Worm Wrangling at The Funny Farm

We rarely use regular compost any more. After we build a pile we let it work for 6-8 weeks then we feed the partially decomposed ingredients to our worms to finish the job. We use the worm castings as the main ingredient in our seed starting mix and we use them as a topdressing when we move transplants into the garden.

Our worm bins are modeled on Will Allen's bins at Growing Power. They are made of non-pressure treated 2 x 12's. They measure approximately 2' x 3' x 19" deep. We have 12 of them. We place about 6" of the partially composted material in the bottom of the bin then add about 5 lbs of worms. Then we fill the bins with more compost until it is bulging up over the top of the bin. As the worms consume the material gasses are given off and the pile shrinks about 30%. It takes about 60 days for the worms to completely eat the whole pile.

After they finish a bin we lure them out and move them to a fresh bin to start the process again. When Will described how they get the worms out of the bins i could not believe it would work until i did it for myself. What we do is lay a piece of window screen over the bin and spread about 3" of fresh compost over the screen. The worms are hungry and living in their own poop so they squeeze through the tiny holes in the screen to get to the fresh food. I know, hard to believe :) As they do this the contents of their gullets get squeezed out of them leaving a very fine layer of beautiful castings on the top of the pile under the screen.

We leave the screen on for a week, dump the worms and repeat 2 more times to get all the worms out. At first i thought that the last worms to come out were probably slackers but now i am of the opinion that they must be the most hard core worms because they were able to tolerate being in the bin with little food and surrounded by poop for the longest time!

After the worms have been removed we let the castings dry out for a couple of months before we use it. We push it through a 1/4 inch screen to remove the rough stuff which makes for some mighty fine castings. We collect the bits of woody material that has not completely broken down and use them to mulch our fruit trees. It is already inoculated with fungus so continues to break down and feed the trees. From each bin we end up with about 150 lbs. of screened worm castings.

We love our little worker worms!

Worms will eat your garbage too!

Setting up a worm bin in your home is a great way to keep organic waste out of the landfill and turn it into something useful. Worms will eat almost anything organic including paper, cardboard, kitchen scraps, and leaves. Their requirements are simple; air, moisture, food and darkness. You can make a bin out of buckets, totes, trash cans. We used a tote because we had one. You can get plastic buckets from a local restaurant or donut shop. We recommend reusing a container rather than going to a store and buying something new. The main requirement is that it is opaque because worms do not like light.
To provide air for the worms you need to drill 1/8" holes in the sides and top of the container. I put 2 rows on the sides about 3 inches apart. One row near the top and one row near the bottom. I drilled about 20 holes in the top. The bin also needs some 1/4" holes in the bottom for drainage to keep any liquid from building up which will rot the bedding. I placed a layer of landscape fabric over the holes in the bottom to keep anything other than liquid from coming out the holes.
Next you need to add about 3" of moist bedding. You can use shredded paper or shredded leaves. Soak the bedding in water and wring it out so only a few drops continue to drip out. It should feel like a damp sponge. Put the bedding in the bin and fluff it up so there is plenty of air. Next add some soil, from the ground not potting soil. About a quart will do. The soil contains microorganisms that break down the food into tiny particles the worms can ingest. They have really tiny mouths! They also get some grit from the soil which helps them to grind up the food.
Next add worms. You will need a pound of worms. We get ours from Bear Creek Worm Farm. Their number is (678) 794 6664. They will come with a pound of bedding. Dump them gently into the bin and spread them evenly over the surface of the bedding.
Next add some food. We keep a rot bucket under the sink into which we put our kitchen scraps, paper towels, napkins, coffee grounds and tea leaves. It takes us about a week to fill it up. During that time mocroorganisms are starting to break down the stuff on the bottom so that when it goes into the bin some of it is ready for the worms to eat. When you first start your bin put only a few handfuls in so that the worms are not overwhelmed while they are getting adjusted to their new home.
Cover the food and worms with another layer of moist bedding. Keeping the food covered will discourage fruit flies. When you add additional food it is a good idea to bury it in the bedding to keep fruit flies from finding it. In a week you can start to add more food. The important thing is not to add so much wet goopy stuff that air is prevented from getting down to the worms. They are voracious eaters so the food will disappear pretty quickly.
We recently got 10 pounds of worms for the members of our workshop to start their own bins. We put them into the tote and put the top on and went to bed. The next morning Robin came screaming into the bedroom. All the worms escaped she said! I went out to the screen porch and there were thousands of worms crawling in every direction. It took me 3 hours to pick all those suckers up and return them to the bin.
To prevent this, for the first couple of nights, keep a light on. Worms do not like light and will burrow down into the bedding to get away from it. As an additional precaution spread a 2" wide band of dish washing liquid (organic of course) around the inside top of the bin. The worms will not crawl over it. Once they get over the trauma of traveling and settle into their new home they will not try to escape.
What not to feed them: Animal fat, meat scraps, cheese. You can put citrus but not a whole lot at a time. Same with onions. They both have compounds that are toxic to worms in large amounts. You can put egg shells in but crush them up finely. They really like fruit like banana peels, mango skins, anything sweet and mushy. One of my students said she cuts her banana peels into tiny pieces and the worms devour them. They like coffee grounds too but again not too much because they are very acidic.
Once the bin is filled up almost to the top you can harvest the worms and move them to a new bin. The remaining worm castings are great for feeding your vegetable garden or house plants. I will explain how to get the worms out of the bin in another post.
Become a worm wrangler. You'll love it.

