Introducing Nigel

The vermi-family has grown: I have African Nightcrawlers now. Actually, have had for a couple of months, though not many to speak of at first...so I didn't. But now Nigel's a definite presence.

The image above, from localharvest.org, is nothing at all like the material I started from. Local bokashi-and-beyond purveyor Microbial Earth offers an "African Nightcrawlers & humified compost mix"--according to the label, approximately 200 to 300 cocoons packaged with coir and compost for direct-to-garden application.

My vermigardening's mostly containerized, so I potted some herbs with a little of this mix added in, and set up a planter tower after my usual practice but without any actual worms, just the cocoon-and-compost stuff.

Well, in the interest of accuracy I should mention the two or three thread-thin hatchlings I found in the bag. But no breeding populations, you understand.

So at first, I assumed the worms I saw in the new tower were volunteers from the established colonies. But African Night Crawlers (ANC) are larger than the others. Much larger. When, on lifting the tops off two worm-homes, I saw worms in one that were twice as large as those in the other, I knew Nigel had established.

Still not quite as impressive a tangle as that image, but he's expanding quickly enough that I'm planning to divide him this weekend--probably a little soon for that, but he's just so big. It looks like he's cramped for space.

Haven't yet found any in the olla pots, so he may be brighter than Verne (EF). Or maybe it's the size thing again, or age; it tends to be larger, presumably older, iterations of Verne who move comparative mountains to get into the damp, cool clay containers between waterings.

So far, no vermi-battles have been observed. Verne mostly stays in his containers; Cousin Clem (Indian Blue) wanders a bit, but Repulsive (BSFL) has claimed all the good spots, so he retreats to the undersides of saucers. George the earthworm (no idea, possibly more than one species), sniffs around wherever any excess bokashi juice or Repulsive effluent has been diluted and applied, and sometimes finds his way into a recently wetted planter to become the worm equivalent of the crotchety old man in the corner house. "Hey, kids! Stay out of my burrows!" Or so I assume from the occasional vertical airspace in some of the less-tended and more populated units.

Nigel has yet to make his way out into the larger world. Which, you understand, is just fine with me! Worms that large disturb me a bit; I'll be just as happy never to encounter one without advance warning.

Though he's certainly welcome in the garden.

How many buckets would that fill?

From the text on the poster--details and a gallery can be found at GrowNYC--I'm assuming that little if any of this collected material is composted; clean dry and paired suggests reuse, not reclamation. And that's great! But what about filthy, torn, disreputable shreds of former garments?

Let them eat cake couture.

Verne et cie happily munched their way through the post-season potato bags, not quite waiting until the season was over before starting; Repulsive's nearly through the denim I decided was too worn to save for next year's insulation, and it's only been a couple of months; there are still bits of terrycloth in the slow-compost after nearly a year, but only bits, sufficient to add a bit of structure but nothing more. And the fabric bokashi bag (filled with matured ferment and buried at planting time) was only root-tangled threads when I repotted that particular item.

It's hardly news that natural fabrics are compostable in a home setting; the trouble is that so few of us think to do it! So, I'm trying. Dishtowels and cleaning cloths, old clothing and shopping bags, bits of fabric too small to make decent patches...into the mix they shall go.

Cleaned if needed (though I'm not much for chemicals) and tossed in after fermentation, I think. Unless I'm feeling experimental. 'cause, you know, that happens sometimes.

Been reading about the soil industry lately, picked up a new-to-me-term: low value soil-like materials. Paper waste and sand and things. Bulking and structural items, to me, since for nutrients I have bokashi. Seems strange to think of silk or linen as "low value" in any way, but a stained or torn shirt is trash, so, okay.

If we each saved one shirt from the landfill...that'd be a lot of space we didn't use. But I'm selfish, I want a personal benefit. So: if one shirt could replace one gallon of soil in a planter... Yeah, that'd work for me. Soil's expensive, relatively speaking.

