Twenty-seven years ago Norm Hirscheld of Greenfield visited a permaculture farm where he met his first red wigglers (Eisenia foetida). “I was awestruck by how you could get rich black compost from vegetable scraps right in your house,” he said. He decided right then to become a worm farmer himself and built a wooden box, providing holes for ventilation, and put in a sufficient amount of wet shredded newspaper for bedding. He sent away for his pound of…
Twenty-seven years ago Norm Hirscheld of Greenfield visited a permaculture farm where he met his first red wigglers (Eisenia foetida). “I was awestruck by how you could get rich black compost from vegetable scraps right in your house,” he said. He decided right then to become a worm farmer himself and built a wooden box, providing holes for ventilation, and put in a sufficient amount of wet shredded newspaper for bedding. He sent away for his pound of…
Temperatures soared above 60 degrees and this was the first weekend we could actually work outside, so let me give you a brief tour to set the scene. The snow is still melting and revealing that the winter has been kind to the rhodies. No breakage. Lots of buds. The "Limelight" hydrangea was not so lucky. The snow plow dumped a lot of our enormous snowfall at the edge of the lawn and broke more than half this…
In July of 2008 my grandsons and I put 1000 red wigglers into a bin we had prepared. We were worm farmers. I wanted worm castings, considered very fine compost, to use in my garden. The process of making that compost has been a slower process than I expected. Red wigglers are not earthworms. They need to be kept warm - at least warmer than 50 degrees to thrive. I did not want to keep the worm bin…
I have been waiting for dependably w arm weather to harvest my worm compost, vermicompost. Composting worms cannot survive when temperatures go below 50 degrees. The weather has been so unsettled this spring, first hot, then cold, and then hot again. Even when it has been very warm temperatures in Heath get cool, and the weatherman kept threatening 40 degree nighttime temperatures. My basement, where the worms live for at least 8 months of the year is a…
I've never gotten an award before so I was delighted to wake up to this award bestowed by Tinky of Our Grandmother's Kitchens. Thank you Tinky! She did say there were seven things the award givers want to know about me, before I pass the award along to seven other favorite bloggers. She also said if I was too shy I didn't have to tell all - but I can certainly think of seven things to share. Some may…
It might be more genteel to say a harvest of worm castings, but no one ever knows what I'm talking about when I use that term. Castings or manure, I took advantage of the warm day to bring my worm farm out of the basement and begin the harvest I dumped the whole bin full of worms, bedding and manure out onto a plastic sheet, and let that rest and give the worms time to dive deep into…
Pulling Together was the theme of this year's Annual Heath Fair organized by the Heath Agricultural Society and supported one way or another by just about every one of the town's 800 residents so that thousands of area people can enjoy a day in the country and gain a sense of the abundance around us - even in these hard times. It would not be pushing a metaphor too hard to say that it takes a lot of people …
The worm farm is celebrating its first anniversary. A year ago the grandsons helped set up the worm bin, drilling air and drainage holes, and putting in rotting leaves, compost and a little soil. All of that was really unnecessary; red wigglers are not the earthworms that live in our gardens. Red wigglers are happy with damp shredded newspaper. We started with one pound or about 1000 baby worms. The worm bin lived outside into the fall on the…
Worms alive! “I used to say that one ton of worms could eat one ton of garbage. I was always thinking big like that. Then I found out that Seattle had distributed four thousand worm bins. I did some figuring and realized that worked out to ten tons of garbage going into worm bins. That’s when I realized—it’s happening! It just isn’t happening the way I originally thought it would.” Mary Apelhof, author of Worms Eat My…