Worms, Worms, Worms

Hello everyone! Sorry for the long wait... grad school things. You know how that goes.

But I finally did something that I've been threatening to do for years... I started my own little worm compost bin for the apartment!

Vermicompost, or composting with worms, actually lends itself really well to indoor spaces like apartments or houses, and it seemed the logical way to go since my third floor apartment doesn't come equipped with a backyard compost bin. It doesn't get smelly - if properly maintained, that is - and a pound of worms can eat up to a pound of food per day! Which is fantastic, since over a third of American household waste is from food, and I like to think I am doing my part by letting the little worms turn all my food waste into nutrient rich worm castings for my container herb garden.

There are tons - and I mean tons - of online resources for worm bin making, and some of them can get quite complicated. I decided to keep it simple.

Item One: Plastic Bin, with a lid.

I poked holes around the top to keep it ventilated. A lot of folks say to poke holes in the bottom and put another lid or bin underneath to catch any drips, but a woman I spoke to said the problem is usually letting it dry out too much, not getting it too wet.

Item Two: Newspaper.

These, you tear into strips for the worms' bedding. No glossy pages with colored inks, if you please - the full color ink is toxic. You dip the strips into a bowl of water and squeeze them out, then fluff them up in the tub until you get half-way to three quarters up the sides. Toss in a couple handfuls of sand or dirt so the worms can have some grit for their digestive systems.

Item Three: Food.

I went with some spaghetti squash rind, all cut up and shredded. When you put in food, you want to cover it up in the bedding - this helps prevent smell and fruit fly infestations.

Apparently there's a little controversy over whether or not you should feed the worms immediately - I've seen some websites say you should give them a couple days to adjust to their new environment. Other sources I've seen or talked to have said that if you do that, the worms might escape out of their bin. I really didn't want that to happen... so food it was.

Item Four: Worms!

You can purchase these online by the pound, but I managed to get some from a lady who was getting rid of her worm bin and was giving them away.

For the final touch, you put on the lid (they don't like the light), stick the bin somewhere that has a regulated temperature that does not get too hot or cold, and wait for the little guys to work their magic.

Regarding Poop

As a child, I remember seeing an Amish family come into a store when I was visiting my grandparents in southern Indiana.

Actually, I remember smelling them, for they smelled quite strongly of manure. And, being a fastidious child, I was mildly grossed out.

I wonder how that 10-year-old version of me would feel if she knew that, fifteen years later, she would be smelling that scent every day?

In fact, not only have I seen, smelled, and frankly touched manure almost every day this year since I began, but I have come to recognize that it is not that bad. Take the smell - something that once disgusted me is not really at all unpleasant. While certainly immediately recognizable for what it is, manure has a nutty, earthy, almost sweet scent, and probably only deeply unpleasant to those whose only experience with ordure comes when they are flushing it down a toilet.

Little do they know that manure is here to help us. Manure is our friend.

After the last two years, I consider myself something of an expert in manure. Well, maybe not an expert. A dilettante, perhaps. A dabbler, even.

It's pretty difficult to work on a farm (one with animals, that is) and not know something about manure. It's omnipresent. It gets on one's shirt, shoes, hands, and occasionally in one's hair. It must be rinsed off of equipment and pitchforked out of the barn, employing myriad tools such as high-powered hoses, latex gloves and disinfectant.

And yet, there is much to admire about manure, which has long been recognized as a delightful fertilizer.

This is one of the brilliant bits about grass-fed grazing strategy. The farmer does not need to collect the manure and truck it to the field, dispersing it with his/her tractor. What a terrible waste of time and energy and labor this is. Instead, the intelligent farmer lets the cattle takes care of distribution logistics all on its own, by liberally sprinkling the field with their castings even as they replenish their gut with yet more grass for further deposits down the road.

This, of course, is the rub. Grass-fed and free-range animal husbandry allows livestock to live in a way that does not overcrowd the land with more excreta than it can handle. Factory farming, or the practice of raising hundreds, if not thousands, of livestock together in a confined space until they reach slaughter weight, is not nearly so considerate of the earth's needs, as evidenced by the dreadful stench. Anyone who has driven behind a pig truck on the interstate can attest to this.

I thought I would close with a list of my favorite manure synonyms, garnered from Thesaurus.com:

Buffalo Chips. Cowplop. Feces. Fertilizer. Maul. Compost. Guano. Meadow Muffin. Night Soil. Egesta. Evacuation. Excrement.

International Compost Awareness Week: A Toxic Love Affair

Happy International Composting Awareness Week, everyone!

Some of our compost piles.

Well, actually, it should really be called International Toxic Sludge Awareness Week. According to our friends over at SourceWatch, International Composting Awareness Week, or ICAW, is actually a PR front for companies that are trying to push sewage sludge as a viable composting method.

There's no telling what is in the sewage. Organic material? Yes. But also heavy metals, pharmaceutical drugs, steroids, hormones, and many other dangerous chemicals.

It sounds incredible, but it's true. Sewage sludge is sold - often at a discount - to farmers to compost their fields. In fact, Susan recently had to change her straw supplier, when she found out that the same guy she's been going to for years entered into a contract to use sewage sludge on his fields. This practice, by the way, is specifically prohibited by USDA organic standards.

It's not just large farming operations that can get burned by this. The companies pushing this are also packaging compost that does not disclose its undesireable origins, and in fact implies that it is organic, and selling it to individuals too. Here's a sad story about a community gardener in San Diego who found this out the hard way.

I'm going to leave you now with a clip from my favorite environmental documentary... Fern Gully.