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
When I was up in Fort Collins for the Rocky Mountain Compost School, some classmates and I were able to get a tour of the facility of John Anderson (aka, ‘The Worm Man’). I was able to snap a few photos, and you can see most of them below.
Here is a view of the entire Worm Man operation, including fridges, wormbulances, and windrows.
Windrow containing worms. Notice the carpet covering the windrow, and the bales of hay.
Carpet covers all Johns windrows, preventing light from entering and moisture and smells from leaving.
Protecting the windrows from freezing is key. John uses bales of hay to prevent the prevailing winds from stealing heat and moisture from the windrows.
Here is a better shot of a windrow with the carpet pulled back. John is using a pitchfork to move some of the bedding to better show the redworms.
On the right is a pile of bedding and worms, covered in carpet. I believe the left is an uncovered pile of bedding.
John uses fridges as a cheap, effective worm bin. They are almost water tight, insulate well, and hold a large number of worms.
Here are some happy happy worms in the bowels of one of the modified refrigerators.
Here is a fridge that John made early in his experimentation. You can see the plastic on the door was not removed, and it is starting to get squishy.
John hot composts a lot of his feedstock for the worms. He got these large square bins from an A/C company, and mounted them on an axis so he can rotate the compost.
Here you can see John rotating the tumbler, using rope and his truck. I wish I had gotten video!
John makes money selling castings as well as worms. He stores finished castings in these 55 gallon plastic drums.
This was a piece of old farm equipment that John had on his site. A classmate of mine is indicating how it could be used as a continuous flow harvester. You would scrape off the bottom of the worm bin periodicaly, getting most of the castings and few of the redworms.
John built a separator on an old gurney; here is his primary casting separation setup. Worms and castings and bedding are taken from the wheelbarrow and put into the upper end. The barrel is rotated and the worms and vermicompost fall to the lower end. Castings fall through the screen onto the tarp.
The back of the ever popular Wormbulance.
June 28th, 2009
Especially during the winter, food scraps can be a big problem. My redworms are not inside, so I can’t just walk to another room in my bathrobe. Food scraps accumulate at different rates (if I make a fruit salad, quite rapidly; chili, not so much). If I leave the scraps for too long, they produce fruit flies and smells. And since the weather can be bad 6 months of the year here in Boulder, Colorado, I can’t always put the scraps in my bin immediately, as I tend to do during the summer.
I’ve tried a variety of solutions for keeping my food scraps inside until I can move it out to my external worm bin, including:
- having my worm bin inside
- a 5 gallon bucket full of leaves and some vermicompost
- zip lock baggies
Things that I have not tried that I’ve read or heard about include
I don’t like the idea of freezing the scraps because
Below, I outline the system that works for me. I have two or three 1 gallon coffee containers, like this one:
coffee container
I fill one (container A) up with food scraps. Since it is airtight, the smells don’t escape, and you have no flies. It does get pretty funky and moldy in there, depending on what scraps I’m putting in. I’ll put everything in there, including liquids.
When it is full, I take it out and dig a hole in my bin. I empty the container into the bin. If it is really funky, sometimes I’ll fill the container with water and dump that in. I refill the hole with some of the bedding.
Then, I add a bunch of leaves (every fall I grab them from the curb and store them on my patio) for additional carbon content.
As for the container, I’ll leave it outside, and take another one in (container B). I find that leaving them outside on my patio serves a number of purposes:
- dries out any food scraps that stuck to the side of the container
- dissipates any smell
- dries out mold (I don’t know if it kills the mold, though)
I have not had any trouble with animals investigating the containers, though I live in a pretty urban environment. After container B fills and I empty it into the bin, I knock whatever dried scaps remain in container A out into the bin or onto the beds, and take it in with me.
What methods do you use to deal with your food scraps?
April 26th, 2009
Here’s part three of my interview with Michael, a worm keeper. See part one, where he discusses how he ignored his worms for 3 weeks post purchase, how he uses his worm bin currently, including what types of scraps, and how he built his worm bin and part two, where he talks about earthworm orgies, the five gallon bucket of worms he started with, and ignoring your worms. Below he talks about worm trenches, how worms are like bees, whether he’d keep worms in his kitchen, and how worms fit into the permaculture way of having systems you can ignore that will do work for you (do you sense a theme?).
