INDOOR COMPOSTING Extension Information

WSU Spokane County Extension Master Gardeners The Lowdown

June 2015 INDOOR COMPOSTING Extension Information

Dr. Jeremy Cowan 477-2145 Regional Horticulture Specialist [email protected] By Kathy Callum

Tim Kohlhauff 477-2172 Horticulture Program Coordinator [email protected]

Anna Kestell 477-2195 Education/Clinic Coordinator [email protected]

Master Gardener County Site http://www.spokane-county.wsu.edu/ spokane/eastside

Master Gardener Foundation of Spo- kane County http://www.mgfsc.org/

WSU Master Gardener Site http://mastergardener.wsu.edu

HortSense Fact Sheets http://pep.wsu.edu/hortsense

On Line Timelog Reporting: http://ext.wsu.edu/Volunteer/logon

“I’d like to compost … but I live in an apartment now.” Spokane Inside this issue: Master Composters and WSU Master Gardeners often encounter people who want to compost their food scraps yet lack the

Indoor Composting 1 space, ability or time sufficient for an outdoor bin. One of the

Foundation News 2 primary messages of 2015 International Year of Soils (#IYS) is the global importance of returning our food scraps back to the soil. Book Review 4 In the words of U.S.D.A. agronomist, “Ray, the Soils Guy” (Ray Ar- Armchair Gardener 6 chuleta), “The Soil is Naked, Hungry, Thirsty, and Running a Fe- Continuing Education 8 ver!” It takes nature about century to accumulate the amount of Upcoming Events 10 compost that you can incorporate into the soil in just one gener- ous dose. Making compost locally out of our food scraps, particularly in urban environments, is one of the most helpful things we can do to help the earth on which we live. (Continued on Page 3) The Lowdown Page 2 MG FOUNDATION NEWS

OVER $17,000!

2015 GARDEN FAIR TOTAL

CONGRATULATIONS ON A JOB WELL DONE

(Ready for next year? You betcha’) The Lowdown Page 3

Liz Stewart 1-Jun Daniel Mueller 3-Jun Vivian Powers 5-Jun Beth Fairfax 5-Jun Eberhard Schmidt 9-Jun David Yarbrough 14-Jun Margy Swenson 20-Jun Peecheng Chen 21-Jun Karen Feyk 24-Jun Janis Saiki 24-Jun

We are so glad you are with us!

(continued from page 1) WORM BINS

Worm bins are particularly fun for vegetarians, families, schools, churches and other educational programs. Red wiggler worms (Eisenia fetida) are a relatively undemanding pet capable of turning half their weight in food scraps into rich, nutritious worm castings per day. A pound of worms can process a half pound of food scraps a day. The only caution is that worms are alive and require care and ideal temperatures of 55-77 degrees just like you. However, meat, dairy, citrus and garlic give them indigestion. House plants and outdoor gardens alike thrive on worm castings. I love how vermicomposting is a living demonstration showing how the “poop loop” recycles carbon in food scraps for the benefit of our planet! Did you know that worms are capable of detoxifying pesticides and killing pathogenic bacteria just by passing materials through their alimentary canal? There is even upscale designer worm fur- niture that you can purchase.

(continued on page 8) The Lowdown Page 4

Garden-pedia A Book Review by Susan Mulvihill

When helping clients in the plant clinic, do you ever feel daunted or confused by various botanical terms? You are not alone but I’m happy to report there’s help on the way.

A new book called Garden-pedia: An A-to-Z Guide to Gardening Terms (St. Lynn’s Press, 202 pp., 2015, $16.95) has been written by Pamela Bennett and Maria Zampini to help Master Gardeners, students and those working in the horticulture industry master these terms.

From “abiotic” to “zone,” the authors went to great lengths to list and define the words we com- monly see, yet occasionally struggle to comprehend in our line of work.

Garden-pedia is a colorful guide filled with illustrative photos for most of the definitions... and the occasionally humorous definition … just to remind us that the authors don’t take themselves too seriously!

For example, read part of the definition for “double digging”: “... you take out the top one foot of soil and place it in the bottom of the first trench, then take the next one foot of soil from the bottom and put it on top of the bottom soil in the first trench. Keep doing this until you are either dead tired or the garden bed is ready to go! Hint: you will be dead tired anyway, but hats off to you!”

