Seeds of Sustainability- Worming Composting Workshop

well why don't we get started so we have plenty of time to ask questions and talk about whatever we want to talk about Oh carrots they like carrots was that papaya okay has almost an orange e papaya color to it take a week yeah I got my eye on that bowl over there toons she's gonna eat it all up she'll eat it okay well welcome to another workshop for those of you have been here before and for those that are new the workshops have been the titles the subjects have been kind of all over the place but really they're all on the central theme of how we can live more sustainably from various aspects of growing our own food raising our food doing our our own things and this workshop is the same idea is that we tend if if you eat food at home you tend to have a lot of stuff that you don't eat peelings and scraps and cores and skins and eggshells and so on that most people don't eat and that goes in in often cases into the garbage which goes to the landfill as solid waste and becomes a problem not your waste but a few million people's waste becomes a serious problem and it's kind of a silly thing to be doing because that organic material is really a rich resource it's as rich as coal or oil or anything else and in its own way and we shouldn't be throwing it away we should be making use of it the trick is how do you make good use of it so that you get the benefit out of it without you know having rotten garbage hanging around the house nobody needs that and composting is the way that most people deal with organic solid waste and probably one of the better ways I think to do that is to take that solid waste and run it through a worm and once you run it through a worm then it's ready to go for plants what you're doing is taking mostly plant material that's your your solid waste organic material and breaking it down into a material that plants can use plants can't use an apple core or a banana peel or an eggshell but the contents of that are good nutrients for plants so just like in nature where the leaves and everything have to break down into the soil and to be a useful form by microbes and everything else that's what we're doing in composting with vermicompost or worm composting we're just using the natural system of you incorporating worms along with bacteria and fungi and a few other invertebrates to break it down faster because we produce a lot of stuff in most homes if you have a family especially then we need to get it into a form that's useful by doing it this way we not only preserve the nutrients that are in all that food that we would have thrown away we get it into a form that plants can use directly and we also incorporate into it a lot of microbes that improve the soil and are beneficial to the plants and that's done in in these boxes in this system so there's the benefits of reducing the waste stream out of our houses reducing our pollution and making use of this resource and this is often the problem with unsustainable activities as we treat resources as though there are problems instead of recognizing it as a resource and making use of it we do the same thing with our own sewage so we just treated like oh geez I don't even want to talk about that you know it's it's we just need to flush it away and it's a mammoth resource that we're wasting and turning it into a problem by putting it out into the environment in various ways septic tanks and lagoons and so on but anyway with food this is one thing that everybody can do it's very simple it's very economical and it works and if you are interested I hope you'll see today a couple of ways to do it what I brought here today are two worm bins this one and this one this one is an established worm bin that's full of worms right now and it's one that we have here at school and so what I'll show you later on with this is how do you harvest what's in the worm bin to make use of it this is a new worm bin it's it's my own it's the small one that I have at home and so I brought it in to set it up and show you how you set one up these are just two designs there is a third design we're going to go a mini bin that's really really small it's full of worms and they're eating the scraps that are in there this cheesecloth is obviously to keep them in but they need air they need fresh air all the time so they're in there and we can take a look at that later but there are all kind and there are wooden bins or plastic bins and all kinds of things a lot of people make their own out of you recognize this may be as simple tubs that they sell in any hardware store I won't mention the big box names but any hardware store and they're easy enough to use as a worm bin as long as you provide aeration and cover to keep the worms dark and in there so let's talk first about who we're dealing with here I brought some from my other worm bin here just to use to start this one but these worms are red wigglers people tend to think of worms as worms as worms but there's a lot of different kinds of species of worms and we're asking these worms to live in a contained box that's under different conditions than in the forest or in the ground not all worms adapt to that well night crawlers that people might use for fishing or earthworms that you see in your garden that are can be a couple inches long and nice and plump and good for fishing too I guess don't do well in this kind of containment they don't like the moisture the temperature and the they want to go deeper night crawlers particularly go six or eight feet deep and then they come up at night to eat and that's primarily to get where it's cool and earthworms are a little bit shallower than that but they'll be down a foot or so how many people here know the story of Herman the worm oh my goodness that's so great oh it's a long story that's all right it like an hour I like hairy top Herman the Worman you got it you got to get the story but anyway they they like to