The Worms, Reloaded

The Venerable Friendly One is having a cup of tea on a glorious afternoon here, north of the 48th parallel. A rest break is in order. Today's forecast called for 61°F today. It is now 68. No clouds. It's just past 3:00PM and the PV array is still pumping out more than 3KW of power.

It seems to be a perfect time to chat with The Wrong Rock for a bit.

"Why a rest," you ask? Well, I have just spent about 4 hours futzing (that's a technical term applied to clueless urban farmers) with my worm bin. It's been clear for weeks that the worms were not thriving, so today was allocated to:

1. Investigating
2. Diagnosing
3. Improving

...the habitat of the worms.

Now this delightful activity was best performed in the basement – the finished part of the basement. "Why," you ask?

Well, worms don't like bright light. So if you dump the contents of their bin in a place with bright light, they'll burrow away from the light. This reflex on the part of the worms make it easier to herd them. You just keep brushing the worm bedding around and the worms keep burrowing. Eventually you can separate the two. The finished part of the basement has a wall lined with windows. When the blinds are up, it's bright in there. Not basement-like at all.

It's cold and dark in the unfinished part of the basement. Carrying loaded worm bins up and down the stairs wasn't that appealing. That left the finished part of the basement.

So I found a giant piece of cardboard and laid it beneath the windows of the basement. Then I placed several sheets of newspaper on the cardboard. Then I opened the worm bin and dumped the contents onto said newspaper.

Immediately, I was able to diagnose at least one of the problems with the worms' habitat. It was too wet. Food was moldy and stinky. So was some of the shredded newspaper. The whole thing was a slimy, stinky mess. I took the worm bin pieces out to the garden and hosed them off so they were clean.

Now I have read that cardboard is a good component for worm bedding, so I snagged a nice box from Angel's stash of potential shipping boxes. No color printing. Check. Pretty clean. Check.

I cut this box up in a couple of different ways. First of all, I cut one piece that would just about cover the bottom of the worm bin insert. That's the place where the worms live. It's got a bunch of holes in the bottom and you need to have something to keep the worm bedding from falling through the holes into the bottom tank. I sprayed this piece of cardboard with water from the garden hose (not too wet!) and placed it in the bottom of the bin.

Then I cut the rest of the nice clean cardboard into strips. I made a sort of woven "place mat" thing with cardboard strips and wetted that too.

Next I got some new bedding. I decided that my first try was too easy to compact and get gooey, so this time I decided to try to reproduce something closer to a worm's natural habitat (whatever the heck that might be). We still have some organic compost that we used in the main garden. We also have some of the soil that I took from the garden and strained to remove the rocks. Finally, we have some sawdust from my adventure with the chipper/shredder.

All three piles have been sitting out in the weather. It rained pretty heavily last week, so when I dug down a couple of feet into each pile, I found nice moist stuff. This is what I used for my worm bedding.

I mixed some of all three (compost, earth, and sawdust) together, emphasizing the compost, and placed a couple of inches of this mixture in the bottom of the worm bin. Then I laid the damp "place mat" on top of that and added some more mixture. Then the remaining damp strips of cardboard, peeled to make them thinner and (one hopes) tastier and easier to eat. I topped off the bedding with another inch or so of the compost-earth-sawdust mixture.

I did this whole thing in the place in the basement where the worm bin stays. This new bedding was both deeper and heavier than the original. It is moist, but not wet. It is not sticky and smells pretty much like moist earth.

Next I tackled the stinking mess on the floor of the basement.

Over the next few hours, I pawed through the stuff, looking for living worms. Each time I found one, I carefully cradled the worm in the palm of my left hand while I continued pawing with my right. Much of this was done kneeling on the floor (wood over concrete... padded by the edge of the big piece of cardboard). Sometimes I sat on the floor. After a while I realized that I could spot living worms better if I wore some of my reading glasses.

Each time I got 10 or 20 worms out of the mess, I carefully transferred them to the new bedding.

Oh, and I wore some latex gloves while I did this. I just couldn't see any benefit to smearing my skin with slime. This whole process was sort of smelly. Even now, I'm slightly nauseous, but it's getting better.

After a few hours, I had separated hundreds of worms from the old bedding. Clearly, the old environment wasn't as toxic as I'd feared, but it clearly wasn't that comfy for the worms. I found full size red wrigglers, significantly smaller red wrigglers, and what I'm pretty sure were baby red wrigglers. These last worms were paler in color and tiny, but they were shaped just like and moved just like their larger brethren. I am choosing to be optimistic here. Hopefully they are not the larvae of some kind of alien invaders.