There are cross-references throughout Garden-pedia to other relevant terms that have been de- fined elsewhere in the book. Within each definition, there are also highlighted terms that will each have its own definition.

For example, the definition for “rootstock” refers the reader to other important related terms such as “roots,” “graft,” “ornamental” and “dwarf.”

Some definitions are very clear and don’t require explanations, while the authors provide clear examples of the context of words for most definitions.

I think this would be a useful book to have in the plant clinic as it is both informative and very easy to use. And you just might want to have a copy of your own to help you wade through terms in garden books, magazines and other literature produced by the horticulture industry. The Lowdown Page 5

Fact Sheet Project Update! By Tim Kohlhauff

Thank you to our dedicated committee of volunteers who are working on fact sheet up- dates! This is an ongoing project, so anyone who finds they have time to help out, let me know and I’ll put you to work. Thank you to everyone on the committee who has done so much work! Here are the latest additions and changes: C008 Blueberries has been rewritten and split into two fact sheets! Thank you to Karen Parks who did a great job of updating and rewriting the old sheet. C017 Blueberry Cultivars for the Inland Northwest has been updated. C075 Mulches has been updated and rewritten by Sue Malm. Thank you Sue! C091 Soil pH has been updated and rewritten by Sue Malm. Great job Sue! C133 Strawberry Cultivars for the Inland Northwest has been updated and rewritten. C205 Drought Tolerant Shrubs for the Inland Northwest has been updated and rewritten by Janice Sather. Thank you Janice, great job! C040-C045 Fruit Tree Spray Schedules. To comply with WSU requirements we’ve had to eliminate all pesticide recommendations from our fact sheets. However, we have updated these sheets with links to the appropriate page so our clients can still retrieve the information they need. Unfortunately, links only work online, so our hard copies will not be as helpful as they used to be. The following fact sheets below have been eliminated. We will refer clients to Hortsense: C035 Fairy Ring -refer to Hortsense -Lawns– Fairy Ring for updated information. C074 Moss & Algae- refer to Hortsense-Lawns-Moss page. C089 Peach Leaf Curl –refer to Hortsense - Fruit Trees - Peaches and Apricots- Peach leaf curl C157 Local Rose Sources as been eliminated for lack of use. C159 Harvesting and Preserving Herbs has been changed to Harvesting Herbs, as food preservation is outside the scope of the Master Gardeners

Thank you Fact Sheet committee members: Carol Anderson , Jane Beaven, Joice Cary, Nancy Big- gerstaff, Carol Doty, Sharon Doyle, Beth Fairfax, Patty Fay, Jill Ferguson, Anna Kestell, Ryan Herring, Rose Jacobus, Ken Johnson, Ed Lester, Pat Lynass, Doug Mallott, Sue Malm, Carol McKenny, Kay Meyer, Claudia Myers, Karen Parks, Janice Sather, Vi Tiegs I hope I haven’t missed anyone! We’ve had a lot of great help so far and we’re looking forward to moving ahead. The Lowdown Page 6 MEET A FEW FASCINATING GARDEN PLANTS By Eva Lusk ‘Constance’ (on the left) and ‘Willy’ (on the right) are two of my favorite flowering vines. They bloom early and profusely and belong to the Clematis alpina species. They share a trellis in my garden and sometimes seed themselves.

I’ve brought some of the seedlings to our plant sale, but they’re always still too young to flower, so I’ve never seen what a seedling flower looks like. I assumed they would grow into another ‘Constance’ or ‘Willy.’

Assumptions aren’t always correct. According to A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO CLEMATIS by Barry Fretwell, “None of the hybrids (and this includes named varieties of the species) will produce seedlings that in any way resemble their parents.” I just discovered the truth of that in my own garden. I had kept a seedling for myself and this year it’s finally blooming. It doesn’t exact- ly look like either ‘Constance’ or ‘Willy,’ but it has ‘Willy’s coloring and a lusher flower than ‘Constance’s semi-double one. It is definitely a keeper and I just hope that all of the plant sale versions turned out to be equally attractive. Is the new version due to hybrid seed habits or to cross- pollination since the two parents share a trellis? Who knows?

Seedlings that don’t duplicate the parent flower are no newcomers to my garden since columbines (Aquilegia spp.) flourish here and are presently in full flower. Each spring I wait for the new crop of flowers to unfold and surprise me. The color and shape of the flowers are amazingly different from year to year. This is caused by cross-pollination among all the different columbines in the immediate neighborhood.