The money quote, for me, is
I feel like it’s been a success for me because I haven’t put a lot of effort into it. And I’ve been able to kind of ignore it. And I like having systems around my house, my property that will take care of themselves and are self-sufficient. So, with as little effort as you can put into it, I say it go for it. Because you can’t make them do anything. They have to do it themselves.
Dan: Huh. I don’t remember [John] saying [that worms were in short supply, see previous post] but along that vein, you said you might want to sell worms or give worms away, do you have friends that have asked you for them or asked you about them?
M: No, but I also haven’t offered them to anybody…
D: Somebody else I interviewed, Linda, actually said that she was talking about her worms and had a bunch of people interested and then when she actually had them to give, they were not interested anymore but I don’t know what the deal is with that.
M: I don’t know myself either.
D: Yeah.
M: So like I said, maybe starting a 2nd worm bin because we have such a high production of organic waste here; we could easily support 3 more of those.
D: Well, you guys have enough land here that you could definitely do like a worm trench, you know like 20 feet long and just…
M: Carpets or something like that?
D: Yeah carpets…
M: So it’d be a windrow, is that?
D: Yeah exactly. Well I mean a windrow, to me, is much bigger, but you know, I mean, you could definitely…
M: I was thinking just a pile on the line.
D: Yeah, yeah exactly a pile on the line, but Forest actually was telling me about piles, I mean he in Hawaii he had one that was 20′ long and they just…
M: And 5 feet wide or something?
D: No I think it was less wide than that, I think maybe1 or 2 feet wide [note, according to the interview with Forest, it was 4 or 5 feet wide].
M: You need to keep it covered though. Is that the idea right?
D: Yeah basically they had a hoop over it and rocks on both sides and it was actually in a chicken house so that the foxes and whatnot couldn’t get into it and then they had a really big shade cloth over the hoops and I think they had some misters too. But you can move a lot of organic matter through the worms. Although maybe just a couple of worm boxes would be easier to maintain. I don’t know.
M: I’m new to it, I’m a total amateur.
D: Really? Did you read anything or did it sounds like you have done some looking around just kinda see what you can expect or…
M: A couple Google searches and then the class we had on it was pretty much the extent of my worm knowledge really.
D: And then you just kind of just jumped into it because you felt like it was a really good counterpart [to other things you were doing on the land]?
M: Yeah, it just seemed to make sense and I thought… It was more just wanting to try, see what would work. You know I’m happy with it and I’ll keep doing it.
D: Sure.
M: It’s easy, it’s extremely easy. I mean building the box took a little bit of effort but not much and you don’t do much. I mean I really like the permaculture idea of having the different um components of your system doing all the work for you. I’m a pretty lazy person by nature.
And I really resonate with the idea of, you know I love having the bees out there, we keep a beehive. So I really like the fact that bees are also very, very easy to keep. Very, very low labor, you know. We probably visit the bees once every 6 weeks or something, you know, just check in with them every 2 months maybe.
D: It’s been a while since you checked out the bees, hasn’t it?
M: Yeah, certain times of year you do certain things but that’s about it. But, then the bees just sort of do their thing and what they do is they increase pollination, which is probably their primary asset, then they produce excess honey, surplus honey. This is the first year we had a hive and it produced 70+ lbs of honey which you know we can sell for $5/lb or whatever.
D: Sure.
M: It works out really well, it’s great gifts, Christmas gifts this year will be honey. Anyway, It’s the same thing with worms, you give them the right conditions and they do all the work, it’s really nice compost.
D: Obviously you’re not gonna get enough worm compost to spread across your huge garden out there, are you planning to [make] compost tea, are you going to focus on certain plants or have you given any thought to that?
M: Again I’m just been more concerned with building up the population in it, as far as getting anything out of it this year. I don’t know, I’m kind of thinking about it more now that you mentioned that they don’t like to be in their own waste as much. I’m actually not totally sure about how to harvest it. How to get it out of there now at this point because it’s sort of mixed in with rotten food.
D: Sure.
M: And how do you do that?
D: I mean I can tell you the couple ways I’ve done it. One way is you can just take out stuff. You can take out about half of your worm bin if you wanted to and put it places and of course you’re losing all the worms that were in there but the other half will come right back eventually, right? That’s definitely the lowest effort way.
You can also kind of push everything, all your bedding and your vermicompost to one side and just move it to the other side, slowly, and after, I’ve seen everything from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, the worms will migrate to where the food is and of course, the half where that was old, you will be able to take all that out. There will be cocoons and whatnot in there. But you’ll definitely [retain] more live worms than you would if you did the first method.