stay down in the ground these worms the red wigglers the reason we use them is because they adapt well to the container but these are the worms if you were to go out into the forest and just pull away some leaves if you get a nice area where there's a lot of dead leaves on the ground and you find a few worms on the surface these are the ones they live right under the surface of the organic matter you might think oh they're just baby earthworms they're not baby earthworms they're red wigglers these guys and they are the first ones at the surface to get the organic matter that's falling dead insects birds leaves whatever it is and they are the ones that are adapted here and that's the ones you need to use people do raise earthworms and night crawlers in bins particularly if they have an interest in having them for fish bait and they work but they're not going to consume the amount of organic matter that these guys will these reproduce incredibly as sue mentioned they are really horny and they make a lot of worms so you get a lot of them and they eat a lot a worm will eat half its weight every day so if you a hundred pounds right if you weigh 200 pounds that would mean you would eat 50 pounds a day Jerry back there weighing in at 201 honey okay that means you eat 90 pounds a day if you were a red wiggler so they can process a lot of food much more than earthworms or night crawlers will process and that's what we need is we need a lot of processing so we figure their weight every two days is going through them that's a lot of lot of material what they're eating are any organic matter I mean if you put in shredded paper those brown paper towels as those towels sort of disintegrate in the moisture and the bacteria start to break them down fungi break them down the earthworms will take them another step and digest them and run them through their body and what comes out in the end is what we call worm castings it's worm poop is worm castings and that's what's in here Alana and that's what is so rich to put into your plants and you mix that in about 1/4 worm castings to three-quarters soil soil mixture some people makes 50 to 50 if you've got really poor soil and you think you need more organic matter or you can use it to make worm casting tea as you put it in a bag a cloth bag an old sock and you soak it in a five-gallon bucket for a day or two and then you use that water to water your plants that gives an enormous boost to the microbial content it's not high in nutrients but it's high in microbes and that's what most of our soils are deficient in is the microbiology of the soil not so much the chemical issues of the soil so that's what these guys are the red wigglers and what I thought I would do is I'll start off there are obviously two styles of worm bins let me just explain this one and there are advantages and disadvantages to any design so there's no one which is the best one well it depends on you and what you're going to do and what you like because somebody might prefer this one somebody this one this one can also be made into a stackable if you just get multiple bins and put them inside each other so you can make your own this is a commercially made one it's called the worm factory 360 you google it you'll get it lots of places sell them all over the place it's nice because it's it's well made and it out of recycled plastic and it comes with a lot all the stuff you need it even comes with a little rake so if you don't like digging with your fingers and with the worms one of the rules you have to remember with going into a worm bin with your worms is please don't ever go in with a trowel that's like a guillotine going down through them you don't ever dig in with a trowel anything that's a blade think of a blade in a long worm know the both halves won't grow into new worms one half will heal the other half will die so it's not an it hopefully so it's not a good idea so we any kind of travel garden fort or something is good this comes with this one so it's it's easy these are stackable so that worms move up from the bottom worms the red wigglers tend to keep moving to the surface as I said they're under the leaf litter they like to stay near the top because they like to get the fresh stuff that's what we're after that's what we want to give them and so we start them at the bottom and these trays all come apart and the base is just this and you'll notice there's a part in here that's a square ring this is like a basin in here to catch what's called leachate that's the liquid that drips down because the food you're putting in is a lot of water content and eventually that will drip down into here and then there's a faucet here to take that out that's really good for watering your plants if you don't have something like this like in this one it will tend to leak out the vents and can make a little bit of a mess if you don't have a way to catch it this ring in here is important because it goes right in there in that bowl and it's called a worm ladder sometimes worms will fall down from the trays into here and then they get trapped down in here well they have a ladder here they can crawl back up because their tendency will be they're like bees if anybody has honey bees they tend to want to always be going upwards for some reason it's just they're hardwired to do that and the worms will do the same so if they fall in here you have this worm ladder to catch let them get back up to the bottom tray each of these trays has got put the paper in order but you can see it's very open mesh work in the bottom for drainage and aeration and in the bottom tray the first one that we would put in I put in newspaper just to sort of catch debris so we don't get a lot of our material down in here in the beginning that's going to be where we start the worm bin is in the bottom tray with the paper on top the other ones are we'll get to in a little bit you can use almost anything you've got in here except just