Not Exactly Mark Watney

After observing the desiccated drought stricken weed patch that was my backyard and naively thinking I knew something about farming because I  read the Martian and lived with a farm scientist for two years, I  decided to plant a garden. If you need advice on how not to do a garden, then you should follow exactly what I did. After a lovely and always confusing trip to homedepot my dad  and I bought two raised garden beds and some soil and a turntable composter. So as a scientist who thought he knew what he was doing, I purchased the exact volume of soil needed to fit the beds. Except that's not how soil works apparently. It squishes. It compacts. And after dumping the 50 pounds of glorified organic dirt (with BAT GUANO!), the beds were barely half full. So back to the local garden store to get some more soil. And in complete SNL fashion I ended up returning to that store TWO more times to get all the soil I needed... So after a slow start and a truly bewildered store clerk,  we went out to the Marina Del Ray Garden Center and randomly picked an assortment of vegetables based on our preferences for not liking vegetables (I blame My coop friends for the kale) as well as a pink lemonade and Valencia orange tree with the false hope of getting any fruit in my lifetime. Planting was easy enough. Though deciding to plant BEFORE installing the drip irrigation was well... I'm no Mark Watney. But I am proud to say that after a month of oppressive Miami like heat, ravaging micro dogs, and a diabolical plague of green CABBAGE LOOPERS (Trichoplusia ni) (kale was the human shield), the garden is looking pretty good.

The Compost on the other hand...

I like bugs. I think they are awesome. I am all about spiders and praying manti and who doesn't like butterflies? But there are a few insects who I would be ok with if they went extinct. Mosquitos are one. And the other are but now were fruit flies.

So after deciding to science the shit out of this organic composter, I began to notice maggots, sorry I mean baby flies (hard to be PC). At first there were a couple and I thought that in this oppressive heat, they would be baked alive, a well deserving end for them. But they didn't. They just kept coming like an episode of Walking Dead. And despite the 100 degree weather in SANTA MONiCA! (yes if we go 5 degrees above or below 75 our bodies shut down entirely) But the baby flies did not care. And clearly my composter clearly was not reaching doing what I thought it was supposed to do. But after some research (garden bloggers are a weird cult) it turns out that those bastard maggots were  little black soldier flies larvae (Hermetia illucens) that were churning out compost like nobodies business. So despite my expert farm advice from some friends/dorks at Stanford (go figure), the seething mass of loveliness is actually exactly what I want. Now actually handling the compost and putting it on plants is not what I want. Ever. It is a fate as bad as wielding the mung knife at S@S. I have nightmares just thinking about it.

So I short, this marine biologist is starting a slow, hopefully environmentally friendly, conquest of the terrestrial biome. The urban Gardner brigade won't know what hit them.

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