Dave represented Monster Worms and helped clean up along the river in downtown Antioch on September 19th. It was the 25th Annual Coastal Cleanup. 
He along with 230 volunteers ranging from girl and boy scouts to business people and residents helped to collect three tons of trash along the Delta. It was a very rewarding experience.
Monster Worms also donated 15 pounds of our castings for the raffle. We understand that they were won by a person with a garden that needs some TLC. Perfect!
Every Friday Dave helps out at the CC Times community garden in Walnut Creek, CA. The food grown at the garden is donated to the Solano County food bank. To date more than 100 pounds of fresh produce have been donated! Donations of home grown food from gardeners is also greatly appreciated. Each week a different topic about gardening is presented. This week the presentation was about “Winter Gardening” and what crops grow best in cool weather.
We enjoy gardening and we are fortunate to live in a climate where we can garden all year. Soon, we will be pulling out our spring and summer crops and putting in our fall and winter ones. The winter crops for this year will be lettuce, beets, carrots, broccoli, and peas.
We plan on using our “bean teepee” for the peas. In this photo you can see our girls surrounded by pole beans that they planted from seeds. They help me plant most of the garden and everything is planted from seeds except for our tomato plants. The girls love seeing the plants grow and harvesting the vegetables!
For more information about the Contra Costa Times community garden go to www.contracostatimes.com/home-garden.
WOW!!. Look at this lovely organic fertilizer that Dave pulled out of our bins the other day. Worm Castings!!! The best fertilizer there is. Why do I say that? Because it’s true. Worm castings are rich in water-soluble plant nutrients. They are packed with minerals essential for plant growth that can be used by the plant immediately, unlike chemical fertilizers.
Earlier this year, we applied worm castings to our tomato plant that had leaves with yellow in them. That plant made a turn around and ended up looking better than the other tomato plants.
Castings can be used as a seed starter….it won’t burn the plants, as a fertilizer by top dressing or working into the soil surface, or it can be made into “worm tea” and sprayed onto plants or on the surface near their roots.
We heard a wonderful sound in our backyard today! The buzzing of hundreds of bees collecting pollen from the flowers of our fruitless Pepper tree. Now most of you are probably saying…..what..are you nuts? That makes you happy? Well, yes it does…along with other things of course. Many years ago, you would always hear the loud humming of the bees in that tree. Then year after year, it got quieter and quieter.
The plight of the bee in recent years has been a difficult one. Their numbers have been diminishing dramatically. This has been blamed on a variety of different factors. Honey bees are susceptible to the same chemicals that are sprayed on many crops for insect control. These pesticides are known to be toxic to bees. Parasitic mites and Colony Collapse Disorder have also reduced their populations.
Bees along with some other insects are responsible for pollinating many of our crops. We need them and I hope that the buzzing sound in our tree keeps getting louder and louder.
The garden at Monster Worms is 100% organic. We do not use any pesticides or any chemicals in our garden. The only thing that is put in there is compost from our compost tumbler and homemade compost bin. Occasionally we will have a plant that 
has a problem and we will top dress the soil at the base of the plant with our worm castings. This always seems to make a big difference. Within a few weeks, the problem plant looks much better.
When I first bought this house 18 years ago the soil was lousy. It was hard and lifeless. About 16 years ago, I started to amend the soil with compost that I made. What a difference! We added old deck 
boards to make the garden beds raised and we kept on adding our compost inside these beds. We now have rich, crumbly black soil where there was once tan clay soil with no drainage.
When it is time to plant something in the garden, I 
normally only dig out the area where the roots will be. In this area, I put in the compost mixed with some crushed oyster shells to add in some extra calcium. This seems to work really well. These photos are of our cucumbers, beans, zucchini, and sunflowers. Look at how large the leaves of the plants are!!
Dave found our red worms chowing down on some cucumber the other day. 
It sure looks like they like it! When Dave found it they were all over it and through it. They made all of these tunnels and channels. It was pretty cool looking!
Cucumbers are a plant in the gourd family Cucurbitaceae. Having enclosed seeds and developing from a flower, cucumbers are scientifically classified as fruits, much like tomatoes and squash.
This year, we had our cucumbers climb up a trellis in our garden. It helped to free up space and it was much easier to find the veg…I mean fruit. Do you think that cucumbers make worms burp?
