Worm farm or cockroach farm??

Today I was going out to feed my worm farm, and:

1. There was a large brown cockroach crawling around on top of the newspaper. Considering how much I hate cockroaches, I didn’t dare lift up the newspaper to see how many were underneath.

2. There was mold all over the farm.

A short google search later, I found some answers.

Buy Organic had a great post with comments like:

You might have a lot of cockroaches as your compost is too acidic. Try adding water and lime and see how that goes.

And some good tips plus a few smart arse comments on the ABC Gardening Australia forum.

There was also this long and detailed article on Gardening by Mistake for anyone who wants to explore the wonderful world of a worm farm ecosystem.

As well as a funny post on how worm farms can stand a fair bit of neglect.

But my favourite has to be this great selection of posts from Small Farms. They had good, simple advice about the mold:

Now, if you have mold growing on the INSIDE of the container you’re doing one thing wrong – feeding the worms too much. While a worm can eat its weight in food each day, this doesn’t mean they can eat as much organic waste as you can produce every day. When mold appears, remove the excess food, especially the mold covered pieces from the worm housing or the mold will spread. Replace the food with fresh food, only in a smaller quantity. After a while, you’ll get a feel for how much the worms will eat on any given day.

Yikes. That means I have to:

1. Throw all the food I’ve painstakingly collected away.
2. Pick out all the moldy bits.
3. Crush all the cockroaches (With a spoon? Like Gardening By Mistake did? Yeurgh… I might leave the cockroach crushing till Pete gets back.)
4. Or leave the cockroaches alone and …
5. spread some lime over the worm farm,
6. and water it in to keep it all moist.

I think I’ll try No 1, 5 & 6. Not sure I want to lift the newspaper, so maybe I’ll get a nice obliging person who is not cockroach phobic to do it for me.

Any volunteers? Or any other tips?

In the meantime, I’ll keep you guys posted when I can stomach opening the farm again to look.

My other posts on worm farming.

Green living, Worm Farming #3

Or, how anal and tight-arsed I can be.

Everyone knows about my Divacup. If you use tampons and have a strong stomach, make tampon tea and pour it on the garden. At least it’s some form of recycling! BTW, when I tried to find a link to tampon tea (I found the tip in one of my gardening books), the Google results were downright odd: from drinking the tea, to how to improve your plant’s aura, to odd sex-sounding topics (I wasn’t curious enough to check).

We also have a worm farm. No more guilt trip from throwing away fruit & veg that we forget to eat! If you have a smaller home, try a Bokashi bucket.

More about worm farming, Part 3:

1. A useful collection of articles.
2. Appropedia summary of typical designs and common problems.
3. (read part one & two)

Guerilla recycling – I reuse my envelopes by:

1. Using them as notepaper. Their thickness makes them the ideal shopping list. Write on them and throw them in your bag, it won’t get lost.
2. After they are all scribbled on, I cut the corners and use them as bookmarks. Especially handy in cookbooks or reference books when you can scribble little notes in the corner. Doesn’t hurt the book and makes recipes very easy to find. Especially if you colour code them with a highlighter.
3. THEN (and only then) they are dumped in our recycling bin. By this point, they’ve been used 3 times.

Other great ideas:

1. Turning off the lights and assorted power points (obsessively). If you think it’s a waste of time, read this mental_floss article on power vampires.
2. Using grey water on our garden. I try to time my laundry and showers for the hot days so that I can water the same evening. We rarely end up using mains water for our plants.
3. Op shop shopping. Buying used rescues products from becoming landfill and spreads the environmental cost of manufacture and freight. Almost all of my clothing is from op shops. Once I’m done with my clothes I pass them on to a friend or sell it on eBay, recycling them once again.

Links and thinks:

1. Being Skeptical of Green – New York Times
2. With big biz jumping on the green bandwagon, should activists cheer or jeer?
3. Living beyond our means | Guardian Unlimited
4. Going green means forever | Herald Sun- interesting, read comments.
5. Lifehacker green links

Valentine’s Day without breaking the bank

I don’t like the commercialism of Valentine’s Day, but I love the sentiment of enjoying a romantic time with your partner or expressing appreciation for your loved ones. Peter and I never go out for dinner, or buy flowers or have a romantic getaway. We save that for our anniversary, when it’s cheaper!

Here’s my 5 Valentine’s ideas that are cheap, but not cheapskate!

1. Bake some yummy cookies. We first baked these with Lizzie. It would be better if they were heart shaped, but these were so good we didn’t care! Besides, they’re too sticky to make into any shape: You’re lucky if they’re round. But they taste so goooood it won’t matter. Or check out these ideas from Epicurious.
2. Have a romantic picnic. Find a nice patch of sand or grass, and grab some supplies. Peter and I used to lay the blanket outside on the back lawn and have a breakky fry up. It was alot of fun, and very relaxing and pleasant.
3. Send an e-card. Hallmark has some good ones that are free, and you save paper (and trees) too.
4. Decorate the house. Light some candles and scatter rose petals to create a romantic atmosphere. Petals are cheaper than flowers, and cheap candles are everywhere.
5. Buy a nice pot plant, instead of expensive flowers. P and I have a tradition of buying a shared rose plant every year. It’s cheaper than a bouquet (that dies anyway) and we get tons of flowers over the years. This year, we bought a Delbard “Sister Emanuelle“. It’s got beautiful pink-purple flowers and smells wonderful!

