Worm food!
For their first meal, I started with 4 oz of various vegetables, some herbal tea bags (with papers, strings and staples removed) and some crushed egg shells. All of this was chopped up with some kitchen shears into smaller pieces so it would break down faster and put on top of the coir bedding and recovered with the shredded paper.
The big white thing is called a "G-Diaper". It's an insert that goes in a cloth outer wrap and is used in place of cloth prefolds for diapering babies. They can be flushed or composted, so I thought I'd see what the worms thought of it. Since it had dried, I re-wet it with some of the "tea" from the bottom of the composter.
Three days later I added 9 oz more food - veggies, fruit, banana peel, flower leaves, egg shells and baby food.
The next feeding was a mixure of food waste including cereal dust at the bottom of the bag, and some dried leaves from outside, a torn-up envelope and some drier lint.
This was the progress on Day 16:
If you look really carefully you can see little brown dots all over the "waste". These are the castings or poops that the worms are leaving behind as they go.
So on day 16, I had a collection of banana peels (we'd been having smoothies!) Now, in my regular compost pile outside, these babies take a long time to break down, so I was concerned about giving so many to the worms all at one time. I remembered Walter the Worm Guy saying that he put egg shells in the blender to break them down and make the nutrients more available to the worms. I wondered what would happen if I put banana peels in the blender...
No problem!
So I added some egg shells for good measure and poured the whole lot on top of the other food. I then covered it with some moistened shredded paper.
If my husband sees this post he'll look at me suspiciously next time I offer him a smoothie!
Huh, I wouldn't have gone with the g-diaper myself. (We've composted a few in compost pits here before- my SIL uses them sometimes.) I killed off a batch of worms a few years ago by putting in too much acidic stuff (I think it was the sorrel that finally did it), and I'd be afraid of the urea going too far the opposite direction. With so much other stuff in there, I'm guessing it will be fine. BTW, how many pounds of worms do you have? I've only got a pound right now, and I can't put anywhere near that volume of food in for them.
ReplyDeleteI've started with a pound (though, how do they measure that? They came with a fair bit of dirt/casting material). The instructions say a pound of worms should be able to get through 3 lbs of "waste and organic fiber" per week. I've been adding 4-9 oz every 3 days or so and monitoring for any bad smells. I'd put enough fibrous stuff in, I thought the concentrated urea would be ok.
ReplyDeleteHow long have you been running yours? Again, the instructions say that they can double their numbers in 3 months.
Latest batch is only a few months old. Prior to them, I hadn't had a worm bin for over a year, not since some critter cleaned out the bin for me. Do raccoons eat worms? Anyhow, mine is in the greenhouse now. Not sure how that will go in the summer, but we'll see when we get there.
ReplyDeleteRacoons are probably a likely culprit - do you have opossums? - they could be another. Definitely watch the temperature in the green house - do you have a soil thermometer? I need to get one so I can move ours outside (it's in the breakfast room at the moment).
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