I have been on the hunt for alternative sources of bedding. I usually just use leaves, but last fall I didn’t pick up enough leaves to handle the three worm bins I have a hand in. So, given that I now have a lawn, I thought I’d try grass clippings.
First, off, I knew that fresh grass clippings are not a significant source of carbon–they have a C:N ratio of 20:1. But I figured I could dry them out and have a ready source of bedding for my worms.
I looked around the internet. The folks over at Redworm Composting say “yes but”. These posts on GardenWeb states that grass clippings never lose their low c:n ratio. However, this book on composting has dried grass clippings in the “brown” category, as does this article.
What to do? I decided to ask an extension agent: “How long do grass clippings need to dry before they are considered a ‘brown’ in terms of composting?” And the answer came back:
It usually won’t take longer that a week, depending on the environment. Getting them off the lawn, especially if it is irrigated, into a “holding area” would hasten the process.
Excellent. Now that I knew the grass clippings were really a “brown”, I needed to dry some out and try to use them as bedding.
I did this by laying some grass clippings out on a tarp (you can see some sticks that got caught up in the clipping gathering process).
Grass clippings on tarp
This location probably gets about 6 hours of direct sun a day, and by the end of 10 days, the grass clippings were pretty dry. I did end up turning the clippings every 3-4 days, and was surprised by how green the grass was under the top layer.
Then I added the grass clippings to a worm bin I had.
Grass clippings in worm bin
Thus far, I think that grass clippings are a substandard bedding. They take some time to prepare, and they definitely tend to clump in the worm bin. In addition, they don’t seem to hold water very well. The grass clippings dry out and get all white, as you can see below.
Grass clippings going white
So, the lesson to me is that I need to do a better job of picking up neighborhood leaves this fall!
July 30th, 2010
One of the things I didn’t think of when brainstorming what to do with redworms was to use it as a supplemental source of feed for chickens. Luckily, some other folks have thought about it. Here’s a good page with some suggestions. If you are at all familiar with worms, you can skip the first 2/3rds of the page–it’s only the last section where the author discusses how to use worms to feed chickens. He has 4 suggested ways to integrate worms into a chicken system, including building a wormery with various sections that would allow the chickens to eat some worms and not others, and drying the worms using them as a protein additive.
I was talking to someone a few weeks ago who said that worms contained a fair amount of zinc, and that zinc is helpful for egg production. I wasn’t able to substantiate the first statement (though it looks like too much zinc is toxic to E. Foetida). As for the second, I found this reference stating that “normally, 15 to 30 grams of zinc are added to 1 ton of feed”.
It looks like some backyard chicken keepers have investigated redworms as a supplemental protein source. At the bottom of the post, AK-Bird-Brain runs the numbers, and concludes that, given the amount of food scraps (20-25 lbs) one would have to feed worms to get 1 lb of extra worms a day, one would be better off just feeding the scraps directly to the chickens. This makes sense the me–the only situation where I can see coming to a different conclusion would be if:
- you wanted the castings for your garden or to sell and
- you had access to a large amount of feedstock that chickens might not eat (chicken manure [here's a post describing such a system], other manure, hair, etc)
I also found this table of chicken parasites that can be transmitted via worms (though it says earthworms, so I’m not sure it applies to redworms). Some other posts in the backyardchickens site also implied that chickens don’t like the taste of redworms, either.
What do you think? Do any of you have experience using redworms for supplemental nutrition for chickens?
July 20th, 2010
A few months ago, I moved. Rather than try to move my previous worm bin, I decided to try a different type of worm container–a 55 gallon drum. A quick google search found someone who sold 55 gallon drums, and I bought a couple. I wanted plastic, but he didn’t have any, so I bought 2 steel 55 gallon drums previously used for holding orange juice. (It’s amazing what you can fit into a tiny sedan.)
Basic setup: I filled the bin with a couple of bags of leaves I had retrieved from curbside last fall. I put in some water. I also drilled five drainage holes in the bottom of the barrel. The barrel came with a steel top–I put that on top to protect the worms and retain moisture, but I leave a crack so that some air can get in and out. And then I put in about 10 gallons of worms and vermicompost. You can see the lid on the lower right–I put a rock on it to deter critters.
Barrel o worms
While it was chilly but not freezing this spring, the barrel seemed to work fine, as you can see from this photo:
Worms in a barrel
However, as we head toward summer, I’m a bit worried. The drum is black, so any sun really heats it up. And the worms can’t easily retreat into the earth, as they could with my previous worm bin. I recently moved it to a shadier area–I hope that helps the worms a bit.
Last I checked, the worms were doing alright, and I even found a cocoon:
worm cocoon
The reason I wanted to try this is that 55 gallon drums are pretty cheap ($20 each, I think) and readily available, and I thought these would be a fun container to use when vermicomposting large amounts of atypical feedstock. That is, things like dog and cat poop, or human hair. I want to play around with them, and yet be able to use some of my worm castings on food plants. These containers seemed like a great way to segregate such feedstocks. I still think there is promise in these, but do want to see how the worms survive the winter months.
However, the downsides of the 55 gallon drums are many:
- Unless I cut a hole in the bottom, I will have a hard time incrementally removing worm castings.
- They are hard to move around–even 30 gallons of worms and vermicompost weigh a lot
- They don’t drain well–although I could have helped this by drilling more holes
- Worms can’t retreat out of them–again, more holes and placement on dirt would help.
- As mentioned above, they heat up.
After a few months of worm keeping in a 55 gallon drum, I noticed the local recycling center was selling soil savers for half price, so I bought two. More on that later.