dirt dirt is a little bit dense tends to pack if it's clay dirt or stony dirt it takes up a lot of space and what you want is an organic mix what you can get for these sorry what you can get with these you can buy this in nurseries everywhere now or you can get your is core or core these are bricks of coconut husk fiber this happens to be from Sri Lanka it's normally a waste product of the coconut industry and somebody found out if you shred it up real fine and pack it into a hard brick you can sell it to nurseries it's a great alternative for potting soil instead of peat moss because we've now realized Pete and peat moss is mined out of wetlands and it requires destroying the wetlands to get peat moss so when you buy your bag of sphagnum Moss or peat for your plants in your garden essentially what you're doing is paying somebody to destroy your wetland somewhere probably in Canada this doesn't require a destruction of any habitat this is just a waste product of the coconut industry and it comes in I buy them and this kind of brick for my planting and or you can get them in thinner bricks I took this brick which was that big in that thin and broke it in half and put it in this tray with water and it's now soaked up the water so it looks like that so it's four times as as big it holds an enormous this thing was had a lot of water in a couple inches it's all now in here and then you just take this and as you can see it breaks up into nice loose rich organic matter and it's not acidic or anything so it doesn't bother anybody that lives in it what they provide with this and this is really the lazy way of doing it and I'm sure you can figure out a way to come up with this particularly if you work here at school shredded newspaper you know where there's a shredder around somewhere there's lots of shredders in the offices if you don't have a shredder at home take a pair of scissors and chop up something and you just mix this and that's food that's food for the worms its bedding material is what we're building here but it's also food for these thing trays we don't need the whole amount and yes no no it's soy basting they don't use lead-based ink anymore not even in color so because people handled it and they realized oh geez maybe that's not a good idea to be poisoning our subscribers and making them dumber with lead you know which is what lead sort of does to you so I just you mix it up now and that's the organic matter that will be the bedding and you like it to be the moisture level of a wet sponge you know you don't want it dripping out all over the place but it should be plenty of moisture the worms because that's the way they like it then they have to be moist to be healthy the other thing that worms need is they are sort of like birds they digest their food in a gizzard does anybody know what a gizzard is in a bird chicken it's one of their stomachs you know what the gizzard is what happens in the gizzard here was anybody here up chickens I wonder who do you ever see chickens out alongside the road picking at the stones in the gravel what are they getting out of that stones and gravel they need stones in their gizzard because they don't have anybody ever see hen's teeth they don't have teeth so what they have is grit in their gizzard and the food goes in there and then it grinds all around in this gizzard and this substitutes as their teeth in chickens same thing in worms worms will take in they need some grit often it's sand that's in the soil or anything that's ground-up egg shells that are pulverized if you dry your eggshells so they pulverize real well pardon me yeah yeah the oyster shell driveway if you get some really fine stuff obviously their mouths are very very tiny so you can't give them big bites but it will break down I mean things like this that's put in there will break down and break apart as it's wet and is the worms go through it these worms all have grit in their gizzard because they've already been living in a bin that has that but I put it in just show you that you do need some grit in there it could be just sand like play playground sand that you buy in a bag for a sandbox or something like that that's clean sand if you get it from the beach that's fine as long as it's been rinsed a little bit with water so it's not salty that would be fine and you just mix these things in and that's their home you've made a soil for them some people will take a little bit of soil from their garden or outside if they have nice soil and mix that in that inoculates with some of the organisms in the soil some of the bacteria and fungi that are naturally out there and then this just goes in on top of that paper of course it spills out real easily want to leave any of that and you're just kind of spread it around in there and you can't see it I know but it's a little more than an inch or two inches thick deep in there we don't want to make it too deep I don't want to fill this box at all because we're going to be putting food in here and we're going to keep adding and adding and adding and that will add to the soil and we don't want this to get too full so that there's not room for food and in worms but this makes further betting that they can grow in and live in and they're perfectly happy in that kind of setup the second thing to do is put the food in I'm going to give them Trader Joe's organic sugar because these guys are all like sweet they have sweet teeth worms don't have teeth okay well then I won't put sugar in I just happen to have the bag this is a butternut squash skin happens to be from my garden because we chopped up a butternut squash last night and what they recommend you do and I don't think it's critical to the success of the bin but it's recommended just so you can watch things is you put it in a corner and I like to put it in two corners some over there and some back here they love cantaloupe peeling the skin squash peeling banana peels don't worry about the paper