Tales From the Bucket: Hands Off That Worm(ery)

(image from IMDB, came up in a search for "worm dude". Don't ask.)

The bucket wormery was harvested mid-November or thereabouts, at which point I refilled the bucket half and half with cured bokashi and porch sweepings (that's “dried leaves” to most folks, though sweeping off a deck picks up different stuff than raking a lawn). It occurred to me just after adding the bokashi that there were almost certainly still a few small or stubborn worms clinging to the sides and seams of the bucket—I'd overturned it to collect the vermicompost, but hadn't bothered to rinse it out or anything.

Oh, well. Seeing as I hadn't killed any worms in a while, I tossed another dozen into the mix and decided to call it a test. Small population, lots of food guaranteed to heat but a good mix for wormfood aside from that, no modifications.

None.

This bucket is the basic homebrew jr. wormery, nested kitty litter buckets with a spigot for drainage and holes in the upper rim and lid. But I have no tolerance for fruitflies, so my jr. got a cotton pillowcase snood fairly early on in its career, and I've never seen any reason to reclaim it. Once the bucket was full, I scrunched the pillowcase on, making sure it covered all the vent-holes, then shoved the whole thing underneath my outdoor seedling table. Where it remained. No insulation even during our hard freeze, no added water, no stirring, no dusting of eggshells, and no peeking.

Until spring. Around the time the BSFL were waking from hibernation, I decided to check on that bucket. Looked really pretty, lots of dark brown threaded with wriggling red, but I wasn't prepared to harvest that day, so I just tossed them some UCG and a few crushed eggshells to tide them over and went on my way.

Took another two months for me to get around to that harvest, so I'm glad I gave them that snack, but I think they might have been all right anyway. I pulled a respectable few cups of worms out during the harvest, along with eight beautiful liters of pure vermicompost all rich and dark and so very different from the less mature, soil-amended stuff I harvest more regularly (or at least more frequently) from the tower wormeries.

Not the most controlled experiment ever, but definitely worth doing again! For large planters, I prefer the soil-amended vermicompost, but for seedling mixes and soil-free applications having pure vermicompost is pretty much required. Also, it's a whole lot better suited to making compost tea*.

The planter towers are more immediately useful—I grow things in the tops—but there's something to be said for the no-tend model. No BSFL, no squash bug larvae, no fruitflies, no ants. Told myself that next time I'd be kinder to the worms, mix the leaves and bokashi in a worm-free unit to let it cook, but I didn't. Just as soon as I'd finished chortling over the total harvest, I tossed some leaves into the still-unrinsed bucket. And then some bokashi. And a dozen worms.

Hey, why mess with what works?

In a few generations, I might think about mixing some worms in from another colony. Other than that, I think this is part of the rotation. To a lot of vermicomposters, of course, this is heresy—planning to neglect the worms!—but I'm still working on the two-touch container garden (plant and harvest with no tending between). Always assuming I don't manage to cook this set before they produced some cocoons, I think this one's ready for cloning to my satellite locations.

Good thing my friends all know I'm obsessed. "Hi! How'd you like to foster a wormery? Junior's no trouble at all, just leave him tucked up in his blankie. I'll be back in a few months."


DSF

*or AIM, but that's a whole post on its own!

Don’t Try This At Home

—no, wait, I’m not your mother! Do whatever you like. But this may present a slight hazard in some situations…

Some little while ago, I tried a reclaimed bit of peat-based potting mix as an absorbent material in the bottom of a mini bokashi bucket, yet another version of the no-drain model some folks seem to prefer. Worked very well with drier materials, though it was pretty easy to overwhelm and correcting moisture levels isn’t nearly as simple without a drain. But the bokashi it produced was a dense, spongy mass held together with thick mats of mycelia, and it broke down into a usable potting medium remarkably quickly, so I had to try it again. Full-sized bucket this time, with three inches of new coir in place of the soil-less mix I didn’t have. (The stuff that comes in bricks for worm bedding, not the long-fibered kind from which planter baskets are made.)

