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Worm compost
"Jim W" wrote in message news:1fzs5io.bdvegm1m78xzcN%00senetnospamtodayta@m acunlimited.net... Franz Heymann wrote: Please comment on the following musings: Make a wooden frame about 18" square and cover one open side with black polythene, so that when inverted on the ground, you have a small darkroom. Lightly till a piece of soil in the garden bed with a handfork. Make it just the size of the darkroom. Put about half a pound of compost worms in this space. Tip today's kitchen waste over them. Cover with the darkroom to protect the worms from the birds and the sun. Repeat daily somewhere else. If you are lucky, you might be able to build up a dense enough worm population to enable you to cease inoculating the ground with worms after a time, and to just put out your kitchen scraps out under a dark protective cover. Or am I behind the times, as usual?. Assuming you have an unlimited supply of worms that is.. I don't think you'd be able to stop them retreating into the soil? If I were a worm, I would congregate with my pals where the food is. Thus you would lose worms each night? The worm is only lost when it dies. Until then it eats and converts raw rotting stuff into compost. half a pound of worms, thats.. 14 pounds a month.. in weight.. thats a lotta worms! Yes. I am talking about building up a very dense worm population in the soil. If you are thinking of 'worm compost' as in 'worm bins' then these are not earthworms but closer to manure worms (the red ones). These are Dendrabaena species. I am thinking of any earthworm species which will eat rotting kitchen scraps ravenously. I think you are being optimistic that a days waste will dissapear completly overenight. If the worms don't cope daily with the daily kitchen waste, there will be an ever increasing heap of rotting, unconsumed kitchen scraps building up in the compost heap as well. We have a commercial Worm bin that we found on a skip (I believe the original purchasers threw it out as they weren't managing it properly) It works fine here but the main thing is keeping the conditions OK for the worms.. Luckily we have ideal places, the shade of a mature Birch in high summer and a frost free GH in winter.. The compost is a fine rich worm manure.. I really ought to take some pictures!-) What weight of plant material can you convert per day? Do your worms cope with weeds? Do they cope with leaves? There are however a variety of plans to make your own bins froma converted plastic dustbin to a wooden insulated bin.. Take a look at the HDRA's site www.HDRA.org.uk or just search online for Worm Bin Plans Just my 2p's worth! Thanks for an interesting note. But my whole point is to try and find a way of circumventing the maintaining and harvesting of a wormery by just letting the worms do their job in the exact spot where I ultimately want the compost to be. I was told that the brandlings sold by fishing tackle skops would be just what I need. Is that correct? Franz |
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