I am just going to jot down a few points for myself so that I get a general understanding of the composting basics. As composting is not precision science, guess I don’t have to be accurate on anything. Even if you don’t get it right the first couple of times, given some time, you will have your compost.

• Equipment

I guess we need a bin. Could leave it in the open, but there are disadvantages doing that, and to keep it all simple, I will choose to use a bin for my composting.

Now that I have a compost bin, what do I need to put in there?

• Ingredients

Kitchen waste – vegetable waste, watermelon rinds, coffee grounds, eggshells, egg carton; but NOT fish or meat waste, oil or fats, nor dairy products, NOR juice or milk cartons (those laminated carton is composed of paper and layers of polythene – which is not biodegradable)

From office – paper, newspapers and cardboard, wrapping paper, bank and credit-card statements, etc;

From garden – lot of green waste can be put in the compost bin

The basics theory

• Carbon to nitrogen ratio

Best practice is 30:1. Paper is carbon; and vegetable waste contains more nitrogen.

• Moisture

As worms and organisms need moisture to survive; if the compost pile or bin is too dry the

• Aeration
• Worms

I set my compost bin on the vegetable bed, hoping some worms (red wigglers) will find their way in; so I am actually hoping to make a worm bin, with just paper, carton and vegetable waste. I will be ready, though, to buy some red wiggelers, just in case.

I have put some kitchen waster in there and we will see how it goes from there. Hope in a few months’ time, I will have a bin of compost to use next year.

In the mean time, I will be watching my bin and backyard, and my basement very closely for any signs of mice.

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While looking for some better-looking apples to bag, I found this small apple. It looked perfect, but when I lifted it to put a bag on, I realized that it was stuck to a leaf. Then I knew that it had already been infested. I had seen too many of those just the day before. I pulled at the leaf, and saw the tiny larva. And a hole on the apple.

While I was taking picture of the hole, I found another imperfection on the apple, a dent with a sealed hole – that was likely the entry point of another codling moth larva. The larva must have entered a long while ago, and the poor apple tried to heal itself by covering up the hole.

This is how it looks when opened up:

Here is my theory as to how the codling moths infest apples:

1. A codling moth lays eggs on a leaf. Or a twig;
2. When the eggs hatch, the larvae start looking for apples to infest. As they are not capable of moving at great lengths, and apparently they are not able to jump or fly, the only possible way to get onto an apple is where the twig or leaf the larvae are on physically touch the apple.
3. The larvae move onto an apple and start eat their way into the apple. In the process, their excrements stuck the apple and leave or twig.
4. When the larva is mature enough to pupate, it exits the apple. If the apples gets lucky, or big enough, the larva does not get to its core yet before exiting, the apple might actually survive.

This apple was still on the tree, I cut it off just to see what had deformed it.

It’s apparent that a codling moth larva had called it home for a while before leaving to pupate, mate and lay eggs just to infest more apples. Looks like I had lost the battle even before it started. My first encounter with codling moths has totally failed! Dealing with codling moths will not be easy, but I am determined! I am going to be your worst nightmare (if you actually dream, that is). Codling moths, you are now officially declared my enemy! I will find every little dirty secret of yours and destroy you!

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Searches for bags turned up some YouTube video and webpages about bagging apples using Ziploc bags. Wow, that’s just what I need!

So I set up my ladder and looked for good apples to bag. There were one or two that were absolutely clean and clear of any sign of damage. Yes, you read correctly. One or two, out of maybe two or three hundred apples that are still left on the trees!

Looks like it IS too late. And you know, man, it hurts. Badly. The dreams of eating those delicious organic apples from my own backyard! Oh, what a shame!

I had rejoiced in picking one little cucumber or a couple cherry tomatoes from my yard, congratulating myself on my first successful season of organic gardening! Oh how stupid of me! By neglecting my apple trees, I must have lost hundreds of dollars’ worth of apples! Those little apples have been falling dozens everyday day, probably hoping that they might somehow get my attention so that I could save their fellow apples! They fell everywhere! On the grass, on my cherry potatoes and cucumber plants! Even on my head! But I just ignored them.

Looking at those ugly apples, with holes, brownish excrements all over, deformed, I could not help but think of Zoombies. Say you know that some people have been bitten and have become zombies, but it hurts the most when you realize that some good friends of yours have been bitten and are turning into zombies. There are still others that you are not sure if they have been bitten or not. Or if they will actually turn into zoombies if they are just scratched. That’s what happens with my apples.

I know most of the apples are gone! They are lost to the larvae. When there is a hole on the apple, chances are they already left to pupate. If they had got to the core of the apple, the apple is done! It will just rot away and fall prematurely!

After bagging maybe a dozen good and not so good apples, I realized that that’s not the best thing to do. If I leave those uglier ones out there, codling moths are going to get them and it would be just as if I feed those apples to them. I could not do that. Finally, I decided to bag each and every of those apples that still look like apples. Just like those would-be zombies. You cannot kill your friends thinking that they must have been  infected. You have to try all you can to save them.

So, I am going to

• bag those good apples, so that codling moths will no longer have access to them and will have to leave them alone;
• bag those not so good-looking ones, so that they would not be infested by codling moths, although they might have been infested with something else. By bagging them, there could be at least a chance that they will survive;
• bag those that were apparently infested with codling moths, as there was a hole, or there were brownish excrements. Doing so, I hope that when the larvae, if they are still inside the apples, want to move to other places to pupate, they will be trapped inside the bag, thus terminating its life cycle.

I will be monitoring those bagged apples very closely.

Update: It looks like you need to prick the bags or cut the corners of the plastic bag to drain rain water. But will codling moth larvae find their way in from those holes? We will see…

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I have a couple of apple trees in my backyard. Last year, only one apple was found. To be accurate, just half of it hanging lonesomely in the tree. Guess the other half was shared by birds.

When the trees burst into blossoms in the spring, I was thrilled, thinking that I would have plenty of organic apples come the fall.

Look what I have two months later.

And this,

It’s apparent my tree is sick and the apples are infested with pests. This might be the hard way to learn some pest control techniques in organic gardening. So I went to the library and found this book: The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Pest and Disease Control from Rodale. Here is what I found:

Fruit with holes surrounded by brown, crumbly excrement. Cause: Codling moths. Adults appear in early spring and lay eggs in trees within 2 to 6 weeks of blossom time. Eggs hatch into larvae within 5 to 14 days. The fat, white or pinkish, 7/8-inch caterpillars tunnel through fruit and may be gone by the time you find the holds, which may be filled with frass, waste material that resembles moist sawdust…. Infested apples may drop early;

So that’s it. Codling moths are the culprit. Those are making tunnels in my apples.

I found another (well, it’s not that difficult to find one, but…) apple on the tree with the above-quoted symptom. I opened it, voilà!

Having stumbled upon organic gardening, I am ill-prepared for pest control and disease control. I knew it would not be easy, but I had only a very vague notion of pest, or pest control. This will be a very good opportunity for me to gain some real experience in organic gardening.

I am going to follow the methods to control the codling moths, and will share with you my progress. Stay tuned.

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It turned out that organic gardening is not as easy as it sounds. After many long hours of work and many a mosquito bites, I actually harvested my first cucumber in about one month’s time and my first cherry tomato two weeks later. There are definitely lessons that I learned. Not really the hard way, but there is indeed a learning curve.

Lessons I learned so far:

As it’s still early into my first year in organic gardening, there is a lot more to learn. And rest assured, I am learning and I will be sharing.

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