label they'll eat yes Coffee and the bag it's paper so you'll find when you dig in here around the coffee you'll find a mass of worms around that coffee in a little while tea bags in the bag yes well these things are small I mean in that will you could break it open if you want it's pretty well deteriorated and it'll come apart I wouldn't put I don't put big things in like corn cobs or big chunks of squash skin I usually chop it up they'll get to it eventually it's just they'll get to it faster if it's chopped up and it'll break down faster if it's chopped up they have very little mouse you know so they can't take a big bite out of something that's too big but now I've got this in two corners here and here the food I will put the worms across the middle from this corner to this corner the reason I separate them is because I'll put them into the bedding and they're going to need a period of adjustment but worms do not like to be disturbed to have their earths turned upside down and mixed all around obviously that's not a natural thing to be happening to a worm and it it stresses them so it's going to take them a little while to adjust to figure out their new system and where they're at and by putting the food in the corner I can check this day by day and see have they moved into the food once they've moved into the food then I know they're happy and they're starting to eat they've settled down they've accepted their new home in their start indeed they will they will they'll get over it okay the trauma they will then I just put put them in here because I dug them out of the other bin and as you can see one of the things I use is a lot of leaves these are leaves from last year they're all kind of chopped up some of them are broken up leaves are perfectly good for Bin's and so they'll add to the betting and as we get the leaves off the top we can start to see some of the material that's in here and as we get the leaves off start to see tails disappearing maybe I can just come around and you can you can see as I pull you see who's in there you might look at it and not see anybody but they're in there and they're hiding because they it's very interesting to me that worms do not have eyes but they are very sensitive to daylight they don't like daylight daylight is a bad thing to a worm because obviously that's where they're predators live is in the daylight with with worms and they'll disappear very quickly unless I keep disturbing them and see now these are red wigglers these are a little bit smaller than your typical earthworm although there might be a couple of earthworms in here to see see don't want to pet them no ok first earthworms are an invasive species they came from here they were brought over by from Europe probably by accident before the Columbian Exchange before Columbus invaded and all the Europeans invaded and brought everything all the diseases and animals and plants with them one of the things they brought with them was earthworms probably in pots or bags or something with plants just accidentally but for the World War know your species not not earthworms not earthworms not in North America and they've spread from ocean to ocean in no time you're not a bad thing no it turns out well it depends they're a bad thing for ironically birds what yeah they do but worms also compete with worms compete with birds for a lot of their food and so they are and they find populations of birds are and fewer species in areas where there's lots of worm population there's a inverse correlation they're competitors that you wouldn't imagine how worms could compete with birds but they do because they eat a lot of the organic matter that birds depend on to raise insects that birds eat and the worms break it down really fast well worms aren't easy to get because they stay underground and you know Robins dig for worms and Woodcock dig for worms but they're there they have a good defense they go down and birds can't chase them so anyway we put that in I'll just put them all right across the middle there's maybe a thousand worms in here I didn't count them there surely say it's solid worms and but as I say they do not like daylight and so they will go down initially that's why I wanted that newspaper on the bottom because I don't want them to go down at the bottom of this right away and once they get stabilized in here then they'll start thinking about going up to where the food is there's another newspaper here and we put a newspaper on the top it doesn't have to seal it or cover it or anything I just put it around on the top and soak it and it's just a way to keep things wet inside the material the medium is pretty wet already but the paper just sort of forms a little bit of an evaporation barrier for them and so I just put that wet paper on top and keep that there and that will help cover them and keep the inside wet and then we put the cover on because we don't want them to escape in the daytime they won't come out not in the daylight but at night if there were ways to get out there exploring all the time and they might come out and explore if you left it open at night so yeah and then they dry up and die because they don't know that there's bad bad habitat out there so we cover them up and then there they can't get out and they're where they're want to be anyway because that's where the food is and where it's dark and moist so that as far as they're concerned they've you know they're in their own home which they are that's the way you start the worm bin the advantage of this style of worm bin is then once I notice that this is getting kind of full up to about an inch from the top and the food in here is being consumed and there's a lot of decayed well composted material in here already then I can start the next layer and I'll push this down so it will come in contact with the material underneath no newspaper here because I want the worms to come up through that bottom and then I'll just start