At first, I thought it was my imagination, but it wasn’t: the coir plus EM bokashi bran plus a pot’s fresh UCG started a thermophilic composting reaction in my kitchen bucket. That first heating passed, presumably through lack of oxygen, but it restarted with each new addition of food (and air). Without a recording thermometer, I can’t be certain, but I’d guess it never went above 160 and didn’t sustain that much heat for more than a couple of hours at a time. Not much visible breaking down, but signs of fermentation are present, so I guess the heat isn’t hurting anything. And it’s even a food-grade bucket this time, so I won’t worry too much about plastic off-gassing or melting. It’s not like I store my working buckets on top of oily rags or anything. Still…

After all the years I tried hot-composting in spaces too small for the ideal three-bin set-up, with barely enough success to keep me from giving up entirely, it’s a tad bit unnerving to have things heating where I don’t really want them to.

On the other hand, this might actually be an all-in-one indoor compost--with no draining, no bugs, no worms, no off-odors, and no need to empty anything until it’s done. What’s a little fire risk compared to that?

...she asks, suddenly hoping the landfolks aren’t reading this. -G-


DSF

[no image credit, because I've lost the link. Sigh. File says "international pictogram no flame-bucket]


UPDATE:

Harvested that bucket a bit after posting this. Next time, if there is a next time, I'll have to add a thick coir layer at about the halfway point, since the material in the middle of this bucket was too wet and trending toward failure, though not quite there. But the stuff at the top was bokashi leaning toward self-composting, and the stuff at the bottom was compost with a slightly higher than normal pH. I layered it with dried leaves, giggling at the speed of heating, and then...well, this is me. I forgot to turn it! But Verne neared warp-speed in his haste to move in, and it's largely degraded past identifying contents already.

A hole above the ground

Necessity is the mother of…Repulsive 2010 beta.


My usual spigots can’t handle grubbery leachate; it's pretty nearly sludge, thinner if the filter hasn't been dislodged yet but always muddy and with fine-silt particles that clog the tap. I can’t lift a full inner bucket right now to get at the lower one to empty it (wrist injury’s healing, but not yet fixed). And letting the reservoir back up into the unit is not an option. So I set the inner bucket on top of a soil-filled planter that had once been fitted out as a wormery--which means that it had ventilation holes on the sides and bottom, plus a drip-tray beneath. Also, since Verne has no concept of personal space or respect for ancestral colony gravebins, some worms.

This largish unit has about the same volume of soil beneath as potential food-and-grub volume above, and I’m not sure I’d try much less than that; eight inches of soil minimum, if my admittedly sketchy math is correct.

So far, it’s working quite well. A few grubs have no doubt squirmed into the soil, but most of them stay near the top, that being where food comes in. (I decided not to worry about it unless or until I saw a grub using the wormery part to escape; so far, no grubs have been sighted emerging from the soil layer or hatching in the soil-packed vent holes, and the mamas don't tend to bother probing them.) It's quite possible there are worms in the grubbery's inner bucket, but that's not a problem either, and the holes are there should any aggregate bit decide to move. Leachate seeps out of the grubbery into the soil, where it serves to keep the worms fed and moistened, and since soil regulates temperature and pH, there’s no need to worry about Verne no matter what the grubbery gets up to. Too, between the weight of the soil and the nesting of base and rim, plus the inevitable-here-in-Bucketville weight on top, the grubbery’s as nearly secure as I can make it. No human-perceptible odor escapes except when it's very wet--as in, after our recent storm-cycle--and then it smells like fertile wet soil, no trouble at all. Judging by the adults flying around, happy-BSFL pheromones are being produced and food-scent is perceptible to them, since despite crawl-off there's no population shortage on the horizon, but so long as my neighbors and I can't smell it, it's a success.

I'm kind of excited: a moisture-regulating grubbery means one less chore, and one less chance I might accidentally spot one of the aggregate bits that earned Repulsive his name. Well worth the temporary reallocation of a bucket of cheap dirt! Have to say, I’m not sure how well it’d work without worms in the soil layer and/or EM in the foodstuffs. Or, ideally, both. But since I do have both, this is a workable model for me.

At some point, of course, I’ll have to do something with the unit, but with any luck at all, that won't be until fall. Lure the last layers to an alternate location, let the grubs in the unit mature and crawl off or go dormant, let the worms work the bucket over the winter, and in spring and harvest a bucket or so of rich vermidirt and worms. From stuff I wasn't willing to feed my bokashi buckets.

The obvious next step is to test this as an urban pet waste disposal; I've had some success with temporary in-ground units, but that only works where you have a hole in the ground away and downslope from your garden! Too, that was to get rid of the leavings from the neighbors' dogs. The household feline's box is a very different matter. EM, obviously, but what then? I'd thought about BSFL before, but they don't like clay, and there remained the question of what to do about the remains in the bucket once they'd done their part.

