Successful (Savory) Harvest

 

Practical Application of a WoRmECYCLE Acquired Skill

Logo wear is expected attire at promotional events, and we are exhibiting at the Earth, Water & Faith Festival (http://www.visitatc.com/earth-water-and-faith-festival) at the Annapolis Towne Center on Sunday, May 1st. However, the idea of spending WoRmECYCLE's Kiva-destine proceeds on expensive labeled attire undermines our professional philosophy and insults our personal style sensibilities. WoRmECYCLE experience presented an alternate solution: Citrasolv transfers, a fun, creative process learned from one of our customers on our compost rounds. Ten dollars bought 4 appropriately sized shirts at our local thrift store. We scanned our own compost related sketches into the computer and spent about another $1.50 on laser copies of line art and inverted text. A sponge to apply the cleaning fluid, spoon to burnish/encourage transfer, and we had personally designed, Earth Day appropriate logo wear to sport at our event. Thank you Sandra for teaching us this creative way to upcycle clothes.

Wiggle in Our Waste & a Verdant Tinge to Our Thumbs, But No Fungi Fingers!

We are experienced worm farmers and responsible managers of our own mini CSA(or V for Vermiculture). We are proud of the avocado, lemon, and mandarin orange trees started from seeds salvaged from our compost container. We have successfully rooted pineapple tops, rosemary, lavender, jade plants, ficus prunings, and Celeste fig saplings. We have even regrown the bulbs of green onions on our winter windowsill, harvesting and reharvesting the fresh grown tangy greens to enhance countless salads. We viewed the mushroom kit as a delightful invitation to the world of mycology. The idea was right up our alley: using kitchen debris to produce food.

In mid March, we excitedly embraced our new agricultural venture (mycogriculture?). We followed the package direction: inside and out. We dutifully cut an + (even though an "X" would have better suited our intuitive sense and aesthetic sensibility) in the plastic bag holding our used-coffee-ground growing medium presumably coated in mushroom spores itching to grow. We also performed the additional instructions recommended  "for Best Results": soaking the bag in a cold, tap water filled bucket for 24 hours, appropriately weighted to ensure full submergence; shaking off the excess water; placing in an properly ventilated and illuminated location; and spritzing as directed. Our wok anxiously awaited our first harvest. A couple of days ago--near the end of April, we admitted defeated and acknowledged our lack of fungi fingers. We don't know how or why this went wrong, but we are open to advice. For now, we are sticking with worms and purchasing our mushrooms in their fully grown state.

What's in Your Freezer?

Ice cream? Some peas, string beans, or broccoli florets? Maybe a container of overripe bananas that you've ambitiously stored for a future smoothie or fruit bread? Our kitchen freezer looks about the same, but an auxiliary freezer tucked away in the storage room harbors hidden treasure of a decidedly unpalatable sort: worm poop (castings, in more refined vernacular).

 

Why do we do this? Well, for a couple of reasons, actually.

 

The best composting worms, red wigglers (Eisenia fetida) are not native to North America. It is a European species that is imported and sold for composting because it is a surface dwelling worm that lives, eats, breeds, and works in the leaf litter and debris that collects on the forest floor. Adaptation to this surface environment makes red wigglers better composters that their native earth burrowing relatives, but their status as non-natives means a responsible composter should avoid introducing them into the wild.

 

Introduced species can cause problems. They are usually less vulnerable to native diseases and predators, which have co-evolved to be particularly effective at attacking the native species. This means the new environment can serve as a safe haven where they can thrive and reproduce, potentially resulting population explosions such as those documented for zebra mussels. Such proliferation can drive native species to localized extinction and alter ecosystem conditions making the habitat unsuitable for other native plants and animals.

 

The question is whether the species is non-native or invasive. Unfortunately the answer to that is not simple and typically habitat specific. Japanese Beetles and zebra mussel, most of us can easily label as invasive. Horses are also non-native to North America; are they invasive? Think about some of the coastal islands and areas in the West where they run wild? Humans...certainly invasive if the plants and animals could vote.

 

Susan Harris, a master gardener in the DC suburbs, offers a thoughtful assessment on the status of red wigglers on her web site Sustainable Gardening:

http://www.sustainable-gardening.com/inputs-tools/compost/invasive-worms

 

We choose to freeze our compost because we feel it is our environmental responsibility to reduce the threat of introduction. Freezing also provides an added benefit because it kills the eggs and larvae of other critters that can inhabit worm bins: millipedes, soldier flies,... We feel we can not in good conscience deliver compost that might result in an indoor infestation of soldier flies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetia_illucens) after incubating in a member's pampered houseplant. They are entirely harmless and effective composters in their own right as larvae (maggots), but they are wasp mimics that look disturbingly like their stinging cousins.

Processing Our Product

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you--that is compost in a food processor, recently retired (that same day) from kitchen duty. We are not usually this fastidious about our product, but we decided to make an extra effort for this, our first CSA delivery of worm compost. The processing mills the compost into a finer product and more evenly distributes eggshells and other fibrous matter like banana stems. We thought the extra processing would be appreciated by our members who might be using the compost to start tender seedlings. Later in the season, we will distribute a slightly chunkier product to aid transplanting, enhance garden soil, or boost house plants.