And the last one is you can pull all the compost out and pick through it, which doesn’t really go with along with your idea of not much effort, but does make sure that you get almost every worm that you can catch. And it can be fun; I did that, once. I mean for a pile of worms half the size of my fist, maybe a little bit smaller, took me about 45 minutes. And it was a pile about 2 feet wide of vermicompost that I went through. So it sounds to me like the second method is probably most in keeping with your ideals.
M: I don’t really know what to do now that its getting cold, sort of entering winter here [it was October].
D: Yeah I’ve definitely had worms freeze and die in the winter. Although your box is pretty big.
M: It’ll be ok, I just have a feeling it’ll be ok out there. But we’ll see. I might throw some straw bales around it just in case.
D: Yeah.
M: It’s insulated.
D: Yeah, that sounds pretty good. Any thoughts about keeping them actually in [the house], inside because that’s kinda the attraction of worm bins is that you can conceivably have them inside.
M: No.
D: No? That’s fine.
M: We don’t really have room for them in here.
D: That’s fair enough.
M: It’s pretty packed at this point.
D: So other than the compost pile is there any other place you want to put them in? I guess that’s pretty much the natural place for them.
M: Yeah. I mean I would be interested in experimenting more with maybe laying down worms, plus raw compost and then heavy mulching around plants so that they’re [in the ground]. I’ve heard of techniques like that before.
D: Just to increase plant productivity?
M: Yeah just to increase vermicompost right at the base of the plant. [Beneficial chemicals and nutrients] are right there, readily absorbable by the plant.
D: I saw a cool video…Youtube’s great… where you can get a 3 or 4 inch diameter PVC pipe and drill a bunch of holes in the bottom and then dig it like a third of the way in and then you put worms in there and then you put food in there and then you cover it with like some kind of cloth to keep flies from getting in there and then you cover it with something to keep the sun out and then you can feed the worms in the tube and then they’ll go in and out of the holes and you can have those stationed around your garden, same kind of thing, but it’s ongoing. [Apparently, I speak in run on sentences!]
M: Yeah I see what you mean, that’s interesting. Little…
D: Stations. Almost like feeding stations. Yeah.
M: Do you think worms like weeds and things like that? We have to weed a lot.
D: Sure.
M: So like, grass or pigweed or mallow, things like that, vineweed, stuff that it’s dead, you pulled it out of the ground, can worms eat that?
D: Is it dead?
M: No it’s green.
D: It’s green? But does it have seeds and whatnot?
M: Maybe?
D: Cause I mean I think that if it didn’t have seeds, the worms would be fine…that’s just like lettuce leaves, right? I mean worms would be happy with that. I don’t think [vermicomposting] gets hot enough to kill seeds, so that’d be my worry. If you were gonna put the vermicompost under the cardboard, like if you were sheet mulching something, I would say no problem. But if you’re gonna have to put in house plants, well then… Definitely some of the vermicompost I’ve used around plants sprouts stuff periodically because it just doesn’t get hot enough for composting. [Vermicomposting does have some kind of effect on pathogens, though.] I think they [the worms] like any kind of green matter they can get.
M: I think that would be good for that windrow method.
D: That’s the thing that worries me about worms in general. It’s got to be consistent input. I guess you could put a huge chunk of matter in and just let them go to town but for maximum throughput I think you want to give them consistent amounts over time.
M: Yeah. Maybe next year that’s what we’ll do with our excess worms, start a worm trench.
D: It’d be interesting, I read an interesting book called “How to raise worms for fun and profit”, printed in the 60′s and reprinted in the 80′s. They talk about industrial production of worms, about windrows with concrete inside which the worms go. I guess if you’re raising worms for profit…
M: Like in peoples’ houses or something like that?
D: No inside, like garages.
M: Like a warehouse or whatever?
D: Yeah. I mean, if you’re selling [worms] for $25/lb, that’s back in the industrial system I guess. Anyway do you have any advice for somebody whose interested in keeping worms for the first time?
M: Just go for it. You know, play around and experiment.
D: Any do’s or don’ts? Do leave them alone for the 3 weeks when you first get them? Don’t ignore them for long periods of time?
M: I feel like it’s been a success for me because I haven’t put a lot of effort into it. And I’ve been able to kind of ignore it. And I like having systems around my house, my property that will take care of themselves and are self-sufficient. So, with as little effort as you can put into it, I say it go for it. Because you can’t make them do anything. They have to do it themselves.