Anyone need help cleaning out their closets? -G-

Got K-Cups?

[sorry for the formatting—I'm having blogger issues again. Image from espressoplanet, no connection though I lost some time browsing their offerings.]

Single-serve = more packaging. I know. And K-cups are ridiculously easy to throw away, all neatly packed even after use, while being nearly impossible to dispose of responsibly.

If only they didn't make such good coffee! -G-

So the workplace now has a Keurig. It also has two Solofill reusable filter-cups, but I'm the only one who'll use those; everyone else uses the packaged cups. Before I started agitating for folks to toss their K's into the compost collector [“my worms are hungry! Please feed them your tea bags, fruit peels, etc.”], I figured I'd better make sure the foil-topped plastic cups with coffee and filter inside were, in fact, bucketable.

Turns out...they're not suitable for a standard bokashi bucket. (As a general note to myself for future experiments: Impermeable additions mess with bucket health. Treat separately if at all.) Nor all that desirable for my bucket-alternatives. Even leaving the chemical concerns out of it, plastic in a slow compost pile is never recommended; it will break down into smaller pieces, but not truly degrade. The worms don't appreciate foil, though it isn't enough to make them flee from an otherwise suitable planter, but it takes a surprisingly long while for any worm to get brave enough to wriggle into a cup, and in the meantime, other critters may decide to colonize. Bad enough having to remove slightly degraded plastic cups from your vermicompost, but a cup full of centipedes? Eek! Repulsive doesn't mind them if the foil's torn a bit, and cohabitation's far less of a concern there, but small cups can hold waer, which could stagnate, and then there's the mucky mostly-intact plastic to fish out of the grubbery. Ick. And Ugh.

If you take the foil off the top, the worms are happier, though the other concerns still apply. Sigh. I scrounged a covered tray that would fit half a dozen or so unlidded used K-cups; spritzed EM/AEM/AIM on the UCG and let it ferment for BSF bait or “breath freshener” or compost boosters—nice fermentation, but in order to use the stuff, you still have to separate the organics from the plastic. Let me just say, it's a pain: the filter's glued into place. I resorted to kitchen shears.

And gave up on trying to salvage the organics from them in any organized sense. Hey, I divert my own UCG, isn't that good enough?

...which argument would sit less uneasily on my tongue if not for the fact that the workplace Keurig is actually my personal property, installed there for office use because I could.

Oops.

...and the results are in!

Sorry for the lack of posting lately—oddly for me, I haven't had much to say! -G- Since I was low on pot-fillers and plant-foods, I went back to the processes I knew would work and shelved (most of) the experiments awhile, and “Day fourteen: bucket ready for stage two” doesn't make for interesting posts.

But it occurred to me as I was picking lavender for a fruit salad that I had written something about that plant's rooting medium soon after its potting, with no followup. So...

This is one of the plantings where I used bokashi and shredded office paper, with no additional microbial source and an extra-long curing period during cooler weather. I tossed some exhausted dirt in the bottom of the container, filled it most of the way with the paper-bokashi mix, then dug a small nest into the paper and filled that with decent potting soil, into which I planted a typical four-inch nursery start. About an inch of soil to top. No olla pot in this planter, mostly because I didn't have one ready but also because I wasn't sure the paper would hold one stable. (A later test confirmed that assumption, though it is possible to use the side of the planter as a partial support.)

Call this a very slightly qualified success I cannot currently replicate. It's a little messier than I prefer my container gardening, especially without crockery in the bottom of the planter—a step I gave up on for good when I realized that it might prevent worms from colonizing my plantings. But the muddy deposits around the base of the planter are attractive to wandering worms, many of whom then find their way into the planter, and a larger-than-normal drip tray will retain that nutrient-rich material until it can be tossed back on top or harvested for another planting.