putting my kitchen scraps in here and that will draw them up they won't come all up at once that means not like overnight but gradually as they realize there's more food up here than there is down below they'll they'll finish what's below and then they'll move up to the next level and when that one's done I can add another one and move them up and then I can add the last one and move them up and you can get more of these if you want you you know as high as you want and then the worms are up in one of the upper levels I can take off the bottom one where there will be almost no worms because they will all moved up to where the food is and there's my bin of castings to use in plants and soil in or making tea and so on so it just keeps going up and when this is like this you can keep this in your kitchen and not have a problem a couple of problems that people can develop with worm bins is fruit flies which usually come in with your bananas and apples and so on on the skins if you don't wash them when you get them that's by the way if you notice in the winter time you get fruit flies in your house because of bananas and such if you would wash them when you got them from the supermarket you would wash the eggs off because they hatch right then hmm that's where they come from it's from the stuff you brought from the store these will also sometimes attract them because of the fruit that you've put in there that's why I keep the newspaper on top and I always keep a layer of dead leaves on top the fruit flies don't like that they don't like to land on dry stuff and go down through underneath that they don't like to go in there and so we don't get fruit flies when we've got all that litter this bin that is established it's very heavy you can see I've got a lot of leaves on top and we don't have any fruit flies even though there's a lot of fruit and produce in there because the fruit flies just are not willing to deal with all of that and what's in here these are just leaves from around the grounds here that were run over by the lawn mowers and one thing you'll notice in here there's a there's a thing sticking out of the ground I put that and that's the last place I fed them that's where I put in food last week and I rotate between the corners so that I'm not always putting it in the same place I put it wherever that is I'll put it in a different I can never remember two weeks ago where I put it but at least I can mark one week ago and then I'll put it in a different corner and just kind of rotate around so that the food gets spread around in different places and it keeps the worms on their toes so to speak so they have to keep moving around looking for the new food they seem to have no problem finding it they have a very keen sense of smell and chemical sensations that they can find things in the soil at good distances we get them like this in this one you could take another bin just like this drill a lot of holes in the bottom and set it on top but this is and they would move up to the next level in the next than the next in this case so this one isn't set up to do that and so this is like a batch type of arrangement and you can see the worms in there when I rake aside fears of where all the food was nope sorry it was over here it's an apple piece of Apple there things like Apple should be cut up small because that's kind of hard but as I go down in you'll see the worms that are in there if you can see that very well but there's same thing that was in the other bin and if you don't like to handle them you can get one of these little Forks but you can see there's solid worms in there and they're all working on on various things but this when you start to see this organic matter this black everything is dark brown very crumbly and broken down that's the good stuff that's that's what's good Wow that's the that's the next step I think the lab is finished next door I couldn't go in the lab and get what I wanted to show you this before because there was a class just talk amongst yourselves and I'll be right back okay how do we separate the worms from from the castings we take advantage of the worms natural avoidance to light right now by opening this up they've already gone down some in here away from the surface when I took the leaves off the surface so I'm going to have to dig a little bit deeper but if I had a bigger tray I could just dump the whole thing out but I won't do that but all you need to do is put them out like this take a load out if you had it outside you could put it in the Sun if it's inside you put this on there and they will vamoose down as fast as they can and then you just take off what's on the top take off a layer and then let them go down and as you can see there's some on top and there they'll go down in as fast as they can they may hesitate for a second because they have to stretch out and burrow but then as soon as you take off the next lay out load the ones that are there will head down and eventually as you skim off the top you'll get down to just a very thin layer and that's what you put back in either into another bin or back in the same bin and unfortunately by opening this up I've kind of driven them down already kind of deep and so there's you know as you can see there when they're in there on the top they're all over the top but they won't be there for long they'll they'll head down to get away from the light narrating and I don't know how they do that unless they feel the heat from the light the warmth the you know the infrared from the light but they have no eyes but they certainly don't like light because that's to them that's a bad place to be that's where they're vulnerable that's where frogs and lizards and birds are that eat them so they don't want to be in the light at all and so you just keep skimming it off and there are you can use that sort of trench there's a little scraper you can use kitchen tools like scrapers and just kind of cut it off and