[Michaelangelica]

Turtle said:

Mmmmm...eizer tock, oder eat zie verms. Better yet, have the worms eat your garbage!
By the by, did you know Charles Darwin's last major work considered the lowly worm in great detail?
http://pages.british...ould/mould.html

Didn't Darwin say earthworms added 1/4" of topsoil to the planet a year???

I started with a shop bought three tier "Worm Farm" and a big pile of worms.
Anyway i never did get it to work properly.
You could buy earthworms for the garden or for fishing

I ended up with a compost bin outside my kitchen window.
I would toss all my kitchen scraps and stuff retrieved from the Frig "Crisper" (better named "Rotter").
What the Possum didn't eat at night the worms ate.
I added lot of paper and cardboard too and occasionally yard sweepings and some manure.
After 12 months I started a new pile at another window.
My fist pile was now mostly compost and earth,and worms.

I had to pay to have my garbage collected (I was on acres) so instead I turned kitchen waste into soil with no effort.

these days I am experimenting with compost teas and kitchen scraps go into that.
but I do throw out a lot of paper mmm

In Australia there is a Giant Worm, mostly in Victoria.
Very little is known about it.
It can often be located by the noise it makes burrowing through the soil
SEE
http://www.dpi.vic.g...D3?OpenDocument

There are around 1,000 species of native earthworms in Australia. One of the most spectacular is the Giant Gippsland Earthworm; at over a metre long it is one of the largest earthworms in the world.

[Turtle]

I just finished watching an interesting news story on a young man in Oregon who is going big with worm poop. He dropped out of college and he's already a millionaire. What he and his compatriots have done (they said he has 2 Phd's on staff) is to develop a water & worm poop mix fertilizer which they are bottling in old plastic pop bottles & adding a sprayer top. It is cheaper than other fertilizers & the first bottled product ever marketed for which the bottles are not all the same type!
They already have the product in several big-box stores across the nation as well as many smaller outlets.
I'll check the news stations page & see if I can find a web link.

PS Here is a link to the product from worm poop called Terracycle:
http://www.kgw.com/f...terracycle.net/

[Michaelangelica]

Racoon said:

I would like to buy a nice pre-made fabricated device, with bottom trays to simply remove the "end product" without having to dig, and move everything.

You can buy a three tier plastic worm farm here in just about any nursery
You harvest the 'juice' from it ever other day. One tier is active where you put your scraps (on top) the next partially decomposed the bottom worm castings ready for the garden. The worms follow the food.

[Michaelangelica]

Turtle said:

. He dropped out of college and he's already a millionaire.
PS Here is a link to the product from worm poop called Terracycle:
http://www.kgw.com/f...terracycle.net/

Sounds like a big business.
Good for him

Quote

TerraCycle is looking for a creative use for bottle caps. As a part of our production process, we collect hundreds of thousands of soda bottles per year, many of which include a bottle cap. Over the years, we've collected quite a few. Help us find a use for these bottle caps and win a lifetime supply of TerraCycle.

Here councils re-cycle all plastic bottles. In one state (SA)there is a 5c deposit on all bottles

[Ganoderma]

very cool stuff. i experimented with this a while ago in a slightly different manner. i keep a lot of reptiles and amphibians so i had a lot of vivariums. i had a phelsuma (day gecko) enclosure running for 6 years with full plants and animals. the main bugs were red wigglers (thanks to a bait store) and sow bugs. fertilizer for plants, eat dead bugs/poo, aerate soil, and provide food for lizards. it was so successful that from 2004 till the end of 2005 i did not add anything but water. the lizards ate the bugs and the cycle continued.

there is also research on using fungus are composters. oyster mushroom is of special concern, it is great for composting cellulose. it is also being researched for cleaning up pollution. see Paul Stamets. I am thinking of experimenting with using mushrooms as a primary decomposition then moving it on to invertebrates and worms. Anyone try this?

i am curious why the want for removing wood lice (aka sow bugs/pill bugs)? they are excellent decomposers and will stay in the top area of the worm farm. i would think that any effective organic decomposer would be beneficial provided it does not prey on other live animals.

i have also recently being playing with snails for decomposing, but it is apparent that they are rather picky eaters, even the giant land snails....

[Michaelangelica]

http://www.c-n.com/a.../NEWS/608270331

Quote

Worms give breeders wiggle room to be creative with organic fertilizer

By MARY ANN D'URSO
Staff Writer

PISCATAWAY -- Sure, worms poop, but is it enough to make a business go?

It is if you're Jersey Devil Organics, a worm ranch in the business of selling organic fertilizer made from worm waste.
One worm, the Coslicks said, will produce about 10 pounds of waste per year.
Australian experiments found that adding 10 percent to 20 percent castings to a mix increased the production of marigolds by one third, Bogdanov said. Likewise, the first year that vineyards put worm castings on the plant surface and covered it with mulch, grape production increased by a third.

"In the second year, they got the same rate of increased harvest without an addition of any vermicompost on the surface at all," Bogdanov said.

