Wednesday

And Yet More Miscellaneous Rambling

Have you ever considered starting a worm farm to produce your own vermicompost but don't want to deal with all the hassles? I think I have a solution: Simply use a self-watering container (one with the indents and holes at the bottom that lead to a reservoir). You can get one for $4 at Dollar General, and it'll work great. Just add a fistful of garden soil and finished compost, put the red wrigglers in, then add coffee grinds, banana peels, apple cores, and vegetable scraps. You'll have to spray it with water every other day (or it'll dry out), but otherwise, it's effortless. I did this in my basement this year so Max would have a supply of worms to feed his turtle. It has worked out incredibly well. There all sorts of online forums that delineate what the red wrigglers can eat, but in my opinion: if you can compost it, you can vermicompost it, except for tomatoes, anything in the onion family, and citrus.

Belloc on the Battle for Syria. Lengthy. I haven't even read the entire thing yet, but it looks pretty good, though it might resurrect some of those "Belloc is an anti-Semite" arguments from yesteryear.

I've been reading a lot from Dorothy Day's diaries lately. I'm really enjoying them. You can find a few choice entries at National Catholic Reporter, if you're interested.

It's the Feast Day of St. Gregory Nyssa! He became one of my favorite saints after reading Jean Danielou's introduction to From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa's Mystical Writings. I wrote a piece about Gregory many years ago that The Catholic Faith purchased. Unfortunately, it no longer appears to be online, so I scanned and saved it as a pdf, Click here, if you care to read it.