Worms were also a possibility, of course, but they can't handle fresh liquid wastes. Grubs + worms seemed reasonable, except for everyone saying how difficult it is to maintain them together.

We shall, as ever, see.


Glad to be back,
DSF


Photo courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service , where some very odd photo categories can be found!

It's an image thing

Lolcats are cute. Repulsive...lives up to his name. But Grubbery 2010's directions aren't too different from this. You know, except for the part where you actually look!

Happy grubbing,

DSF

Tales from the Bucket: The Full Circle Bucket

Having figured out how to compost, vermicompost, and soil-finish bokashi appropriately for my setting, why am I still playing around with different techniques? Well, I’m curious, but more than that—this may not always be my setting! And there’s never a guarantee any living-space will conform to retailers expectations. So I’m trying to find methods that will work for other non-standard situations.

This particular bucket test is an unqualified success, but I wouldn’t use it unless my situation required it: by my current standards, it's slow. Three to six months depending on materials and conditions, much slower than my preferred techniques. On the positive side, it’s contained enough that it could be done in a garage as well as the balcony I’ve envisioned, or even indoors given some care with material selection.

What is it? A hybrid composting/finishing done in the bokashi bucket. I have, from time to time, a (temporary!) sufficiency of buckets, and in one of my more squeamish moments, decided to dump some dried leaves into a curing bucket instead of decanting the ferment. Turns out, that wasn’t such a bad idea, though not a complete technique—the bokashi fermentation can take over the leaves, which is great if you wanted acidified leaf matter but doesn’t turn the mixed garbage pickle into any sort of soil analogue.

Poking holes into the pickle-mass and tipping in a bit of finished vermicompost improves the chances of harvesting humus. So does mixing the leaves with the bokashi—in which case, you can probably save the vermicompost for something else. Putting a weight on top of that mixed leaf-and-bokashi makes success almost inevitable, and if you use soil as all or part of that weight, the end result is a familiar, no-explanations-needed bucket of potting medium. The reservoir does need to be emptied a few times early on in the process, after which the tap can remain open and the bucket ignored awhile. Stirring will speed time to completion, but so long as sufficient microbes were added, it’s not actually necessary.

Can’t speak to minimums here; my tests have used one part compost or living soil to four parts bokashi and four parts dried leaves/shredded paper.

What if you don’t have dried leaves? Use some other dry material and a microbe source. I’ve been using shredded phone book pages for the second-stage tests, since they degrade faster than newspaper (and besides, what else do you do with them?), and the same one-to-one ratio seems to work, though the end product is a little heavier. For microbes, use finished compost, vermicompost, or good garden soil.

And if you have unfinished vermicompost that still has worms in it, you can add that about a week after the leaves and bokashi get mixed together, which will greatly speed the time to completion, and get you a healthy new crop of worms as well, so long as the bucket’s kept out of direct sunlight and there’s some actual soil in there—preferably an inch-thick layer on top, above and beyond whatever may be in the vermicompost.

I can’t imagine many people having enough bokashi buckets to make this their primary post-ferment technique, but the closed-container process may be helpful for some settings. Like, say, folks who have no outdoor space!

Theoretically (which is to say, I haven't tried this), you could design your SIP in such fashion as to do the ferment, curing, finishing, and planting all in the same container, just by mixing in various items (EM bokashi bran, then leaves and perhaps soil, then a bunch of coir). All in the same bucket. Grow food crops, and after harvest...

Yeah, okay, you get it. Excuse me, I must have some gardening to do!

DSF

I really hope Verne can’t count

Firefly
Year’s first firefly sighting on the porch Tuesday night. Not so happy the following morning, as that night was also the year’s first major possum raid. I’d harvested a bucket early Tuesday [next post], about three and a half gallons of dark, moist compost-rich soil—or maybe soil-rich compost, considering the starting ratios. Whatever you care to call it, it was still too damp to pot with, so I set the filled planters of the stuff out to air awhile.

I didn’t mix in any vermicompost or scatter cocoons or anything, but Verne’s pretty much claimed the porch for his own, so I wasn’t at all surprised to find a respectable mini-wriggle in the planter I checked for readiness in the evening. What I should have done then was to stack and weight those planters until the weekend, when I can sheet-dry the compost. What I did was shrug and move on. Smiling at the firefly.

