A few days ago I described our new wormery and said that I’d had to send off for the worms from those nice people at Wiggly Wigglers (no, I didn’t believe it either, but there it is). Well, today I received a parcel …
containing two 500g bags of compost worms (Wormus wormus) which the label describes as ‘selected for their composting ability’. The time had come for action. Timeo Danaos Et Dona Ferentes. We shall fight them on the beaches. Delenda Est Carthago. The piano’s on my foot. The first thing I had to do was take the previously delivered block of coir, intended as worm bedding, and break it up in a bucket of warm water…
… into a kind of semi-solid mess with the consistency of something like a mixture between bran flakes, soggy tea leaves and peat (this process was most therapeutic). I then spread this out in the penultimate wormery tray (reading from the bottom) or the antepenultimate tray (measuring from the top) …
There followed the Moment of Truth, when, with halloos of ‘Cry Havoc!’ a kilo of worms was let loose …
After a few minutes the worms burrowed into the worm bedding …
… and when they’d done that, I was able, with the appropriate direction, to place a moisture-retentive coir mat on top …
… and, finally, seal the lot with the lid.
The wormery is now ready to take its first compostable materials. The leaflet advises cooked food scraps, tea leaves and vegetable peelings, which sound fair enough – but it also advises coffee grounds, which sounds wrong to me. Caffeine is a potent molluscicide, but does it also do the dirty on worms? I don’t want to risk it.
The worms also like shredded paper (of which we have loads, as we shred a lot of BNP election leaflets, adverts for mobility scooters and so on to make compost and pet bedding); hamster droppings (ditto) and – get this – vacuum-cleaner dust. This means that the old vac bags won’t go into landfill as they have done, but be disembowelled into the wormery. Result! At last, a good use for the golden-retriever hair that drifts on the breeze like tumbleweed over the sitting-room floor.
There is also a long list of things worms don’t like, notably citrus fruits (too acid); plant seeds (not dead); grass clippings and leaves (makes things too hot); dog or cat feces (carry human pathogens), and, most of all, anything in excess. Sometimes, even worms can have too much of a good thing.
Henry,A colleague at Planet NGO (where I now work) periodically gives me plastic bottles of 'worm wee' from her wormery. It smells not unlike early 1970s Manhattan when the garbagemen went on strike, but has sent my lilies and runner beans into overdrive. So it's a fantastic investment: just hang in there when you drain off the liquid.
If you run short of golden retriever hair, I can always pop a few cubic metres in the post (not the post on the blog, that would be silly, I mean in the mail).
I can offer plentiful Beast hair too. It's either that or make a sweater from it.
@ Barb – early 1970s Manhattan? what was she feeding them?@ Brian and Bob – thanks, but I have as much beast hair as I can handle. I recommend that you get your own wormeries!
Aiya Annelidaë, utúlie'n compostë!
Er… what she said.
A very elegans system
But they're not really Wormus wormus, are they? Barking up the wrong clade, like, totally.
One of the knitting blogs that I read avidly also describes organic gardening adventures, which are fascinating to me because I live in an area that is comparatively impoverished in such things. The blogger mentioned that she and her husband planted their garden this year according to the "biodynamic calendar", and she felt that the garden would be much more productive as a result.How popular or widespread is biodynamic agriculture in the UK? I seem to remember that you attended a Steiner school, cromercrox, so thought you might know ….The fertilizer descriptions on the Wikipedia page for Biodynamic Agriculture sound like a lot of, well, horse manure to me.
Biodynamic agriculture is largely confined to anthroposophists (the people who run Steiner education) although it does ooze out here and there among new-age trendies. It is, I suspect, largely phooey, a cross between alchemy and astrology.