July 10th, 2010
When we last talked to Mike, the Eldorado State Park employee with the human waste (aka poop) problem, he was attempting to introduce redworms into the system. He was planning to start small and see how the redworms reacted to the environment they are in.
I followed up with him in mid June (the start of the really busy season for Eldo) and he had this to say:
The worms are pretty doggone happy. There’s the can where they get raised
in cardboard, soil, and food scraps, and that population is doing well. I
was initially worried about the worms in the sh***er because I couldn’t see
them – but with some excavation, I found them down about a foot in the pile
of poop and wood chips. They’re thriving.
I’m still a little gunshy about introducing the effluent to some worms. I
guess they’ll turn their noses pretty quick if they don’t like it.
The temperature in the experimental vault is rising slowly (90 degrees as
opposed to 60 for the control vault). I’m doing the humanure approach and
adding plenty of greens and sawdust. Honestly, it’ll probably take years to
get that pile cooking – it’s a giant mass of dead, anaerobic, cold waste.
My (adapted) plan at this point is to keep at it with worms and the humanure
approach. Best case scenario: Some combination of heat and osmosis will
start drawing water up into the pile to get hot and evaporate. Worst case
scenario: thermophilic & vermicular composting produce wastewater that
beneficial for vegetation and I can start using that “waste” water in the
park for new plantings, etc.
In short: Worms alive and well, and the sh***ers are learning adventure in
progress.
It sounds like he’s mixing it up–along with the redworms, he’s doing some humanure composting (probably based on The Humanure Handbook–well worth a read if you haven’t checked it out).
I’m thrilled that this experiment is going well. Will keep checking in with Mike in the future.
June 30th, 2010
This conference in North Carolina has been going on for 10 years, and had 116 participants this year. Wow. More here, including some names of worm farms around the country.
June 20th, 2010
I thought this article about a Durango farmer, who is also running a cafe named Evening Star’s Local Farm Food Café (where does she find the time!), was interesting because it references closing the cycle of nutrients that so many restaurants leave open. From the article:
It’s a “green” cafe, George says. She uses compostable plates, napkins and cups. Patrons who bring their own fork will get 25 cents off their order. Food waste goes into George’s vermiculture (worm) bin for later use in fertilizing crops.
The whole article is here.
June 17th, 2010
Via this news article, I learned that a California producer of worm castings, Worm Gold, was fined 100K by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. The fine was because the Worm Gold product is touted as “helping plants repel bugs”, and so should be classified as a pesticide, and thus regulated.
This is being fought as a free speech case–you can find out more here.
June 15th, 2010
Folks, I’m going to take a break from the worm composting blog for a bit–I am getting married June 5 and things are a bit hectic around here. So, please forgive the lack of new posts for a couple of weeks.
Thanks!
May 25th, 2010
I realized that I had written this a while ago, but only published it on my newsletter, so I thought I’d post it on the blog for the world to read.
I’ve seen several inaccurate posts/articles about worm composting and in particular the uses for the liquid that often comes out of the bottom of a worm bin. This liquid is called leachate. The US Environmental Protection Agency provides us a handy definition of leachate: “Water that collects contaminants as it trickles through wastes, pesticides or fertilizers. Leaching may occur in farming areas, feedlots, and landfills, and may result in hazardous substances entering surface water, ground water, or soil.” The leachate out of the worm bin is not useful, and can be harmful. I know that some of the people I’ve interviewed have used it on their plants, judiciously. Forest says “I would just dump [it] down the toilet if it was bad. [some of the worm leachate] had sat for a couple weeks and that didn’t have the smell anymore. And that I would mix with water and then water my plants with it.”
But there’s a difference between leachate and compost tea. Compost tea is compost mixed with oxygenated water, creating “a Petri dish: favorable conditions are made for the beneficial soil microbes, already in abundance in worm castings, to reproduce millions of times over in the water culture.” Water running out of the bottom of your worm bin may or not be favorable to these beneficial aerobic microbes. Since it runs through the bottom, it may be collecting microbes that thrive in anaerobic conditions. These microbes, called “obligate anaerobes”, use chemicals other than oxygen to respirate. According to wikipedia, “[t]he most favorable [chemical for respiration] (after oxygen) is sulfate. [Byproducts of which] most of us are familiar with as the rotten egg smell”. This water probably also contains uncomposted organic matter, which is not what you want to apply to plants; otherwise we’d just dump our scraps directly on plants.
In short, what comes out of your worm bin is called leachate and is not compost tea. Don’t use it like compost tea. Dispose of it (I’d probably put it back in the worm bin, myself).
May 19th, 2010
Via Clean Technica, I found this article about the Rogers Family Company using redworms to process their coffee waste. Apparently, coffee processing generates a fair bit of organic waste, and this was decomposing and leaking into groundwater.
So, leveraging techniques used elsewhere, including in Selva Negra in Chiapas Mexico, they set up worm bins on their farm in Panama. The goal? Process 5000 tons of coffee pulp and turn that into free fertilizer for independent growers. The company ended up with “10,000 square meters [of worm bins] filled with a billion worms”. I asked why they chose E. Foetida, rather than one of the worms more suited to the tropics (as outlined here [PDF]); I’ll be interested to see their answer.
Talk about industrial vermicomposting! I remember reading a while ago about ‘decompiculture’ (PDF here) which is the idea of “growing or culturing of decomposer organisms by humans”, the same way that agriculture is the growing or culturing of plants and herbivores. Decomposers, whether redworms, bacteria or mushrooms, can help address some of our most fundamental issues of garbage management by turning waste into useful substances. This project showcases decompiculture.
Pssst! You should complete the cycle and vermicompost your coffee grounds.
Full press release here, and full blog post with pictures here.
May 13th, 2010
Next Posts
Previous Posts