separate it aside then you take this material this is your castings this is black gold this is very rich organic matter for your plants if you have houseplants that are struggling mix a little bit of this in with the potting soil and you'll see a different plant in a very short period of time just top dressing how mean will the betrayed so yeah and then as your water it'll each down in if it's already an established pot but you can dig it in or if you're mixing up new potting soil mix it right in with it a lot of it is the microbes that are in there the microbiology that you're setting up it's there's a lot of all the nutrients of all the food that they've been fed is there but then the microbes the bacteria and fungi that keep the whole system going this is a whole ecosystem here it's not just you know garbage and worms there's a lot of living things in here going on and as long as you keep it healthy and keep feeding it it'll just keep processing this stuff you can if you feed them a lot you can get the reproduction going yeah put some of I mean the at the very least just takes them out put them in your garden they will balance themselves though I mean its overpopulation in nature doesn't happen at least not for long human beings aside human humans are an exception but in nature over populations don't happen for long if a if a population Peaks too high it will eventually go back down by some mechanism and same thing with worms they're not going to just keep it growing until they're pouring over the sides you know I mean they're only going to grow as big as the space will allow them and the food will allow them because this is their home they need places to live they need worm to get away from each other sometimes I want a little quiet time just to get off in a corner and read a good book or something I've always been told with it I had a to never put em onions garlic yeah I was going to get to the sort of what can you give them so it's it's pretty open it's pretty flexible there's not very many limits it's probably easier to say what you shouldn't put in versus all the things you can put in you can put in pretty much anything but generally it's recommended not to use onions not to use citrus because it's very acidic and worms don't like acidic things no animal products no cheese meat bones chickens parts no it it mostly is you get an anaerobic fermentation going and then it can bit get smelly worms don't like the acidic of citrus or onions or garlic because they're very acidic also that's tannic acid but it's not that acidic it's not like citrus or lemon or lime or something some people have said oh yes you can put pineapple in pineapple is great for work they love it even though pineapple is acidic for some reason pineapple isn't a problem and I've seen it a pineapple processing plant where they will have piles of the skins that come off the machines where they're canning them and you go out and find the pile of pineapple skins and kick it aside and it'll just be livid with worms don't hurt so you want to but some animal things would be okay such as eggshells I mentioned eggshells oh they're okay I just dry them and then crumble them up break them up in your hands and put them and that makes a little bit of grit I don't think the worms eat a lot of that they may get what worms are really eating is bacteria and fungi they're not eating the raw food that you're putting in there so much is they're eating the bacteria and fungi that are growing on the surface so when you put in fresh food sometimes it'll take a few days before they'll be on it because it takes a few days before those bacteria and fungi cover the food but then as they start to break it down then they can start eating the food as well but they're not going to take a bite out of an apple you know a fresh crisp apple they don't do that but as soon as it starts to degrade a little bit then they'll eat it and the bacteria they're in of course the bacteria and fungi go right through them and out the back side and into the castings and multiply as they grow well the events like these are just you just get a whole saw and I could snap these out but these are the vents you can buy in any hardware store that are used for vents like in soffit vents or in tool sheds garden sheds and stuff that will often have little vents up in the peaks they sell these there's some are rectangular some around it you can put a spigot in in the bottom and there are on that list of were me references there's a number of plans for making your own and what some of them will do is you just drill a hole right at the bottom and you get a little spigot and you just put it in there and you know screw it in on both sides so it's sealed and watertight so you can drain the moisture out let it drip in these little vents these two go to the other side through a tube there are two tubes yeah they're connected there's two tubes so air can flow all the way through and then aerate the bottom yeah it's like little pieces of pipe with braids and remember you have to make the holes if you do them yourself make the hole smaller than the worms so you don't want to have quarter inch holes because in the worms will there was a fellow who was going to bring in his homemade bin but he forgot to bring it in this morning but he essentially got a bin like this and then you know the ones that they come with a cover I mean that's all these companies are doing it that sell these they're just buying bins and then there's even a company and it's listed on there called Ben's bins he's up in Holyoke or Amherst up in that area that he makes a really nice bin two sizes but he also is coming out with a kit with all of the parts for it and so you just you don't have to you by your own bin and you buy his parts with the instructions and make your own that way because some of them will put a mesh across the bottom that's equivalent like to this mesh in the bottom of these bins for drainage