A columbine doesn’t look at all like a clematis, but the two are related members of the Buttercup Family (Ranunculaceae). This family includes quite a number of flowers that at first glance don’t look like they have much in common. You can’t count on them to have the same specific number of flower parts like sepals, petals, pistils and stamens.

What you can count on is that every single flower part is individually attached to a cone-like receptacle (the place at the bottom of the flower where it’s joined to the stem). The picture below shows what this looks like in the Clematis tangutica species.

A clematis flower has no petals, only sepals, and you can see how they’re attached at the bottom of the cone-like receptacle. Notice also the stamens attached above the sepals, but below the pistils. There are only four sepals in this clematis, but there are numerous

stamens and pistils. As the flower matures, the stamens and sepals drop off leaving the pistils to turn into a fluffy seed- head. When the seeds turn brown they’re mature. (continued on page 7) The Lowdown Page 7

(continued from page 6) Because each flower part is individually attached to the receptacle and the flower parts don’t come in consistent numbers, flowers in this family are considered botanically ‘simple.’ That term lets us know that this family has been around a long time. In the more evolved plant families, floral parts occur in smaller, specific numbers and are often fused together as well.

Now let’s take a look at the columbines (Aquilegia spp.) in our gardens. They certainly don’t look simple at all. They have petals and sepals and spurs with nectar, as well as quite a few pistils and stamens.

In the picture below, look for the white petal that turns into the pink spur. It’s all one piece and each petal with the spur at the end is separately attached on the underside of the petal, about where the white part turns into the spur. The sepals are the pink petal-like parts that emerge between the spurred petals. They, too, are separately attached. Looking into the flower head itself, you can see the white petals with pink sepals behind them and a lot of pistils and stamens. The stamens are easy to recognize by the yellow pollen anthers. The pistils look like stamen filaments without the anthers. But under the microscope you can see that each one actual- ly has a stigma (the opening) at the top of the style (narrow tube that goes from the stigma to the ovary) and lets the pollen do its job to produce the seed you see below. Sta- mens and pistils are also separately attached.

To the left you can see the mature seed head made up of five separate pistils (try taking a seed head apart and you’ll see that while the pistil struc- tures are close together, they’re not fused.) And look at those hooked tips.

Hellebores (Helleborus spp.) also belong to the Buttercup Family and like Clematis spp. they have no petals, only sepals. Like columbines, they do have nectaries. In a columbine the nectary is part of the petal, but since hellebores have no petals, you see the tubular nectaries each sepa-

rately attached to the receptacle. The picture at right shows a close-up of all these flower parts for the ‘Ivory Prince’ hellebore. In the photo at left, you can see the different flowering stages, from bud to a flower ready for fertilization (it has nectaries, stamens and pistils) and finally the post- fertilization stage in which nectaries and stamens have done their job and fallen off, leaving only the sepals, pistils and fertilized ovaries developing seed.

In BOTANY IN A DAY, author Thomas J. Elpel provides a more complete look at the But- tercup Family and suggests that the easiest way to identify its members is to look for “dicot flowers with three or more simple pistils, usually with hooked tips.”

That description works pretty well for the plants I’ve featured here. But, beware, there are exceptions! Just check the number of pistils in the Actaea genus. And there are surprises as well—who has petals and who doesn’t. Obviously not all nectaries are spurred, but are all spurs nectaries?

You’ll make some amazing discoveries when you get to know the members of the Buttercup Family. The Lowdown Page 8

(continued from page 3)

The Bokashi Indoor Composter (~$60-$80), in contrast, can handle meat, dairy and citrus. The Bokashi is an air-tight Japanese method that anaerobically “pickles” or ferments food scraps anaerobically. It is ideal for offices and apartments. The Bokashi Composter requires a special “grain” or fermentation mix that costs about $1.00 per week for continued operation. The Bokashi method doesn’t physically decompose materials, but it does sufficiently ferment them so that they do quickly break down when added to community garden or landscape soils.

