Our purpose is to educate folks concerning composting their leaves, grass clippings, and garbage to worms.
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When you choose composting with worms you are provided with several benefits. First, worms can do in one season what it takes mold, fungus and bacteria 2 to 3 years to do. In the process of this slow breakdown your leaves, grass clippings and garbage will produce methane gas and co2 gas as they deteriorate. We are aware these are greenhouse gasses and can contribute to global warming.
Second, when worms eat organic waste they produce nature’s best fertilizer for use on plants, yard, gardens, etc... Worm castings are the base fertilizer for organic gardening. They have amazing qualities that are as important to your plants immune system as organic food is to your immune system.
Worms will eat their weight every day in organic matter. They proliferate very quickly.
No need to turn your compost pile - let the worms do it for you, naturally!!!
Here are some tips in caring for your worms.
1.Do not feed them citrus as it is too high in acid.
2.Worms are mostly water but they can drown. If the pile is enclosed make sure it can drain well. In my box I drilled 8 --1/4inch holes around the sides at the bottom.
3.If you have a lid on your bin leave it open so rain gets in, just make sure the pile can drain.
4.Keep the pile in the shade during the hot summer months. The worms will reproduce best in a temperature of 65 to 75 degrees.
5.Make sure they have adequate insulation from the cold in the winter time. I used a box 3 feet wide by 12 feet long by 3.5 feet high and put ½ inch Styrofoam insulation in the middle portion of it, then placed a pound worms and filled it up with leaves.
6.When you first start your bin you should give the worms something to eat while the leaves start their decomposing process. A good start is wet shredded paper, and peat moss. This is a good way to assure they have food in the beginning.
7.I’ve done testing and know that they will survive our winters, at least down to 5 degrees. That’s the coldest it’s been since I started the experiments.
8.Feeding garbage is easy, just dig a hole in the leaves about a foot down and dump it in. I have chickens and have fed my worm’s chicken manure also and they did fine with it.
The India Study
When I initially did my research on worms in 2006 I found an article where India had conducted a study. They took human sewage slug, cow dung and rice straw and composted it with worms. They checked it for deadly bacteria. They found it contained all 7 of the deadly bacteria, (ecoli, etc.). They checked every 7 days and found at the end of 35 days, all the deadly bacteria had been destroyed through the process generated by the worms.
Worm cast (vermiculture) is encapsulated in a wet membrane of enzymes. This process results in a time release fertilizer. The difference is that the release is dependent on the plants need for nutrients. It doesn’t get any better than that folks. The PH is around 7 which is perfect for most plants, and the nitrogen will not burn your plants.
Enzymes, vitamins and minerals are the base materials of the human immune system. The same is true of the veggies and fruits we eat. If they have the enzymes, vitamins and minerals from the soil, they have a healthy immune system and can better fight off pest and bacterial attacks.
There is one draw back to castings. They hold moisture longer than soil. At least twice as long. For container planting, mix no more than 20% castings into your soil mix. Check periodically with a hydrometer to see when they need water
Not very beautiful huh. It is however very effective. It sits under a mulberry tree and we are looking west. Out of this box I harvested 9 wheelbarrows of worms and their casting. I started the beginning of the summer with 2 pounds of worms from Nana Jane’s Worm farm. (www.WichitaWillie.com) Fed them all my garbage, (what the chickens didn’t eat) and added 4 bags more leaves as they settled and the worms ate them. The black bag to the left is covering my in ground worm box. It is a fall back incase the worms in the big box don’t survive the winter. So far both boxes are doing fine and looks like they will survive fine. As you can see the leaf level has fallen already about a foot. The Styrofoam is to keep my chickens out. As you can see they have pecked some holes in it. Yes . . . chickens eat Styrofoam. Don’t ask me why. I bought this excellent box from Spirit salvage on Oliver for $6.00 . You can’t even buy one sheet of plywood for that. This is the chicken run area. As you can see they eat all the grass in the area they graze in. I mow a different part of the yard daily to give them fresh grass to eat. They love grass. That’s what makes the egg yoke orange! I feed spinach in the winter. Free roaming chicken eggs have twice the B-vitamin lethicin and half the cholesterol as caged birds and when they get their greens it adds much more nutrition to the egg.
My Styrofoam recyclers. These are 2 year old chickens. Old for a chicken.
This is my garden. This is where the 9 wheel barrows of worms and castings are. As you can see I covered them with about 10 inches of leaves. They have settled some. I also put my fireplace ash on top. Looks kind of messy now, I havenít done any winter clean up yet.
This is the circle of life. I never considered that using pesticides could kill my worm and other beneficial insect population and using bactericides kill beneficial bacteria as well as unwanted and using fungicides kill beneficial fungus as well as the unwanted stuff. When you apply these chemicals you, in affect, kill your soil!!
Once dead it takes 2 to 3 years to bring it back, if you work with it. You can apply microbial tea and get a super head start. It has the microbes in excess to jump start the soil and the food for the microbes to eat while they get acclimated to the new soil they are put into. Nana Jane’s Worm Farm has the Microbial tea and many stories of success from small farmers and garden growers from the farmers market.
Some of my peppers and tomatoes from 2007. I make a mean fresh salsa.
Jim and Jane Atencio from Nana Janeís worm farm, showing the children at the Goddard school science class how to harvest worm castings by hand, using a harvester Jim builds for customers who want to harvest their own castings.
The Earth Renewal Project Foundation is myself, Frank Hosford, and Jim and Jane Atencio. Our purpose is to educate folks about the environment. How it works and why it’s important to us and our health and how we can fix our past mistakes by just making some simple changes in the way we process our waste.
Thank GOD for the Worm’s! They are our Earths savior.
We are happy to present this information to groups in the community.
We are members of the Organic Garden Club and Earth Spirit Kansas / Interfaith Ministries.