and then aspic it out the side so you can drain the leachate which is really really good stuff to water your plants with and you can water that straight or you can dilute it however you want it's not potent in any way like the tea and and so on to water plants and what you're doing is inoculating your soil with microbes that's really what most soil needs particularly in in gardens in containers it's a little difficult because microbes don't survive there very well in small pots but oh that's a good point they don't like to be hot so you don't want to put them anywhere where they'll be in the Sun and you don't want to put them anywhere in the wintertime where they would freeze good because this would freeze solid and kill them so it needs like in a basement cellar garage maybe if it's but it is important to keep them out of the Sun because this black box would be like a little oven and they can't get away from it they're trapped in here can be in the house in the cellar in a cool place and that that brings up another point of the advantage of well why not just have a compost pile and get rid of all our kitchen scraps in a simple compost pile stir it up everyone smile outside and that works fine and that does work fine and that's an excellent thing to do but in the winter time when we have a normal winter not this year but when we have a normal winter when things freeze your compost pile if we've got it in a container or or not it freezes solid and essentially nothing happens all winter long it just stops and you can keep adding to it and whatever you put there will just freeze and sit there and look at you for the winter and then come spring as it thaws and warms up it'll start working and gradually it'll get going and you'll get caught up with this you got your compost pile inside and it's going all winter long so it keeps the compost going through the season when normally composting doesn't work too well and I think if you get a collection bin for your kitchen for your kitchen scraps for compost you will be amazed how much stuff you produce for compost people think oh well I want to have a banana peel and an apple corer and a piece of lettuce now and then it's never going to amount to anything start collecting it collect all your coffee filters all your tea bags all your banana peels all your apple cores all that stuff and you're going to find you're going to have that bin needs to be emptied every other day it's going to be a you know like twice that size full in an or I mean that's just two of us in my house and of course that's all we eat is plants but it fills up I usually put it like in this one or these at least once a week yeah yeah but I mean if you had this in your kitchen and I've seen these in people's kitchens right in tucked away somewhere in their kitchen they just put the stuff directly in there every day and that's fine too I mean the worms are happy with whatever you give them and they don't keep you awake at night they behave never complain you know and they just keep working away and the more you feed them the more they'll reproduce and the more they reproduce the more they will digest and so it's just a positive reinforcement thing going on and it's very self sustainable and very beneficial and like I say cuts down on your solid waste and it adds to your fertility oh yeah yeah yep sure citrus breaks down pretty slowly so things like that I tend to chop up you know a little bit to help it along because it is slow then clunk they love corn cups so when you get sweet corn in the summertime they love be the worms really love corn cobs but imagine a corn Cup you know it's a pretty big hunk of stuff they can't really they'll I think they like it because it's so porous and a lot of bacteria and fungi grow in all of the crevices and holes and pores and they go after that but I the way to deal with that is just we chop the cobs up a little bit chop them in half chop them lengthwise and open them up and they break down pretty fast that way if you put whole corn cobs in here they'll be there a month or two later they'll be deteriorating but they'll still be there so things like that chopped up tomatoes apple cores anything you can chop up peelings you probably don't you know I chopped up the squash peelings a bit but the more you chop it up the faster it'll get digested and composted it'll eventually all get composted but if you're producing it every day you want to keep them moving and help them a little bit and so we tend to tear things up a little bit no muskmelon the kind that's got the rough edges the rough skin on it take a slice of that and put it put put them face down always when you put things in there just put one in facedown maybe in the middle where you can leave it and then come back and check it in a couple of weeks and all you'll see is like a fish net it'll be like a lace net of what is left and all the pulp all the flesh is gone it's from London it's just a lacy network of the hardest fibers are left and eventually those will go to whenever there's something to drink it entirely is variable according to what you've been putting in it no you just open it put you just keep a little bowl there a plastic bowl and it'll come out like it look like tea there leave it'll just look like tea or coffee you know titles and you don't remember them what - not just feed them right water well and that's why I keep the newspaper on so then when that newspaper is dry then I will re soak it if it's wet then I don't put anything don't put any water in so the newspaper is sort of the gauge with this one it's very wet but it's because we have all these leaves on top so it doesn't evaporate and dry very much at all and oops oh you're adding all the time you're adding the food for them which becomes Betty yeah now in this one you can have much more bedding in this one the bedding is limited because the each bin is fairly shallow you know it's only that deep and you only want the