can-o-worms

[buffalogal]

A special thanks to Comrade Simba for the tub of worms and castings he brought to the B2B meeting last night. We worm seekers were able to spade up cans full of the cute little crawlers to take home to our new compost beds.

Freelance told us that shreded paper makes a good worm bed. And last night, Bob told us of a paper shredder at Walmart for under $20 (in the office supply department). He shreds up his junk mail for the composter and turns junk into black gold for his garden.

Freelance and Simba let the earthworms do the work on junk mail, phone books and stuff like that. It takes a longer time to make the 'black gold' this way, but the worms do all the work. I can live with that. And the earthworms said they would be happy to take care of all that stuff - its their job.

[buffalogal]

More earthworm trivia for you guys. The writer of this blog has an 'earthworm wigwam' http://www.yelmworms.com/worm-bin-depot/ Simular to the can-of-worms, but with a different twist. Thought you might enjoy this info:

Charles Darwin referred to the earthworm as the “intestines of the earth.” Darwin was obsessed with these little creatures. He spent 44 years of his life dedicated to thinking about them. Not constantly, of course, but more than most of us. For example, do we really wonder about whether an earthworm has a sense of hearing? Darwin did. “They took not the least notice of the shrill notes from a metal whistle...” Now there’s an image of Darwin you don’t often consider: blowing a whistle into the hypothetical ears of an earthworm! But what mattered most to Darwin is that they were numerous and busy in the soil. An acre of land he estimated, and he seems to have been largely correct, has about 54,000 earthworms. Darwin realized that each of these little creatures spend much of their time ingesting dead or near-dead plant material and anything else in their path, including little rocks. These are ground up in their tiny gizzards along with the plant material to create golden poop called worm castings. Everyone seems to know why castings are golden, for they are the premier soil conditioner. I have earthworms going to work under our bunny cages. There, they have a ready supply of food and can overwinter easy. Now, this year, thanks to one of our CSA members, we are the proud owners of an earthworm wigwam. This wigwam will be the home to 18,000 worms, at least, and will supply around 10 pounds of castings every day or so. Just turn the crank and falling to the bottom of a giant green cylinder is nature’s nurturer! The point is this: to become a self-sufficient farmer or gardener, think about how you can have a ready supply of fertilizer that has been the result your table scraps. Even a bunny in a cage is a huge step toward self-sufficiency and certainly vermicomposting is another....Rudolf Steiner, who is considered the father of biodynamic farming, wrote that bringing in manure or fertilizer to your farm or garden from an outside source is to be considered a temporary remedy for sick soil. But producing your own manure will lead to the permanent health of your soil. So, if I dare say, for the benefit of your grass, flowers, trees, and vegetables, figure on how you can house some permanent poopers! http://www.localharvest.org/blog/204...wigwam_home_to

[buffalogal]

Here it is near the end of September, and the worm bin has been up and running since February. I just wanted to share with you the results. The bin was just an old plastic ice chest with holes drilled in it and cardboard squares for bedding. For over six months now, I have been feeding the bin with coffee filters, tea bags and miscellanous kitchen veggie scraps. The worms have done an excellent job of disposal and there have been no flies or smell or such. Its amazing with all the stuff that's been put in there, the bin never seems to over fill.

There are holes in the bottom of the bin to drain excess 'leachate" from the bin, but it still often seems pretty moist. I usually tear a few pages of newspaper each week and add that to the bin as well to help soak up excess moisture. The worms seem pretty happy. I took a few cups of the black soil they have made early this summer and put it around the garden plants. This was my best garden in the 19 years I have lived in Missouri.

I've been so busy that the worms have been pretty much neglected, just feeding to get rid of kitchen waste without actually using the stuff they are making for me. I had meant to make worm tea for the garden but never got around to it. I plan to do much better next year using the vermi-compost and tea. The deal with making tea is not just to make a liquid, but actually to multiply the organisms in the compost by aeriating the water for a few days and even adding molasses or brown sugar to feed the microbes. Below are some thoughts and links for making compost tea.
Carol

“You get hundreds of times more microbes coming out the back end of a worm than go in the front,” says Dr. Clive Edwards, who does research in the Soil Ecology Laboratory at Ohio State University. And that may explain why vermicompost tea is superior to conventional compost tea at boosting plant growth and controlling diseases, insects, and nematodes.

http://www.finegardening.com/how-to/...mpost-tea.aspx
Why go to the extra trouble of brewing, straining, and spraying a tea rather than just working compost into the soil? There are several reasons. First, compost tea makes the benefits of compost go farther. What's more, when sprayed on the leaves, compost tea helps suppress foliar diseases, increases the amount of nutrients available to the plant, and speeds the breakdown of toxins. Using compost tea has even been shown to increase the nutritional quality and improve the flavor of vegetables. If you've been applying compost to your soil only in the traditional way, you're missing out on a whole host of benefits
Don't try to make compost tea without the aeration equipment. If the tea is not aerated constantly, the organisms in it will quickly use up the oxygen, and the tea will start to stink and become anaerobic. An anaerobic tea can harm your plants.

http://www.finegardening.com/how-to/...mpost-tea.aspx Compost tea is water in which compost has been steeped. Leached into that liquid are some of the compost’s nutrients, microorganisms, and a witch’s brew of poorly defined compounds called humates. Humates help plants better use nutrients already in the soil and offer a host of other benefits. Compost tea has long been used as a weak fertilizer, but in recent years, devotees of compost tea have shifted the focus away from the liquid’s ability to provide a small amount of nutrients and onto the microorganisms it contains. To encourage microorganisms, tea making has turned high tech: Rather than rely on compost tea, I continually enrich my garden soil with plenty of compost and other organic materials, an approach I have been using for 30 years

[buffalogal]

My worms were sitting on top of their bed the last couple of times I added food for them. I could see there was liquid in places and wondered why it had not drained. When I finally got around to investigating seriously, it was almost too late. Many of the worms on top of the bed were dead, and many others did not look very healthy.

Turns out the drain holes in the bottom were too small and had gotten stopped up LONG AGO. I had been in the habit of adding newspaper when the bed seemed damp, but that was not an adequate fix for the problem. It kept them going for quite awhile, but the worms were only living in the top layer. When the liquid finally got to the top, there was no place for them to go.

OK, I temporarily put some newspaper in the coffee cans and moved worms from the top of their bin into the cans. Then I took half the bed out in buckets to the garden, including much of the water from the bottom of the bed. Then I got out the drill, and drilled more holes. They stopped up right away. My drill bit needed to be larger!!! I finally got the holes to drain properly and let the bed drain for most of the day before putting my little wormey friends back in. I'm thinking it will take quite awhile for them to recouperate from this ordeal. Thankfully, the bin is in the house and cold is not a factor. Nor do I have as much kitchen waste this time of year. Cross your fingers for me and my little worms that they recouperate well real soon.
Carol