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Worm compost
"bnd777" wrote in message ... "Franz Heymann" wrote in message ... "Stephen Howard" wrote in message ... On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 08:42:22 +0000 (UTC), "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?. If the object to this exercise is to build up a significant population of 'compost worms' ( Brandling worms ) then I'm not sure how successful it will be. Brandling worms thrive in a specific environment ( i.e. plenty on non-rotted organic material ). Once the rotting down process is complete they either move on or die. I currently have two worm compost bins on the go - one is active, and full of icky vegetable matter and thousands of worm, the other is full of completed compost with barely a worm in sight. I suspect the soil in the garden contains a small number of Brandling worms per square foot - and is relative to the amount of fresh compostable material available. So in theory your scheme could work, but it would mean having to maintain the level of fresh organic matter - which would perhaps render the soil unsuitable for general cropping. Surely not, if I move my worm hostel by a foot or so each day, like my friend used to do with his guineapig lawn maintenance system. Surely it would be far less hassle to maintain one bin as a nursery for your worms - all you'd need to do inoculate another bin would be to grab a handful of gloop from the nursery bin and chuck it in. Being a lazy sort of bloke, it is all that bin maintenance and harvesting which I am trying to avoid. Franz You really must be lazy if the maintenance of a worm bin is too much for you ........cant imagine why you even have a garden at all Yes I am indeed lazy. My laziness is caused by the general decrepitude associated with having lived for as near as dammit eighty years. You are singularly lacking in imagination. I garden to the best of my meagre abilities because I have loved gardening for close on seventy years. Franz |
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