed. The flowers were pretty and I didn't cut them. :( Even worse, for a while I forgot that this WAS cilantro and I purchased the herb from the store instead of using what I had. A shame.
  
• The pepper plant is doing great. It has two baby peppers, about a dozen flowers-turning-into-peppers, and another dozen flowers. I can't remember what kind of pepper plant it is, though. Last year I had a Serrano pepper plant that produced some seriously spicy peppers.
  
• I have been using the triple-curled parsley very heavily, and it has managed to keep up nicely. I am very pleased with my parsley plants.
  

Other than the chives, which I have had for years, I grew all of these plants from heirloom seeds I purchased at www.seedsavers.org. I learned about this site from Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle. The only thing Seed Savers lacks is pictures of mature plants. I like to think that would have saved me from the globe basil.

Which is crunchier: new or repurposed?

I have a dining room for the first time ever, and I don't expect to have one again in the near future. As a result, I am furnishing my dining room on the cheap with pieces I won't mind parting with in two years. Of course, I also want pieces I'll love in the meantime. Such is life.

After much comparison shopping online and in person, I chose the IKEA Dockstra dining table and an IKEA Expedit 4x2 bookcase turned on its side for a buffet.



But as you can see the room is pretty bland right now. That's ok, because that's how I planned it. The color will come from the chairs, which I envision as IKEA competition. Why? Because instead of purchasing new on the cheap, I'm going to repurpose old (on the cheap, too, I hope).

I see this as a competition between IKEA, a responsible furniture manufacturer, and the combined forces of thrift stores, hardware stores, and sweat.

Today thanks to a tip from my neighbors I picked up two dining chairs for $10 each at a local thrift store. Score! Here's a picture.



My plan is to find 2-4 more chairs. There were some good candidates at the thrift store, but they all had plastic covered seats that I wasn't sure how to remove/swap out. The table seats 4 easily but can handle 6 in a pinch. I'm going to strip them down and I think paint each chair a different vibrant color: blue, green, red, orange, purple, etc.

To figure out how to do this I'm going to rely heavily on the clever folks at my local paint store, with some additional information from these links, courtesy of Google:

http://www.ronhazelton.com/howto/antique_chair_restoration.htm
http://www.curbly.com/celee/posts/152-Refinishing-wood-chairs

What prevents this experiment from being maximally crunchy? As I see it the variables are:

• Direct cost of materials, i.e. price
  
• External costs of materials, e.g. toxicity
  
• Cost of labor
  

I wonder if I'm forgetting anything?

The chairs I wanted to get at IKEA were Norvald dining chairs in red, for $69 each. Assuming I got only 4 that would be a total of $276 -- pricey!

I'll pick out paints for now, but I'll update on results later.

"You didn't vermicompost in Cambridge, did you?"

I've been vermicomposting (composting with worms) since this past December, but I've only just begun to harvest my vermicompost. What does that mean? It means to collect the products of vermicomposting, which are worm poop, worm poop, and worm poop. Here is what worm poop looks like:

I began with fewer than a dozen worms, which came courtesy of a the very nice director of recycling in Cambridge. In the course of vermicomposting, I think I have seen about a thousand. When I close my eyes sometimes I see worms. Big fat worms, middling worms, baby worms, and worm eggs. The worm eggs scare me most. They are supposed to contain 2-10 worms each.

I am going to have to get even better at identifying worm food. For example, I often forget to save coffee grinds and tea bags. Better stop that, or else the worms will come knocking on the door.

In the meantime, I have posted on craiglist an offer for free worm starter kits. Three people got in touch to take me up on the offer overnight! We'll see how many come through. Here is the listing: http://nh.craigslist.org/zip/765935982.html.

Some of the folks who responded to my add on craiglist asked more about my setup. I told them:


I'd be happy to tell you a bit more about my setup. It is very simple! I have a large Rubbermaid storage bin that I purchased at Home Depot. I then drilled about two dozen air holes in the top using a normal power drill (you could do the same using a hammer and nail if you don't have a power drill).

Within the bin I have bedding of shredded newspaper I have wet and then wrung out. Within this bedding I bury food scraps. The frequency at which I add food scraps has increased as the worms have multiplied; it started out being once a month and is now more like once a week.

There are lots of resources online that provide additional information on home vermicomposting. I am really quite an amateur!


I have done two harvesting sessions of two hours each following the advice I've followed online, but I still have a lot of poop to pour through. I've made a dent, though, as you can see. The "finished product" is obviously the brown stuff at the bottom of the image. The stuff at the top is the fresh newspaper bedding with food scraps buried in it.