Compost Your Gophers
I’m a firm advocate of blender composting . Throw your kitchen scraps into your blender (don’t add in items that your blender can’t handle, but throw them in after its blended) with a lot of water and drizzle it around your plants. If its chunky, kick some dirt over it. This feeds your microbes very quickly because the organic matter is bite-sized, and thus feeds your plants. No chemicals necessary.
After making pickled jalapenos, salsa, or other spicy foods I thought that the resulting compost smoothie would be very powerful. Indeed it is. So I pour it down gopher holes that are in my garden areas. No one wants jalapeno/onion/garlic water in their livingroom. I’m fertilizing the garden at the same time as discouraging the gophers.
I’ve gone a step farther and made a merry mixup of foods past their prime along with vegetable scraps. Old juice, stinky rice milk, moldy leftovers, the juice from a bottle of pickles, the last of the salsa… whatever you need to throw out, add to your blender liquid and pour it down the holes. It won’t stop the gopher from tunneling in another direction, but it will wreck existing tunnels for them, and feed your worms and microbes. And after watching plants disappear into the ground, pouring evil brews down the hole is very, very satisfying.
3 Comments
gkinkead
What an awesome idea. Blender composting! I live in gopher hell so I’ll try your method but I’ll add it a gopher cage first. So glad I found this post. It really made me laugh.
Diane
Leah, thank you so much for taking the time to comment. Gardeners bury compost for ‘in-ground’ earthworm bins, usually using perforated pipe to allow earthworms to come and go to fertilize the soil all around the pipes. I bury compost without the pipe, but it does take a little while to decompose. Digging a hole in the garden (if you have no gophers to help you! 🙂 ) and pouring in liquidized kitchen scraps will do the same job, but make it go faster because the bits are smaller and take less time for little mouths to work on it. Great luck with your garden!
Leah
I’ve just come across your blog today after researching guilds for my avocado tree and I’m enjoying your posts 🙂 This is the first time I’ve heard of using the blender to support composting, what a great idea! No gopher problems here, but it might be worth it to use a blender to chop up kitchen scraps than do it manually sometimes. Thanks for sharing!