bedding to get up to there so that when you put the next one down it just comfortably rests on the material underneath it so the worms can easily crawl up through it they don't jump real well so if they have there's a gap there they have trouble with it but they'll just slide right up into the next one very easily so you're not getting it very deep words in this one it's you know it's it's much deeper idea we're eating you weren't going to eat this year you're just going to fast all year long yeah newspapers paper towels leaves yeah you should be given I mean this is what they not you think well gee that's kind of a poor diet this is what they normally this is what they eat out in the wild so I keep this on top of here mostly to keep fruit flies out and to kind of keep it insulated from temperature and moisture but it's also a food supply if they run out of the fresh goodies I put in there they can just reach up and grab some leaves and that's what they eat as the Lea and the leaves are breaking down as they break down and that's what the worms then will will get into so you know leaves one thing you do want to be careful of for example is of grass clippings you can put grass clippings in as long as the grass clippings are dry don't put in fresh green grass clippings because it's a high nitrogen source and it will start composting and you'll get heat generation and the worms will try to evacuate and they'll try to get out because they don't like hot and as you know a hot compost pile can be quite hot it can easily get 130 140 Fahrenheit okay yeah because of compost and burning so you want to keep it from getting into active hot composting and one of the quickest ways to to do that by mistake is to put green grass clippings in so if you're going to in grass is perfectly fine just like the leaves but let the grass clippings dry out first let them dry out until they're brown and thoroughly dried and on a summer day that might only take you know two or three days four days and and then you can add it if you need to add something that's perfectly good any other questions comments stories no you're just gonna think of a lot of names for all your pet Oh oh my god then I have to keep a list of my database so I can recognize everybody I'm sorry they're not they're not they're European invaders they brought over with are you familiar with the idea of the Columbian Exchange the Columbian Exchange is just a fancy way of saying all the stuff that started going back and forth between Europe Africa and Asia and the American continents after the Colombian connection was made after the Colombian invasion happened that that includes worms birds food tobacco diseases you know there were all kinds of things and that changed the world trying to get to is or these guys find that guard for what I have they're in your backyard they're under your leaves under you know if you look there will be the ones near the surface these will be the ones you'll most likely find now if you have a compost pile either in a bin or a pile just piled somewhere if you dig down into it if it's been there for a while you dig down into it you'll find these worms these will be the ones right under the surface yep and if you find a bunch of them you can use those for your worm bin yeah just don't you know if you see bigger earthworms or night crawlers night crawlers of course will go real quick they're hard to catch anyway but it's these will be the ones in the surface the earthworms are the ones that when you turn over a shovel full of dirt they they're the ones that are there and they're four times as big as these at least big and fat and those are not the ones you want to have it have been because they just they'll survive but they don't really do well and they don't eat a lot and they're not real happy and this they're not domesticated pardon that they're the ones that go down yeah and make all the tubes in the soil so that the air in the water can get down to the deeper roots of your plants and so on these guys have a different job their job is to break down the organic matter on the surface the earth worms are the aeration and you know when when everybody here knows who Charles Darwin was and what he came up with when Charles Darwin was near retirement and in older age which was probably not that old then he his theory of natural selection and evolution had not really been well accepted and was sort of one of those fringe ideas that some crazy scientists was promoting he sort of felt like his life as a scientist had been a failure he hadn't really accomplished anything of great significance which really bothered him because scientists like to accomplish things you know make a difference and so he decided to go off on a new field of study that would really be important make a difference his last books were earthworms all about earthworms that's what he wrote about because he realized earthworms are really the basis of Agriculture of soils of our whole civilization is based on earthworm science and he wrote some of the preeminent books about beginning studies of earthworms so I mean here Darwin who everybody knows him for evolution whether you like it or not that's what he's famous for he felt that wasn't enough I mean that changed the world that completely changed science but he felt it wasn't enough so he decided to write books on earthworms and that's how he spent his last years was earthworm so I mean that jeez if he thought they were important they must have you know been worthwhile Oh leo yeah when you're welcome to come up here and see the bins here on your way out don't forget to get the handouts there's you can look in and see what's been set up

Channel: Bristol Community College

Views: 75,758

Rating: 4.8308668 out of 5

Keywords: Worming Composting Workshop, BCC, Bristol Community College (College/University)

Id: h184Xc7jkh0

Length: 58min 11sec (3491 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 20 2012