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Thursday, 13 August 2009 11:42 |
Worms Live in My Laundry Room
Doug Kearney
If I want to test the mettle of guests in my home I take them to the laundry room, say between hor dourves and dinner, and show them the worms eating my garbage. Responses range from “how cool is that!” to “ewwwwww!” My wife believes this practice says more about me than my test subjects.
Four years ago, thanks to a Father’s Day gift, I became a worm farmer of sorts, a vermicomposter. Sitting in the corner of the laundry room is a three-layer plastic barrel on legs that contains a couple pounds of red wiggler earthworms. My daughter, who gardens in Asheville, tells me that her earthworms “would kick your earthworms’ butts.” Beside the fact that earthworms have no butts, she is comparing her fat and indelicate gray nightcrawlers, admittedly great for aerating garden soil, with my sleek, busy red guys. It’s like saying George Foreman would beat Lance Armstrong, but at what? They do different things.
I digress. Back to the composting bin. The bottom layer, essentially a screened tray, holds mostly finished worm castings, which are food scraps and shredded newspaper turned into a rich soil additive after passing through the worm’s gut. The next tray is mostly finished castings, and the top tray is where the worms are most active, eating up to a double handful of food scraps every day. But the high-tech tray system is not essential. A cheap plastic tub with a lid is all that’s needed to get started, along with some shredded newspaper or cardboard, a little garden soil, and a daily handful of kitchen scraps.
The finished worm castings are black with the sweet smell of a damp forest floor. Castings, or worm poop if you prefer, provide a real boost to gardening. They are a great additive to soil mixes for starting seeds, transplants, or side dressings for plants in the garden. The castings provide a mild nitrogen boost and a host of minerals and beneficial microbes to the soil. Hardcore vermicomposters make “worm tea” by putting castings in cheesecloth or even panty hose to make a giant teabag to place in a bucket of water for several days, either stirring vigorously on occasion or using an aquarium pump to aerate the solution. Some gardeners report that worm tea performs magic as a foliar spray. I have not tried this, but I expect I will, if for no other reason than the conversation-starter-factor of having in my laundry room a bubbling five-gallon bucket with worm poop-filled panty hose suspended in a five gallon bucket of water, brewing a batch of “tea.”
Exotic teas aside, worm composting is an easy way to handle kitchen scraps in an environmentally responsible way. Leftovers stay out of the trash and castings provide a great additive to houseplants or the garden. The original deal with my wife was that I could keep the worm bin in the laundry room if it didn’t smell and the worms didn’t escape and end up shriveled and dead on the floor. Four years later the worms are still there, devouring my veggie scraps and providing black gold for the garden.
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