Have a great Valentine’s Day!

More about worms and worm farming

After having our worm farm for a little while, here’s the information I found most useful. It’s a list of commonly accepted practice, and has an Australian slant.

Feeding:

Foods that are suitable for worms including most fruits, vegetables, cereals and grains, and other organic items like coffee grains and tea bags. It is best to cut food scraps into small pieces before placing them in the bin. The smaller the pieces the more surface area there is for bacteria to start breaking down the food, making it easier for the worms to consume. Some people put their food scraps, including eggshells, into a blender and make a slurry. The worms seem to love this, but it is not necessary. {link}

Odd things worms eat:

• hair clippings
• vacuum cleaner dust
• cardboard

Things you didn’t know worms dislike:

• Banana peels: Some banana peels are heavily sprayed, can kill everything if added to a small bin.
• Citrus, Oranges, lemons, limes: citrus has a chemical substance (limonene) that is toxic to worms.
• Rice and pasta (apparently worms are on the Atkins diet..): feed in moderation.

We have a small flip-top bin we keep in the fridge where we dump all our kitchen scraps. We feed the worms weekly: I go out there with a pair of tongs and add food scraps evenly across the top our farm, chopping up the bits and crushing the eggshells as I go. The key is never overfeed them. We made that mistake and there were lots of flies and bad smells, so we stopped feeding them until it settled down.

Can you add dog and cat feces? We do put small amounts of cat poo in, and some recycled cat litter too. This website agrees that it’s fine, and other websites in the links below will disagree. I think it’s ok if your pet has not been recently de-wormed and is regularly treated for parasites.

To bury or not to bury? Burying seems to be ok: it will prevent fruit flies and bad smells, but at the same time you have to be careful digging them in as a trowel can harm the worms. Also, you have to keep track of where you last buried the food! In general, North American references recommend burying while Australian ones don’t. To me, the easier (and less disgusting) thing is to cover it.

Covering the farm: You can also cover over the food scraps with soil, mulch, large sheets of wet newspaper or cardboard. The aim is to prevent vermin from getting to the food and keeping the worms comfortable. We found a farm that was covered by an old brown door mat. Much easier than newspaper!

Links:

1. Constructing your own farm:
   • Recyclezone has instructions on how to build a simple worm farm and feeding basics.
   • SustainabilityVictoria and the ABC have slightly different instructions.
   • EPA NSW has good cross-section pictures of a worm farm.
   • A great blog with some excellent photos.
2. Feeding worms:
   • Sustainable gardening australia: looking after your worms.
   • Recycleworks, California: detailed information on feeding worms.
3. A printable page that is a good reference once you already have a farm.
4. My first post about our worm farm, where you can find more information about our experiences starting a worm farm, and a few more links.
5. Wikipedia vermicompost page if you like to know the science behind worm farming.

There seems to be a few places (like nurseries, eco centres and council/city offices) where you can view a worm farm if you are not sure about starting one. Just google your local city area to check. Of course, you can also come see the one at our place if you know us!

Worm Farm photos

I wrote about our worm farm before, but here are some photos I have of setting it up.

It’s been going pretty well, but I think we are overfeeding it, so we might have to feed it less food. If worms were cheaper I’d have preferred to start with 2000 (rather than 1000), as the farm is barely coping with the small amount of food from 2 people who cook at home about 2-3 times a week. Although come to think of it, we throw in a huge mound of cat litter regularly.. I think that might make the difference!

Worm Farms

Being thoroughly Chinese, I hate wasting anything (especially food) so we got a RELN “Worm Factory” worm farm from the local council this week, and the worms are settling in fine (I think). I’m very excited to do my bit for the environment, and with the limited space we’ve got, a worm farm seems to be the best solution.

Why did we get a worm farm?

In Australia, over half of the household material that end up at the tip is organic waste, and when it is buried can lead to groundwater contamination and the production of greenhouse gases. This practice is environmentally unsound and also wasteful because through natural processes this organic matter can safely and easily be converted into useful soil-building humus.

One of the best ways gardeners can break down organic matter is to use composting worms to convert food scraps into nutrient-rich, pH neutral worm castings, which produce a high quality soil conditioner.

From the Gardening Australia website.

If you’re thinking about getting one, our worm farm cost about $55 at the local council, in comparison to about $100 retail at nurseries. So I recommend checking with your local council to see if they provide worm farms before buying one at Bunnings or the garden center. The well-designed Worm Factory is made from 100% recycled plastic, and has everything you need to raise your worms in it, including very detailed instructions.

We got our 1000 worms online for $25+$10 shipping from Joe at WormstoWaste who was excellent. You should get at least 1000, or 2000 if you want things to start up quicker.

More links here:

• Ecohouse
• EPA | Worm farming
• How to build a worm farm – Sustainability Victoria
• The Adventures of Herman the Worm

I’ve also written a newer post about my worm farming experience.