Tea Leaves, Coffee Grinds and Jellyfish

Fri Feb 24, 2006 7:32 pm

Big Easy -

Vermiculture: The cultivation of worms to break down waste. The worm casts contain recovered nutrients which can then be used for fertilizer or soil conditioning.

As easy as pie!!!

Val

Fri Feb 24, 2006 7:40 pm

grandpasrose wrote:Big Easy -

Vermiculture: The cultivation of worms to break down waste. The worm casts contain recovered nutrients which can then be used for fertilizer or soil conditioning.

As easy as pie!!!

Val

Thank you Val! It makes sense to me...

Don't know how my wife will feel about it...but we'll see! :lol"

Fri Feb 24, 2006 8:55 pm

No problem! That's why we're here!
As long as you promise to do all the work she won't ever see them!! :lol:

Val

Sat Feb 25, 2006 4:00 am

Hi Big Easy.

Vermiculture is dead simple. The classic way to do it is to buy a Tote box and drill holes along the sides and on the bottom. Then fill with leaves or newspaper and add about a cup of RED WRIGGLER WORMS and add all your kitchen scraps (chopped up) to the set up and in about 3 to 4 months, you will have lovely soil. And the worms will multiply like you wouldn't believe.

Red Wrigglers are notoriously expensive to buy so, the best way to get them is start a compost pile in your yard (a cold compost pile) and they will come. Then, just transfer them to your worm bin.

Sat Feb 25, 2006 5:17 am

Outstanding! Thank you. I'll give it a go.

Sat Feb 25, 2006 5:45 am

Hi again Big Easy,

just thought that I would give you some more advice. I prefer to use leaves (usually maple) because they have a C:N ratio of about 800:1 as compared to Newspaper with a C:N ratio of 2000:1 and takes a notoriously long time to be broken down.

These tote box compost systems are actually designed to be used inside apartments and homes. I keep mine outside because when I start a new cycle going, I fill a 5 gallon bucket with some cocoa hulls (or peat but, I don't recommend peat) and manure. Manure is just not something that I want in my house :wink:

So, keep the leaves moist so that the worms don't die of dessication.

Oh, and prop your worm bin up with some bricks or something else and place a drip pan (I use one of those aluminium roasting pans from the supermarket) the compost tea that you will collect can be diluted about 10:1 and used as a fertilzer for you plants and as a foliar spray.

You will find that with use as a foliar spray that herbivory by insects and other organisms will decrease. If you like I can get into the particulars of that on a later date.

Anyway, great stuff. My plants love it.

Sun Feb 26, 2006 10:26 am

Thanks! All good stuff there. Makes it really easy for me not to screw it up! (My wife says I don't need more hobbies/stuff, but this is a quick one that doesn't take a whole lot of work anyway!)

Mon Feb 27, 2006 12:51 am

Pretty tough to screw worm composting up. The one mistake I did make was allowing an old room mate to put all the pulp from the ginger juice that she would make into my bin. (There was a lot of it)

For one reason or another the entire bin went anoxic and I had to empty it and clean the whole thing out with bleach (for the first time in four years). So, be careful with additions of large amounts of ginger. To date, that's the only problem I have ever had.

Sun Mar 12, 2006 9:04 pm

Got my composting bin going! Don't have exactly red wigglers yet, just some regular earthworms (as far as I know anyway! Those are soon to come. Lot's of kitchen scraps are being used up now!

Thanks everyone!

Mon Mar 13, 2006 12:05 am

If you have your compost bin placed on soil, don't worry, the red wrigglers will come. You can cout on it. :wink:

Tue May 02, 2006 2:40 pm

I have a worm farm and have been making "tea" out of the castings. I also compost, but have not made tea from it. What's the recipe?

Tue May 02, 2006 10:07 pm

For compost tea?

For anaerobic tea:

Place your compost in a bucket of water and stir daily for about a week. Nothing simpler

For aerobic tea:

Place compost in a bucket and aerate with an aquarium pump or other aeration device and let steep for a week as above.

Use as foliar spray and/or as feritilizer.

Using compost teas as foliar spray reduces the amount of disease that your plants will recieve as you are adding beneficial fauna to the plants. As a fertilizer applied to the soil nutrients are added as well as the beneficial fauna. It's win-win!