A casting, he said, has a mucus membrane around it that lasts at least a couple of years.

[Ganoderma]

just a guess but wouldnt fungi eat away at the paper/cardboard faster than earthworms would have a hope at? i have a feeling it, fungus, has first strike at things like paper then the earthworms finish 'er off.

i understand the "clean" earthworm style setup being mentioned. but if waste elimination is the goal why get rid of sow bugs? sow bugs are great cleaners as are millipedes and other soil dwellers. centipedes could go though, all they do is eat what you want to breed.

i saw a show a while ago about those massive earthworms. althought they said 6' was their max length! i believe it was by melbourne? very rare they said.

i am using some nice fat 12"ers in my 5 gal compost. i am going to be setting up an experiment using sow bugs and earthworms seperatly to compare the differences. i will be adding the same amounts of raw vegetation to both and leaving them in cool place. i am assuming the worms are far supperior but i am interested in how much better they will be. another one i may try is snails, them suckers are amazing eaters. just got to find the right specie for composting and not eating crops...

[Michaelangelica]

In warm waeather worms went through a lot of my scrap newspaper.
I shreded it a little but not a lot.

I doubt snails would be in the race- you would need so many of them

[Ganoderma]

I was in a book store this weekend looking at English books and saw a book in the science section and saw a book called "The Worm Book" (I think that’s the name). It talked about using worms, vermiculture, composting etc. Anyway one section I remember was it had a 3 columned list. Primary decomposers, secondary and final. it placed earthworms in primary and secondary. it also placed fungi (I always seem to mention mushrooms...) in primary.

i am wondering if earthworms are able to break down cellulose? perhaps using a mushroom worm cycle could yield super effective/fast results?

[Michaelangelica]

Ganoderma said:

i am wondering if earthworms are able to break down cellulose? perhaps using a mushroom worm cycle could yield super effective/fast results?

They have just discovered some bacteria that will break down cellulose. (Usually the mushroom's role I know)
Many are excited by this as it will allow wood waste to be turned into bio-fuel.

For details of the soil bacteria involved see David Suzuki and Holy Dressel's "Naked Ape to Super Species" A & U 2002 or search the web.

I have a shreder. Do you think it would be OK to put shreded paper in my compost?
What about the ink?

[Ganoderma]

I suppose that would depend on what ink they use, not all are the same. I know some use "environmentally friently" ink. Not sure what that means though... If your asking if it will affect the bugs, i highly doubt it. It will definitely NOT harm fungus!

[Michaelangelica]

http://www.nytimes.c...uvVaka6xwxunlbg

a fun article
there is money in poo
as long as, or if? someone sues you?!

Quote

It was a worm bin that Tom Szaky started in his college apartment that eventually led to his founding TerraCycle. He was trying to grow “certain plants” in order to “harvest the buds,” as one account put it. High on the effects that vermicomposting had on his gardening project, he and a fellow student wrote a business plan that turned on making effective and earth-friendly products for gardeners who didn’t happen to have worm bins of their own.
TerraCycle began to appear on store shelves in late 2004. The packaging explains that the stuff comes courtesy of “millions of worms” that are fed “premium organic waste” — and slags “synthetic chemical” rivals. By 2006, Inc. magazine judged TerraCycle “The Coolest Little Start-Up in America.” The plant food is now available at Home Depot, Wal-Mart and Target.

Producing mass amounts of worm waste proved less difficult than figuring out what to put it in. This has led to the company’s “Bottle Brigade Program,” which involves sending boxes to people and organizations (about 3,100 so far, according to Zakes) across the country, to be filled with empty 20-ounce soda bottles and shipped to TerraCycle. Its bottle shapes are thus inconsistent on retail shelves — but that has become part of the brand’s look, and the company is trying to trademark the packaging style.

[LaurieAG]

anglepose said:

Are the maggots i found in the bottom anygood for my heap of goo

The maggots probably mean that you are composting meat as well as vegetable matter. If you remove the meat from your mix you will get rid of the maggots and any bad smells as well while doing your worms a favour.

[Michaelangelica]

LaurieAG said:

The maggots probably mean that you are composting meat as well as vegetable matter.

Good for fishing and gangerous wounds.
I have been told that flys will blow a liquid compost made from comfrey leaves because of its high protein level??.
(You 1/2 fill a garbage can with Comfrey then fill with water wait three weeks and you are supposed to have a fertiliser about equivalent to Commercial Tomato Liquid Fertiliser.)

I have a question.
I get several local papers (I get all my news on the net now never buy papers) and heaps of junk mail every week.
If I shredded these up, I have a little shredder, how do you think this would go as worm food?
OK with the paper -lots of colour supliments but not with the glossy-brocure stuff?
Would the electricity I used in the shredder be counter productive CO2 wise?

I notice they don't seem to be impressed with my composting efforts with sea weed. The particular variety of seaweed I collect seems to take an age to break down even with layers of chook poo and horse poo.

[Ganoderma]

i have problems with that plastic coated paper stuff as well....i often recycle that as i know nothing of how to deal with it myself.