What a beautiful warm day it was.  So nice to be outside and to know the mosquitoes survived the winter:( .  However, there was no smell in the air.  No grass smell, no tree smell, nothing.  The air was empty.

According to hummingbirds.net, the migration has started and I have to remember to put some of my hummingbird feeders out for those males passing through.  I should see them late next week.

I have beautiful yellow shrimp for sale on Aquabid.    Auction #1, Auction #2, and Auction #3.

It’s supposed to be around 70 all week long! Long enough for things to start showing signs of life again. I can’t wait to open all the windows and let the fresh air in.

Also gets me thinking about what to grow in my raised bed garden this year. I was thinking of adding a 2nd raised bed because I saw them for sale at Lowes or Home Depot the other day. I’m glad they sell them now so I don’t have to order online and pay shipping. I’d really like to grow snow peas, zucchini, tomatoes, lettuces and spinach. The problems I’ve had in the past are mosquitoes taking up residence in the lettuce, and ants eating my tomatoes. Maybe I’ll get another raised bed and tent like pole structure for the zucchini and peas to climb on, use my current raised bed for tomatoes, and get grow boxes for the lettuce.

I think a big problem I had with the lettuce last year was that I planted too much too close.  My 4 year old was “helping me” plant the seed by dumping all the seeds in one spot, and I never thinned them out.

A beautiful pre-spring day.  Washed the car, puttered around the house and watched the male cardinals become territorial after a winter of everyone getting along.  The first of the hummingbirds should pass through in 2 weeks, I have to remember to put the feeders out next week.  Last year the first ones showed up on March 18th, the year before on March 15th.

One of the ways I’ve been trying to live more in harmony with nature is recycling and reusing.  But I didn’t know what to do with food scraps.  Normally if I lived on a farm or had a bigger house lot I’d have  a spot where I could just toss the scraps and let whatever was around eat it.  But since I have neighbors on all sides, I can’t do this.

I tried composting once, and it was just too much of a hassle and it attracted flies.  I don’t have the time or desire to come up with the proper mixture of this and that and turn and all that other stuff.  So down the garbage disposal food scraps went.

A few months ago, I was on Metro Nashville’s recycling site and saw they had a Green Cone Food Digester.  It’s basically a cone with a large basket that gets buried 2 feet in your yard with the green cone on top.  You don’t use the food as compost, it’s basically a place to put your scraps and let the worms and whatnot have at it.

So I went to the recycle station and bought it, brought it home and put it together.

It came with the baskets you see above, a small compost pail you put on your sink to collect scraps, and accelerator power.  I put it all together and went to go put it in the yard.  The soil here in middle Tennessee is hard clay, and my backyard is mostly rocks under the top layer of soil so it took a huge effort to get the hole dug.  I wasn’t able to get the basket completely in the ground because of the rocks, so what I did was put a layer of drainage gravel at the bottom of the hole, put the black basket in, then backfill with dirt, another layer of drainage gravel, then more dirt.

Now the basket was still about 2 inches above the ground level, so I built a raised bed with concrete blocks around it, 2 blocks high.  I backfilled that with dirt and it was done!

It may not look all that pretty now, but my plans are to stain the concrete to make it look better.  When the weather warms up I will add some bushes the base, and plant something that will grow over the concrete.

So far the cone is working great.  Even though it’s winter, the food is “digesting”, there isn’t any bad smell when you lift the lid to add more food.  I’m happy that I’ve found a place to put food scraps and I’m sure the worms are happy too!

I’ve been using Tennessee Curbside Recycling. I’ve been happy with the service, but just received notice that they are going out of business and suggested I use Earthsavers.org. I’m going to go ahead and give them a try. They will be a once a month service rather then the twice a month service I have now, but they use a 96 gallon cart rather then the 18 gallon bins i’m using.