Some (peripheral) good news: I am still able to get down on the floor and get up, over and over, for hours at a time. It's not as fun as it was when I was a child, however.

In the process of sifting through the muck, I also encountered some tiny spiders and what looked like an earwig or two. I didn't transfer those to the new bedding. At the end of the whole thing, I swept up. I didn't make too much of a mess, so it was only a matter of 20 minutes or so to clean up.

Now the worms are safely bedded down in their new quarters. I hope these are more suitable and that the worms thrive. I must say that so far, vermiculture has been much more challenging for me than regular old composting. I just read the wikipedia article on "Vermicompost" and it seems just as simple in theory as it originally did. Oh, well. I suspect that the new bedding is a bit deeper than it needs to be, but probably this will be okay. I hope so anyway.

For the next few weeks, my plan is to emphasize things like lettuce leaves that are too funky to go in a salad, finely chopped vegetable trimmings, and things like that. I will put these on the surface of the new bedding. This is much less aggressive than the articles on vermiculture say, but after the first experience, I need to take this slowly.

Garden Today

The last couple of days have been brilliant.  Today the sun is shining brightly.  At 3:30PM, we'd already generated over 20 KWH of energy and the array was still producing over 2 KW of power.  I'm pretty sure we could do better if I were to get up on the roof and carefully clean the PV panels.  If I approached the whole thing from the back (north) side of the house it would probably be safe.

At the right, you can see some of the rows of salad greens in the main garden.  As I type this, Ray is outside putting up the final set of gates.  This is a good thing.  At lunch time I went out to check the mail.  "Bambi" was standing in the flower bed that's on the NW side of the driveway. S/he looked at me as I came down the stairs.  She looked at me very calmly.  I had to get within about 8 feet of her before she decided to saunter off into the neighbor's yard. Yes, it is a Very Good Thing that Ray is putting up the gates.  "Bambi" and her friends could make short work of the garden.  I shudder to think what could happen if the neighbors' goats get out.

At the left, you can see some little chard plants and some potatoes that are clearly thriving.  Some of them came up outside my bird netting, so we'll have to see if the crows have a go at them.  I'm hoping that since potatoes grow underground, we'll be okay.  

Last night I cooked up some chard we got from the co-op.  I washed and cut the chard into manageable pieces.  Then I put some canola oil in a skillet.  I added a splash of sesame oil and some herbs for flavor.  I cooked the greens gently -- all the time thinking about the Steve James recording of "Greasy Greens" from his "Not for Highway Use" CD.  They weren't very greasy, but they sure were good.  Later in the summer we're going to enjoy eating from this garden.

The soil seems to drain extremely well.  We've had a couple of good rainstorms in the past week, but there's never been any standing water in the main garden.

Tomorrow, I'm going to re-bed the worms (if any are still alive, that is).  I think I've got some ideas on how to make them more comfortable.  Hope I'm right.

Worms Under Stress

Last week, when I checked the worms, they seemed to be doing fine.

This AM I went down with some leftover brown rice, some used tea leaves, and some fruit leavings, and saw no live, adult worms! The drainage pan beneath the bed contained quite a few dead worms. I did see some little "wormlings" wiggling about in the bedding.

So I cleaned out one large glop of un-consumed food and took the drainage pan outside. I dumped that whole mess into an outdoor compost bin and then hosed out the drainage pan. Now I've reassembled the worm box in the basement.

Maybe the materials I used for the bedding (mostly shredded newspaper and cardboard with some added sawdust and soil) contained something toxic? Maybe it's too wet? I'll need to keep a close watch on this; although I don't know what to do differently. It's probably time to reread the web references on worm bins.

Chipping

I've been splitting bark from the firewood. The bark seems to stay damp longer and perhaps absorb more water than the core wood. This makes fires harder to keep burning at high temperatures -- which is important for clean burning in the stove. So I usually split the bark off each piece with a hand axe.

This makes for lots of pieces of bark. So I rented a shredder and spent four hours last Sunday feeding the shredder with chunks of bark. I learned right away that the shredder's maw wasn't large enough, nor was the shredder sufficiently powerful, to accept the largest bark pieces, so a lot of effort went into breaking the bark into pieces that were 3 or 4 inches wide.

It was warm and sunny on Sunday here, north of the 48th parallel. This made for hot, dusty work. After a while I realized that I'd better wear a dust mask. Fortunately we had some in the garage. Of course the shredder is also really loud, so I had to wear big, ear-muff-type ear protectors too. I thought about wearing goggles as well, but decided that the built-in protection at the input of the shredder was sufficient.