D: Sure, ok. Well thank you very much for your time, Michael.
M: Absolutely.
April 6th, 2009
So, you’ve read the basics, and are looking to take the plunge? You’ve decided that you want to try home worm keeping?
Bravo!
If you’re looking for redworms to start composting with, and you want to buy locally, I’ve compiled a list of Colorado redworm suppliers.
I’ll be updating this page as I’m made aware of new sources.
Please feel free to contact me or leave a comment if you know of other Colorado suppliers.
March 25th, 2009
One of the techniques I learned in my permaculture class is the “chicken chart”. This is basically of a list of the inputs (needs) and outputs (products) of a component in a system. If you can match up the outputs of one system with the inputs of another, you end up doing less work; the systems support themselves.
Here’s my chicken chart for redworms.
Inputs
- controlled temperature
- food (nitrogen source)
- protection from predators
- moisture
- bedding (carbon source)
- harvesting effort
- grit
- oxygen
- other beasties (bacteria to break down food)
Here’s the outputs worms give
- castings
- surplus worms
- vermicompost
- educational opportunity
- soil
- carbon dioxide
Did I miss anything? Is there more that we need to give redworms, or that they can give us?
January 18th, 2009
I had the pleasure of interviewing Forest, a classmate of mine. We talked widely about his experience with worms, including blue worms, his recent failure, the shelf life of compost tea, worms’ place in permaculture, and many other topics. It was a long interview, so I’ve broken it up into parts.
In part 1 he discusses his experiences vermicomposting restaurant scraps on a farm Hawaii.
Dan: I’m with Forest who was a classmate of mine and we’re going to talk about worms. Forest what’s your experience with worms and keeping worms.
Forest: My first experience with keeping worms? I went to Hawaii a couple years ago, I lived there for 6 months. And in the, in that term we were able to get a worm farm going on a small permaculture farm in Hawaii which ended up being the largest worm farm on Kauai. When I got there, they, the woman who was managing the farm there was operating had a small worm operation there and she wanted a larger one so I designed up a system to expand it and we had, I don’t know one the size of this room there.
D: That’s a good 30 feet
F: Yeah.
D: I would guess. How wide?
F: About 5 about 4 foot wide. What we did was we were collecting the compost from all the restaurants around us all the different restaurants. And then We would sell them our produce, if we had anything ripe we would bring it, see if they wanted to buy it or the compost, so that happened every single day. And so we collected enough compost from that to create a huge worm operation and it was awesome. It was really really cool.
D: So you did compost like vermicompost everything or just the vegetable scraps that they provided?
F: everything went into [the vermicomposting operation]. I mean it was huge you know, trash cans full of compost from all the restaurants and we threw everything in there every day. [We had] a long corridor so we started at one side and moved down and kept adding and move on so by the time we got partway down the line the first batches were ready to come off so that way, that way we could you know switch back, keep it up. We also had shade palms so it was completely shaded. But it also had a sprinkler system, a mister system on an automatic timer so that every so often it would just mist, keeping things misted all the time cause worms don’t like stuff to dry out. Plus when the sun was out even with the sun protection it would get a little hot there also.
D: And it was outside?
F: Yeah.
D: Did you have any issue with wild animals?
F: It was in our chicken bed, so we had to protect it from the chickens which was our biggest issue but that wasn’t that hard, because the way we designed it, it was closed off so the chickens couldn’t get at it.
D: Just chicken wire or something like that?
F: It was just a shade cloth. And we attached that to some long metal rods on either side and attached some PVC pipe and it [the PVC] half circled along it. So it looked a lot like a house.
D: And the chickens never figured it out? They weren’t smart enough to get through the shade cloth?
F: No [the cloth] was too thick.
D: Ok, gotcha.
F: They, occasionally, one would find its way in a little side pocket we forgot to close up but you know, a single chicken can’t hurt it so much. So we were extremely lucky. We tried other different types. We tried tires and boxes and a bunch of different ways but the amount of compost that we had, that’s what we’d use [the vermicomposting hoop houses]. I’m gonna change one thing I said. What we do is bring all the compost into the chicken pen and then let them pick through it for a day then we’d pick it up and we’d throw it into the worms. So the chickens got first pick. So we were able to feed our chickens [off the scraps].
D: You didn’t have to feed them anything else?