Want a no fuss, no muss way to dispose of food scraps? Older folks may remember digging a hole and burying food scraps in their garden. While burying food scraps is illegal in the city of Spokane, a compost digester is simply a fancier version for recycling nutrients back into the soil. A compost digester is great for households that desire a low cost, passive, way to safely recycle food scraps and people who are unable or don’t want to maintain an active “hot” compost pile. Small, plastic cone shaped digesters like the “Earth Bin” or “Earth Machine” (~$30-100) are ideal for small urban yards. The base of the enclosed digester is open to the soil and hungry soil food web. Compost digesters function optimally by throwing in a handful of sawdust, leaves or soil to cover each deposit of food scraps into through the top door. The theory is that pests don’t bother fully enclosed digesters. The addition of hardware cloth to the bottom helps deter gnawing rodents. Despite mis- leading advertising, compost digesters rarely yield finished, finely screened compost and are al- most impossible to mix from the top or get a shovel into the opening at the bottom. Open bins work better for people who want to actively make their own compost. Passive compost digesters do need to be moved around the yard once in a while so the soil food web, rather than invading tree roots, can take advantage of the rich feast of food scraps.

A somewhat more pricey indoor composting option is a mechanized electric composter (~$200- $500). This appliance is somewhat similar to a bread-maker in size and shape. They are ideal for people with active lifestyles, those who travel frequently or eat out a lot, those who are single or are seasonal residents, or kitchen appliance geeks who don’t want the obligation or wiggle of worm pets. Caution: some electrical appliances only dehydrate, so be sure to purchase one like the Nature Mill that guarantees composting through both physical and biochemi- cal means. On the plus side, mechanized electrical appliances handle meat, dairy and all kinds of food wastes. Super green pet owners could even label and dedicate one exclusively to handling pet wastes and place the finished product under landscape (not vegetable garden) plants. The volume of electrical mechanized composters is relatively limited but they do recycle organic “wastes” into a substance that can be used to bring life to the soil. The Lowdown Page 9

They’re baaaaack……

Spotted Wing Drosophila, an extremely damaging pest of fruit crops have been trapped in high numbers in central Washington. We should watch for them in Spo- kane. For information on building your own traps, visit the following link: http://cru.cahe.wsu.edu/CEPublications/FS049E/FS049E.pdf.

Just a Friendly Reminder ….

It is each Master Gardener’s responsibility to find his/her own replacement if life circumstances prevent fulfilling your Clinic duties.

A list of volunteer replacements can be found posted in the Clinic and online under ‘Spokane County MGs’.

Thank you for the time you so generously give to this program!

Lowdown Quiz Answer Key:

1. no organic matter or carbon 2. degradation 3. LOTS! Time ran out this month so the quiz for the June 4. The Tao of Vegetable Gardening Lowdown will run in the July issue along with the July quiz. 5. seed saving and dehybridizing

6. Lamprocapnos spectabilis I apologize for any inconvenience this may 7. Dicentra formosa cause! 8. Chelidonium majus, it is invasive (Like having time now to go pull those weeds!) 9. Organic matter

10. Online Web Soil Survey Happy Gardening, (websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/ HomePage.htm) Kris Moberg-Hendron

Calendar of Events

Wednesday 3 Garden Tour: Marilyn Lloyd 6 pm Saturday 6 TFM Plant Sale Monday 8 MG Foundation Board Meeting 1 pm Tuesday 9 KHQ Connect Center 5am-7am Saturday 13 Information Booth, Spokane Pride. Noon-5pm Wednesday 17 Garden Tour: Pat Lynass 6 pm Friday 19 Info Booth: Emerson-Garfield Market 3pm-9pm Saturday 20 KHQ Connect Center 7am-10am Monday 29 Clinic ID 3:30 pm—5 pm PCS Training 5:30 pm

JULY

Tuesday 7 KHQ Connect Center 5am-7am Monday 13 MG Foundation Board Meeting 1 pm Saturday 18 Info Booth: Davenport Pioneer Days 9am-4pm Saturday 25 KHQ Connect Center 7am-10am Monday 27 Clinic ID 3:30 pm—5 pm PCS Training 5:30 pm

Persons with a disability requiring special accommodation while participating in our programs may call the WSU Extension at 477-2048. If accommodation is not requested at least three weeks in advance, we cannot guarantee the availability of accommodation on site. Extension programs and policies are consistent with federal and state laws and regulations on non-discrimination regarding race, color, gender, national origin, religion, age, disability, and sexual orientation. Evidence of noncompliance may be reported through your local Extension office.