Harvesting Season: A New Method to Avoid Madness

Last Fall, a dear friend and newly initiated vermophile asked for harvesting advice. We started to paraphrase the glib, idealized processes described in various books and on-line resources:

Method 1: Start feeding a different part of the bin; allow sufficient time for the worms to migrate to that area; remove casting from the other side/bin.
Method 2: Open bin and place in sun; worms burrow lower to escape sun; skim off top layer of castings; repeat as necessary.

Then we got real and described how it has worked for us using a multi-tray worm bin:

• Stop feeding bin to be harvested;
  
• Wait for worms to migrate to other bins; wait some more; wait--perhaps months;
  
• Realize that worms are still fat and happy in all bins, merrily breeding to produce more wigglers among the compost, egg shells, and food scraps alike;
  
• Give up migration method and expose bin to direct sunlight;
  
• Wait and skim off minuscule layer of castings to find happy worms barely below the surface;
  
• Dump tray out onto plastic sheet and spread castings out from the center with a mound in middle for worm refuge;
  
• Wait the inordinate amount of time you think necessary for worms to move to sanctuary; finally begin skimming off a minuscule layer of castings; worms obstinately offer only rank & serial number despite hours of intensive sun treatment;
  
• Spread castings into a fine layer and manually remove the enormous number of worms that remain; marvel at the writhing masses you find huddled among the eggs shells;
  
• Sincerely thank the observing children for helping to encouraging due diligence by screeching, "Save the wormie!" at full volume and close proximaty whenever a pinkie is discovered desiccating among the distributed compost;
  
• Place saved worms in another prepared tray or fed section; pretend you do not see, and therefore cannot be expected to save, the millions upon millions of eggs scattered in the harvested compost;
  
• Freeze harvested castings, ostensibly to kill any eggs or undesirable vermin that remain--secretly, gloating that you may have bested a few stragglers;
  
• Pour a cold beverage; order take-out; and plan to harvest another bin as soon as you recover--maybe next year.

You might note this is a "12-Step" process. We acknowledge that we have a problem and accept responsibility for the solution.

This year, we are using a new, or at least modified, method. An empty worm tray is placed over one of the new bulk bins and handfuls of the compost from a full tray is placed into the empty one. Hand sorting is still required, but some worms are driven by their own initiative to escape into the lower bin through the holes in the sorting tray. We hope this trait translates to preferential breeding success and eventually results in a herd of self-sorting compost worms. For now, it is relatively easy to lift the remaining stragglers from the upper tray to the lower bin along with any remaining food scraps.

The process is not perfect, but it is less onerous. We still pretend not to see the plethora of eggs.

Farm Expansion During the Harvest Season

We just modified two 18 gallon tubs to serve as bulk worm composting bins. These tubs significantly increase our capacity and will assist with the sorting process during harvesting.  During the long, cold winter, our capacity was pushed to its limits. We allowed the outdoor bins to sit full and undisturbed, hoping that the compost would serve as insulation and protect the worms in a central thermal reservoir.  By that mechanisms or some other, the worms survived, but they were clearly not munching much over the traditional holiday feasting season. The bins we moved indoors remained active and hungry. They served as our only repositories for compostable material during the winder months. As the weather warmed, all the bins moved back outdoors, but our available capacity was near zero. The worms in the outdoor bins grew active, but still needed to compost material that sat frozen in their bins during months of inactivity. The bins that had wintered in warmer surroundings were bursting with worms and compost ready to harvest. But, harvesting requires excess capacity to receive the livestock, which must be separated from the final agricultural product. So, we spent one evening with a drill constructing new habitat for our expanding herd. Now, we are waiting for some warm, sunny days to begin the harvest. Sun aids the culling process, because worms naturally withdraw from the sun, (theoretically) allowing a top layer of worm-free compost to be brushed into a harvesting container. Warm weather keeps the harvesters happy because you have to get in there with your hands. It is a gooey, finger numbing job if it is cold.

Emperor Wigglers or Wormsicles: How Do Composting Worms Over Winter

The SERC science fair project: frozen worms. We freeze our compost to make sure any worms or eggs that we could not remove do not introduce the non-native red wigglers into the Mid-Atlantic environment. This winter we maintained an indoor bin and 2 outdoor bins. The outdoor bins appeared to freeze solid in the harsh conditions this winter, but the worms were hale and hardy when mild temperature returned. We wondered if worms could survive freezing (not so good for our method of avoiding introduction) or if they were protected from freezing by the insulating qualities of the compost.  Our results did not support either hypotheses. The control worms in a tub but in the compost bin were lively, but those in the 2 freezer tubs were dead. Both frozen groups demonstrated some defense mechanisms. Those frozen in the tub with no compost were huddled together in a wormsicle conglomerate. Those that had been covered with compost were eventually located, after a couple hours of thawing, massed in the center of the compost. They appear to have crawled as deep as possible and massed together before they succumbed to freezing. We discovered after our experiment that our freezer was 12 F, which is significantly colder than the 24 hour average temperature this winter. It is also possible that a larger mass of compost and a larger population of worms for huddling provide more effective insulation from extreme temperatures.  The kids think the worms, which are cold-blooded, animals might use a similar huddling adaptation as Emperor Penguins, warm-blooded animals.