F: We did have to do a little bit of supplementing but I probably wouldn’t have if it was my chickens because I mean they eat all leftover pastries, bread, grain. If you [a restaurant] spilled some grain on the floor you just have to sweep it up and put it in the compost. They couldn’t cook with it so [the chickens] got stuff like that constantly. We had 60+ chickens there too so it was quite the large operation.
D: Were you involved in going to the restaurants and saying “hey, [can we get your scraps]?”. How’d you sell them on that?
F: We just said “we want your compost” and people were pretty excited about that actually.
D: They weren’t kind of pissed off that they would have to split their plastic waste from their food waste?
F: No.
D: Or did restaurants already do that?
F: No, restaurants didn’t do it but restaurants didn’t have a hard, tough time with it, I mean I think it’s partly the area we were living in was pretty liberal and pretty conscious and there wasn’t really any composting systems in place so you just start offering people the option and everybody jumped on it. The problem was just regular pickups because we had to do it every day, every two days we’d have to go and pick up every place and that doesn’t give you a lot of options for going backpacking for 3 days you know. So that was a management issue that ended up causing some problems but we had anywhere from 3 of us living on the farm to 20 of us living on the farm and it changed. It was just a huge invisible structure. Where we put most of our energy [was] trying to create an invisible structure. It’s managing people in flux, but the worms went well, you know, really well. And then after that I built a compost tea maker which is like a 55 gallon drum and then we’d take all the worm castings and separate the worms from the castings and then put that in the compost tea maker. And then we’d go spray down all of the plants with that.
D: Did you ever run any experiments on what compost tea was good for? I mean I mean how much it helped?
F: No, we just sprayed.
D: I mean I’ve wondered that because I’d like to. I mean Tracy was talking about selling that stuff, you know and it seems like that’s one way you could make a large body of stuff to sell.
F: Have you seen at the Saturday farmers market, Eco-cycle sells it there? So the problem with selling is it has to be in the ground within 12 hours of making it.
D: Oh really?
F: So that’s why they do the farmers market. Because they literally make it that morning and then they sell it.
D: Wow.
F: And so you’re buying it fresh and you have to go water your plants with it. There can’t be a delay.
D: Because all bacteria and all the good stuff will just…
F: It goes anaerobic. There’s a certain amount of oxygen in there and the microbes eat it. Once it’s done they kind of fall asleep
D: Sure.
F: So, you know you have to keep it while there’s oxygen in it. Now, if people could bring it home and put oxygen in it, you could use a little fish bubbler, it would last a little bit longer but even then not really [that long].
D: Ok that’s good to know; I didn’t know that
F: So we just spray everything with compost tea. I mean everything I’ve read and all the research I’ve done is it’s really incredible.
D: Really, ok.
F: So, yeah so I just want to explain the inputs to outputs of the worms. We had 3 acres we were taking care of so and then when I had this spring when we got worms…
D: Can I ask you a question about the farm? So how did you separate the worms?
F: Separate the worms? The woman who lived there, Crystal, she came up with a way to do it. You just take you take some old castings, flip them down into a wheelbarrow and then she took a tray that had like a screen on it that was big enough that the worms could crawl through, and we put the worms on the screen and then put that on top of the old castings and you just wheel it out into the hot sun, and the worms, once they reach a certain temperature, they’ll burrow down as quickly as they can to get away from the sun. You have to be careful if it’s a really hot day you have to put it in kind of half sun half shade you know. You don’t want to cook em but you want to frighten them that it is hot, then they’ll go down into the lower level. Then you just pull the top one out and it’s all cleaned out. It’s actually quite easy.
D: It sounds, again like a laborious process right, like you can’t do that with all your castings at once, you have to do repeated trips.
F: Yeah, exactly.
D: But like do that then you go work on the farm someplace else and then you come back?
F: And then this was invisible structures. There was the patterns of behavior. We’d wake up, go make our run [to the restaurants], feed our chickens, rake up yesterday’s [scraps and throw it in worm pits], then we go and take some castings, we put it in [the wheelbarrow separator], then let it sit all day, and then the next day, we’d take those castings and make compost tea with it and then be spraying. It’s just a lot.
D: Sure, lots and lots.
F: Plus 20 other things.
D: Sure yeah, this is a long[?] cycle you’re talking about.
To be continued…
(Thanks to Pam for her transcription skillz.)
December 2nd, 2008
Check out the vermicomposting flickr group for more.
November 23rd, 2008