It didn't seem like this should be all that heavy of a job, but I must say that after four hours of working with this beast, I was pretty much ready to sit down and have a snack.

Now, however, we have a nice pile of coarse sawdust and wood chips. The green in the pile is from a couple of pine boughs that the wind had pruned from the some of the larger trees.

I figured that it wouldn't hurt anything to have some of that mixed into the chips. Here is a shot of the pile. It's probably hard to see in the photo, but the pile is pretty substantial. I've tried screening it to use coarser pieces for mulch in flower beds. This might be a good idea, but it's also pretty important to allocate time to the most important tasks. We're getting the main garden in, and I've got to build a net over the main (16' x 20') garden area to keep the crows from destroying it.

Oh, here's a close-up of some of the wood chips. You can see that we've ended up with a nice mixture of small chips and coarse sawdust. The sawdust will be a good thing to add to the worm bins for bedding. The worm bin articles say that the little worm guys like sawdust, and I know that none of this has had fungicide sprayed on it.

Since it comes from conifers, I'm pretty sure that the sawdust will tend to make the soil more acidic if we use it as an amendment. We want to grow berries and several other plants that like acidic soil, so I think this is good to have. I hope to get this bagged and stored away before it gets rained on too much.

The Worms Are Bedded Down

The second batch of worms from the Kingston Worm Farm have arrived. While the first batch is braving the wilds of the main garden, this crew will be domesticated and live in our basement. I've built some very nice worm condos for our herd. The following outlines our worm strategy.

The basement has two parts:

A conditioned space. Radiant floor heating. Daylight through large windows. Shucks, one room (my office) has is on the southeast corner of the basement and is basically above-ground.

Unconditioned space. It is unheated -- it is on the west end of the basement and, due to the slop

e of the lot, is almost entirely below ground. This is heavily insulated from the main floor above and from the conditioned part of the basement. This unconditioned space is divided into two rooms:

1. The first room is storage, and has things like the houses network gear. Eventually we hope to put a deep freeze there as well to store extra vegetables from our garden.
2. The second room is accessed by moving through the first. The second room is the most "basement-like" room in the basement. Eventually, we hope it will contain a root cellar, a wine cellar, and worm bins.

We have a small wine rack in there. It has a few bottles of wine. Someday I hope there will be a much bigger wine rack that holds many more bottles. Someday I hope that we'll be able to cellar wine for several years in near ideal conditions.

It will be easy to add or build some shelves in this room for "root cellar" o

r pantry (or whatever you'd like to call it) functions. Again, the cool, dry, dark space should be good for storing fresh food.

And of course there are the worms. Finally, we've got the worm bins set up and the worms are bedded down. Here's a photo of the first tier of the worm bin. You can see the faucet that I put at the bottom of the bin to drain off the "worm juice". I've got a heavy cardboard (I've seldom seen cardboard this heavy) shield around the bin to keep down the light and just to keep a cozy spot for the little guys.

Now, this is the inside of the bin. I've got sawdust, shredded newspapers (several references said to use only the black-and-white pages). There is also some shredded cardboard. All of it is moistened so that it's about the dampness of a well-wrung sponge. Oh, and the really dark stuff? Well that's the "worm castings" that the worms arrived in.

So far I've only put in a little bit of food for the worm guys. All the references say that once they're well established, these guys can really chow down on the kitchen scraps. They like stale bread, rice, veggies. Pretty much anything that's not meaty-greasy-spicy. I sort of think of them as vegan worms. There are lots of worms in there......

A couple of pounds of worms can easily manage the table and food prep scraps for a family of four, so I'm sure our little colony can do well on what Angel & I produce.

A few of them crawl up the sides. I generally knock them back down when I open the lid. Once they've converted all the bedding to more "worm castings", I'll add another layer to the worm farm. It's already built and has lots of holes on the bottom for the worms to climb up. I'll fill it with fresh bedding and some food and the worms will climb out of the bottom level and into the top. After a few weeks, I'll dump out all the worm castings and use it in the garden or in houseplants. It is completely odorless (well it smells like rich, moist earth, actually) and is about as good as it gets for plants.

We'll still compost yard waste, but having our worm bins in a sealed, comfy (to worms, anyway) spot in the basement will keep the local marauding fauna from messing up our recycle scene.

Next up: The Bark that Became Sawdust!