Shadyside Worms

We are opening the doors at Shadyside Nursery Saturday April 25th!
Come down and get some worm castings for your garden or talk to us about
composting and vermiculture! We have lots of workshops, events, and even a CSA planned this year!

This is a lovely article about our trip to Allentown to teach some kids in an afterschool program about composting and worms, check it out!

The Brashear Kids

If you are looking to set up workshops for your organization or business this spring or summer, send us an e-mail and we can get started planning!

If you’re one of the many people that would like to compost, but don’t have a yard or the proper space, you finally have a way to do it! Our residential composting program, the Curbside Compost Exchange, is designed just like your recycle pickup, except we take your food scraps and return fertilizer that you can use to enrich your soil, or donate to a local community garden or urban farm program.

A big THANK YOU to my good friend Brent Riley, owner of Access Media Labs out of Frederick, MD for helping us out with some super awesome stickers for our compost buckets! I’m too excited not to post some pictures. I LOVE ‘EM! 😀

Our 2 gallon, or 3.5 gallon compost buckets

This past week we have been fortunate enough to teach some composting workshops to a few summer camp groups at the EECO center(Environment and Energy Community Outreach) in Larimer.
It has been so much fun! The kids are learning all about nutrient cycles, composting, and of course WORMS! We even take a trip to Larimer’s community garden to get some hands on work done.
If you would like to have Shadyside Worms teach some workshops on composting or soil science, shoot us an e-mail so we can set up a meeting with you and make great things happen for your community.

shadysideworms@gmail.com

Please take some time to check out all of the the cool things we have to offer here, from worm bins to our composting program- but more importantly, take some time to go out in nature and enjoy the beautiful ecosystems all around western Pennsylvania! Appalachia is a truly unique place to live in and explore, and this time of year there is nothing more beautiful than the natural composting that feeds our wilderness.

Sometimes we wish we could spend more time out in the wilderness, but this is also a busy time of year for composters with all the urban gardening/farming projects going on. Our apologies if it is hard to reach us, PLEASE keep trying, we value our customers, and hope that as we chug along through our second year, we will be able to make more time for everyone!

THANK YOU!

I can’t think of a whole lot to add that isn’t already incorporated in the awesome video on Cornell University’s website, so I’ll just go ahead and post it so you can start learning about the benefits of worm castings for fertilizer and for a premium growing medium for your starters next spring. If you sign up for the Curbside Compost Exchange today, you will be eligible for more than enough pure worm castings in the spring to start your seeds in, plus more compost to put in your garden or potted plants. Check out the video!

http://cwmi.css.cornell.edu/vermicompost.htm

**SATURDAYS in SEPTEMBER**

Stop in to Shadyside Nursery, or e-mail us at shadysideworms@gmail.com, to register for a Fall Planting/Planning workshop! There will be two workshops in September:

Workshop#1– Learn how to design a successful cold frame for the Western Pennsylvania climate zone, and plant some fall crops as well! We will have some starters for you if you want to get some gardening in before winter. We will also teach you about composting, from food to lawn scraps, and how to prepare your garden for the next season. At the end of the workshop, we will be breaking out the calenders and brainstorming to help you create your own personal gardening calender for the year so you’ll be ready to grow organic foods and decorative plants from seed to harvest.

Saturday Sept. 7th     3:00pm – 4:30pm

Saturday Sept. 14th   3:00pm – 4:30pm    

Workshop #2– Improve your gardening skills by learning how to build a raised bed and incorporate a variety of techniques in square foot design. Gardening in an urban area often requires some good planning depending on what crops you’re growing. As well, we will be discussing what we call “winter hardy” crops. These are things like garlic, horseradish, onions, and other crops that you plant in the fall to harvest the following year. We are going to have some beautiful heirloom garlic, and some cuts of horseradish for you. We will be teaching you some basics in soil science in this workshop, so you will know how and why to test your soil and maintain a healthy organic garden. At the end of the workshop we will be breaking out the calenders and brainstorming with you on how to create your personal gardening calender for the year so you’ll always be a step ahead.

Saturday Sept. 21st    3:00pm – 4:30pm

Saturday Sept. 28th    3:00pm – 4:30pm

Workshops are $10 per person, $15 if you are registered for both. Please e-mail or call us to register, or go to Shadyside Nursery @ 510 Maryland Ave. next to Harris Grill. We will be e-mailing the workshop agendas after you register. Please bring your payment to the workshop you attend.

shadysideworms@gmail.com     (412)532-6896

The months of July and August are a great time to put down some compost tea for your plants while they grow into their last stages of development and production. Compost tea will supplant any nutrients that have been taken up by your plants including potash which is vital to cell membrane health and strength. The beneficial microbes will also help suppress disease, and you will be able to get the most out of your garden and grow well into the fall season.

COMPOST TEA:      $2 per gallon

Come in to Shadyside Nursery and we will fill up a jug for you, or you can buy a 1 pound bag of worm castings, and soak them overnight in 1 gallon of water and then it’s ready to use.

One pound of worm castings in One gallon of water will go a long way to fertilize your plants

Seed Bombing has its roots in guerrilla gardening and proactive environmental protests, but it also shares some history with places like Hawaii and Africa, where seed bombing can be a useful technique for introducing wildlife into landscapes that have been cleared out by volcanoes or wildfire.

The idea is simple. Make a small clump of seed mix by mixing clay, compost, and seeds(preferable native species) and form it into a ball that can be thrown into empty or abandoned lots that suffer from a lack of wildlife. You can toss them over fences, off of bridges, or wherever you want to see a little more flora. The clay helps hold everything together, and the compost provides the base and nutrients for the seeds.

Shadyside Worms was able to provide some worm castings to the Teen Department at The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh for their seed bomb program. The worm castings were made available by two of our customers in the Compost Exchange program who decided to donate the exchange from their first 3 month subscription. We always encourage people in the compost exchange to donate their castings if they don’t want to use them, and we were more than excited to be a part of the seed bomb making!

Vermicompost in particular works perfectly for seed bombing. The nutrient content allows you to skip using fertilizer, and more importantly, the beneficial bacteria contained in the castings actually help prevent disease in seedlings by warding off harmful spores that invade the seed as they germinate. If you would like to know more about this, check out our link from Cornell University on our previous post, and keep up to date on our blog as we show you our own controlled experiments with growing seeds in vermicompost!

Now go make some seed bombs and lively up your neighborhood or yard. KABOOM!

I can’t wait to see this guy grow real soon. Come on rain…just one more storm…