Preparing New Beds

Last Sunday in our workshop we prepared some new beds for planting. The week before it snowed the soil had dried sufficiently for me to till in the weeds and get the drainage working so the soil could be worked by the time of the workshop. We laid out the beds 4' wide so we would end up with a 3' planting area and a 1' path. I got this from Masanobu Fukuoka's influential book One Straw Revolution back in the 70's. He determined that 3' is the distance most people can reach so a person can work the whole bed from one side.
We raked the soil from the path area up into the beds to create a raised bed. We spread kelp meal for micronutrients and espoma plantone organic fertilizer for macronutrients. We harvested wormcastings from our worm bins and spread them about 2" deep over each bed. We leveled out the beds and voila´we are ready to plant.

Worm Wrangling

According to my meticulous(?) records i have no idea when i started my first 2 worm bins. However a search through my previous posts revealed that i started them on April 19th which was 32 days ago. Wow, those worms were hungry! I predicted that it would take 60-90 days for them to finish off the materials in the bin. Some digging in the bin at the end of last week revealed that it is time to harvest them and start some new bins. The method i used the last time i harvested a bin was to shovel the material onto a table, let the worms crawl to the bottom to escape the light (they hate light. Can worms hate? I hope not!), scrape off the top inch or 2 of castings and repeat over and over until most of the castings have been separated from the worms. 

It took hours to do each bin!

Will Allen at Growing Power in Milwaukee showed us a much simpler method which i employed this time. Since the worms have consumed almost all of the food in the bin they are looking (hoping? Can worms hope?) for something else to eat. So the idea is to put some food on top that the worms will crawl up into to begin eating. Here is the amazing part!

One puts a window screen on top of the bin and then places the fresh food on top of the screen and, believe it or not , the worms will squeeze up through the teeny tiny little holes in the screen to get to the fresh food. 

After as couple of days one can then dump the worms into a new bin and start the process over again. When i removed the screen there were lots of hungry worms waiting in line ( well not really in a line) for their turns to squeeze through the screen and get to the food so i replaced the screen and covered it with some more food. We'll wait and see how many times it takes to get all of the worms out of the old bin and into new bins.

I can only imagine how hungry they must be after having all the contents of their guts squeezed out as they squirm through that teeny tiny little hole. More poop for me!

Busy, Busy, Busy

We've been really busy, tilling, planting, pruning, harvesting, selling, learning, teaching and having fun. Where to begin..... Ok, remember that poplar stump we inoculated with oyster mushroom spawn last summer? Well we harvested our first mushrooms from it last week. Put them in an omelet. Yummm!

Speaking of omelets, I went on a tour of urban chicken coops sponsored by Georgia Organics. I saw 8 different coops and lots of different chickens and some goats too. My conclusion was that chicken raising is pretty simple so we should go for it. The hen house is done except for adding a roost and a latch for the door. All I need to do is add some fencing and we're ready for a flock. I think I'll start with 6. That seems like a manageable number.