Sigh. Still, not like Verne’s been decimated, or that the possum wouldn't have found me sooner or later anyway.

DSF

The Return of Repulsive

Soldier Fly

What I learned this year: don't let him freeze. If you're willing to have a grubbery, it may as well be a year-round one. Also, way too much work to get it started up again! Though I imagine part of the problem is my refusal to let the things roam free...

Six or seven weeks ago, the early-waking grubs wandered out of their winter beds and went wherever maturing grubs go to sprout wings. (Not toward the space I occupy, fortunately!) Putting together a starter-pack for someone around March 28, I discovered that I had only a couple of dozen dormant ones left, plus the last few just waking. Didn't seem worth the effort to set up a hatchery--obviously, they'd done just fine in the leaf-filled berry punnets I'd used for winter quarters--so I left the stragglers alone to do their thing.

And in the meantime, I cleaned out the frozen grubbery, to my relief much less disgusting than had it been active, and soaked it in a strong dilution of AEM as a sort of compromise between the impulse to scour and the desire to retain some happy-grub pheromone. While I was mucking about, I converted the grubbery full of finished proto-compost to a wormery [which sounds much more involved than it was: I dumped a cup of unfiltered half-finished vermicompost in there], then confirmed that all the dormant ones had crawled away and set up bait bags to await the egg-layers.

March 30 or so. First recorded sighting of an adult: April 24th. Checked the bait-bags that day, but nothing.

And more nothing. And still more. I used bait bags all last summer and fall, to replenish grubbery populations since my unit does not provide free access for egg-layers (any hole an adult can use to get in, a larva can use to get out, and I can't handle that). Simple design: mylar coffee bag about half-full of UCG, closed, with one or more holes above but near the level of the organics. Propped up next to or behind the grubbery to take advantage of that fabled happy-grub scent. It worked very, very well all last year. But this spring? Nope.

What if I left the bag open at the top? Well, then I got flies--just not the right sort. The only thing worse than a bait-bag full of BSFL is one full of ...things... that are not BSFL. Yecch! Tried different sorts of foods with pretty much the same results, though I did achieve small populations of BSFL with cured bokashi. No idea whether predation or selective egg-laying was the cause of that less-than-boom, but a quart of cured bokashi netted me only about an ounce of BSFL. And this early in the year, those new-hatched bits of Repulsive showed no inclination to hurry up and mature so they could breed more.

Not that they should need to. The adults were flying around, they just weren't laying in the bait-bags. Or in the proto-compost wormery, though I left it open for a few days to see if they would. Apparently, there's no happy-grub pheremone if they finish their meal. Call that lesson #2. And for #3: nor is their happy-grub pheromone if the grubs die in the grubbery!

But Repulsive is endemic in my area, which is how I ended up with him in the first place. Additional pheromone signatures shouldn't have been necessary. Why wasn't he (well, his female members)laying where I wanted him????

Lesson #4. Finally got the right conditions, but it had nothing to do with me: It rained. Rain got into the various baits, and all of them sprouted BSFL as if by magic. (Black magic, that'd be. -G-) Grubs in all their disgusting multitudes, so numerous and so voracious that they went through the baits in no time. Writhing, squirming, smelly mud, just what every gardener needs! But, hey, I set out food for them, guess I really did want the things. (Why, again?) No need to tolerate the muck, now they're hatched; they're getting dumped into the grubbery, along with a whole bunch of EM bokashi bran.

And I'm going back to spritzing AEM into bagged UCG. It hadn't occurred to me that lack of moisture might be the deterrent, as UCG tends to be fairly damp, but the last set of bait bags were all filled from the same batch of collected UCG, and it was much drier than I'm used to seeing. My other baits all seemed wet enough to start with, but Austin's doing its usual summer-preview thing, with strings of 90+ and sunny days. Enough to dry out anything!

Had I put the bait(s) in a standard-model grubbery, with the access holes for egg-layers, it'd have stayed damp enough to be inviting. But, all in all, I think I'm sticking with the no-escape grubbery. Other folks have good results with barriers, but I'm just too squeamish to try it again. Ramp into bird feeder bottle for the pre-adults; bait bags for the mamas to lay. And no grubs roaming free!

He's Repulsive enough when I know where he'll be.

Happy grubbing!

DSF