the wormies
 

are still doing great and i can't be happier
with how this project has come along over the
past fourish years or so.

recently i've had the bean pods from shelling
to get integrated into all the bins and those
are now almost all done. one more round of
feeding will do it.

one of the things i've done over the past year
that is different is to start a "natives" bin to
see how that goes. what that means is when we
worked on a garden last summer i took some of the
worms and put them in their own bin apart from the
rest of the bins. these are not compost worms,
they are earthworms of at least two kinds. one
type is pale and lives down fairly deeply. the
other is darker red to purple and will also go down
deep, but also can be found nearer the surface. as
of yet, both seem to be doing ok. i'm not sure if
there are little ones yet or not. i'll give them a
few more months and then see what the population
looks like.

the other thing i've done differently is to add
some meat scraps, bones and fats to the bins (in
small amounts down deeply enough that it won't
be noticed). we don't really cook meats that often
but once in a while when we do i'd much rather use
those scraps than throw them away. so i've been
seeing how these types of things fare and how the
worms react. as of yet, i can't say there's any
real difference at all. note i am using a mix of
worm species and i also use dirt which many people
who do worm composting do not do at all. i think
that makes a lot of difference. i sure don't smell
anything at any time other than when i'm digging
down into a bin deeply enough that i get near the
bottom where it may be soggy and swampy, but to me
that is fine, i don't mind the smell then, and it
is gone as soon as i put the scraps in and cover it
back up. the worms themselves are usually down that
deep too and don't seem to mind it being too wet or
soggy and swampy. as long as they can come back up
for a breather from time to time...

i no longer count the numbers of worms in the bins
because that would take too long. i just know that
each spring when i put them into the gardens there are
plenty and i keep enough to restart all of the bins.

so far i've had several people ask me to sell them
worms, but i don't want to do that, i'm not set up for
sorting and picking through bins. in the spring i
just dump 'em out in the gardens and keep some for the
next round.

this is a very inexpensive and low tech way of doing
worm composting of scraps. each year i take between
150-250lbs of stuff out to the gardens and bring in
about 100lbs of garden soil to be refurbished and
recharged by the worms over the next year. the soil
here is heavy clay and so it doesn't take much of that
in each bin to be "enough" to mix with the food scraps,
paper, etc.

i think the biggest positive for me is that during
the depths of winter i can still get my hands in some
garden dirt and see a working ecosystem and continue my
studies of how things rot and get recycled by such
interesting creatures.


songbird