Speaking of tours, last sunday we went on a tour of Spring Valley Ecofarms in Athens, Georgia. It is a research farm owned and operated by Dr. Carl Jordan. Dr Jordan is doing some interesting research in ecoforestry but what caught my interest was the experiments they are conducting using perennial legume hedgerows interplanted with annual crops. They idea is that the legume ( they were using mimosa and amorpha), if the roots are colonized by nitrogen-fixing bacteria, will share some of the nitrogen with the annual plants. It seems to be working they said. I decided to try it out in our garden. I have interplanted baptisia australis with my tomatoes. I am inoculating the baptisia with alll the different commercial rhizobium bacteria i can find in hopes of finding one that will colonize the roots. This is not a carefully designed experiment. I don't have control plots. How will I know if it works? I won't know for sure. I will examine the roots of the baptisia to determine if they have been colonized but i can't determine if the tomatoes have benefitted from the companion planting. I chose baptisia because their flowers are good cut flowers and the foliage can be used as greenery in arrangements so they have economic value to us. By harvesting the foliage, we will force the plant to slough off roots to compensate for the lost foliage. Those roots will get broken down by the soil microorganisms which should make any nitrogen in the root nodules (assuming they exist) available to the tomatoes. Anyway we know that diversity is good so we're giving it a whirl.

The next step is to figure out a crop rotation that will work with the perennial planting. I'm thinking cucumbers next year, then maybe greens....

One more thing. Michelle and William from the Weather Channel came out to the Funny Farm to shoot a couple of segments for a series they do called Forecast Earth. One of the segments is about growing worms and the benefits of wormcastings. The second one is about Bugscaping, growing specific plants to attract beneficial insects. We released 1500 ladybugs and played with the worms. Of course Penny the cat star had to get in on the action too being such a ham. Michelle asked me if we used natural cat litter which we do. She's also doing a segment on natural pet care so Penny got to pose for the camera and I got to pour corn based litter into her litter box. 

It was a fun time. The segments should start airing in Late June or July.

Worms are Livestock Too!

I love raising worms. It is the easy way to break down organic waste into fantastically nutritious food for plants. I built 12 bins in the barn in which i'll raise my herd. Yesterday is got in the mail 10 pounds of red wigglers. They are consumers of partially decomposed organic matter and live in the forest duff not down in the soil like earthworms. I filled 2 bins half way with material that has been composting since 4 pm on March 22 according to those meticulous records i referred to in the last post. I put 5 lbs. of worms in each bin and filled them the rest of the way with the partially decomposed organic matter. I mounded each bin up above the sides. During the process of decomposition by the worms the mass will be reduced by about 50% as co2 and other gasses are given off during the process. Over the top i put a wet burlap bag. I sometimes use wet cardboard. Worms need to be kept moist and they need air. The organic material should be coarse to allow for good drainage and thus aeration to keep the worms happy and reproducing. There 2 rewards from worm composting. One is the worm castings (yea it is worm poop) the other is more worms. After 60-90 days the worms will have consumed all of the organic matter and will have had many orgies producing many eggs that hatch into many more worms. When the process is complete i will separate the worms from the poop (i'll describe that process when we do it) and start 4 more bins. After the next cycle i'll be able to start 8 bins, then 16, etc. But since i only have 12 bins , i,ll either have to build more bins or sell worms or both. Probably both.
My bins are 3' x 2' x 16" deep. Why are they that size? because that is the size that fit under the benches in our former greenhouse and could be easily be moved around by 1 person. (the first 6 are on castors so they could be rolled around.) They hold about 2 wheelbarrows of organic matter. After the worms finish their work i can harvest about 150 lbs. of worm castings and 10 lbs. of worms from each bin.
You may be wondering if i bury my kitchen scraps directly in the bins. No I don't. I put them in a pile with weeds, and other green matter from the garden. Worms have tiny mouths and can't bite into fresh greenery. As worm expert Will Allen at Growing Power in Milwaukee said " What's a worm going to do with a potato?" The detritivores (sow bugs, pill bugs, springtails and such) and the microorganisms need the break stuff down into small enough pieces for the worms to ingest them. When the pile gets big enough i start a compost pile. I'll talk about how i spice my compost in a future post. I will start the next compost pile a month before the bins are ready to harvest so i will have fresh partially decomposed material to fill the new bins. Then the process starts all over again.

Oh wait, I almost forgot, what i plan to do with the excess worms is feed them to the future chickens and the way in the future fish livestock.
All part of my cunning permaculture plan.