As well as the mess, this method looks like it might require a mid-season addition of potting mix. This isn't an insurmountable problem, but I prefer to avoid mucking about with roots between repottings. The bokashi and paper seem to be decomposing both faster and more completely than I'd anticipated, and there isn't enough soil in the planter to support the plant alone. Next time, I'll add a bit of sand or some other non-nutritive material. Natural fabrics, maybe; they decompose more slowly than paper, and plants root well in them.

Now for the good parts:

No root-burn! Most of the bokashi mixes have to be cured after mixing with potting media, which is fine for more organized gardeners but a trial for me; this material was close enough to neutral pH to be safe for immediate use, and while there was likely a bit of heating, it wasn't enough to register on my low-tech tests, no more an issue than Texas sunlight if the planter was watered adequately for the plant. (A second test suggests that you really don't want to let it dry out even halfway within the first week, though I found no troubles thereafter. I'd try it again, but I'm out of “hoarded” bokashi. For now.)

No long-term odor. There was a faint but present unpleasantness upon emptying the hoarded bokashi, as there often is when emptying a bokashi bucket left to sit awhile—which is why I always do that outside—but it wasn't noticeable an hour after the planting was finished. A soil cover or some other barrier is definitely necessary lest the material attract pests, but with that one small remediation, this seems like it could be used in any outdoor setting.

No additional fertilizer needed. Bokashi's a nice sub-surface slow-release plant food; 'nuff said.

No trash. Convert kitchen waste and junk mail into produce? Sounds great to me. And this method used only “trash” and an EM source, plus a small quantity of soil for the potting, most of that re-used. Cheap and responsible, my favorite kind of technique.

The lavender was one of two plants I potted in this mix, the other being a blood-veined sorrel that's quite stunted in appearance just now. A casual observer might decide it was was overnourished and therefore feels no need to grow—look closely and you'd see signs of my too-frequent harvesting. What can I say? I grow things so I can eat them.

The garden plan having been scuttled by last fall's too-dramatic events, I joined a CSA this year to augment my produce production. Vegetables are packed in shredded paper for transport, so I thought I'd try the same slow-cure method...but it turns out that doesn't work in warmer weather here. No bokashi hoarding in Texas heat!

Maybe in an air-conditioned office?

Definitely worth further trials.

--Until the next,

DSF

[image source: http://dittodoesit.com/2011/02/academy-awards-envelopes-designer/]

Tales from the Bucket: The Stone Soup Bucket

[image from the Florida invasive plants site]

I could work up a serious dislike of chinaberry trees. Actually, it wouldn't take too much work--the fruits are poisonous, the trees sprout like weeds from seed or sucker, and they're nearly as discouraging as walnuts when it comes to plant biodiversity in their immediate vicinity. Granted, their flowers smell nice, but that's not enough to earn their keep.

Before moving to Texas, I had never encountered the term “trash tree.” Until chinaberries and scrub elm, I'd never thought to use it. But chinaberries...well, I suppose they have their place, but there are far too many of them in my limited growing space.

Porch sweepings in this season are mainly those sticky chinaberry fruits with their hard centers, plus a few dried leaves, oak pollen, unripe mulberries, and assorted other detritus. It's not a great mix, and without serious hot-composting or some intervention, the result will have so many chinaberries-in-waiting as to be more trouble than it's worth.

Unless, of course, you're short on composts, funds, and resources altogether. Or are trying to be wholly self-sufficient in anticipation of TEOTWAWKI. Or have hungry grubs to feed...

Repulsive's active laying period has begun, but I don't have all that much to give him just now. He will not eat chinaberry fruits left to decompose where they fall, but put them in a container with a seasoning of bokashi and he'll chow down! And while the fruits are toxic to mammals, they don't seem to bug him one bit. So I swept the porch-fall into a series of flat, stackable containers--shallow dishpans--and added a cup of bokashi'd kitchen waste to each one. Bokashi plus sweepings will self-compost to some degree, though not significantly in this scenario, with so little moisture or pressure. But there is enough moisture for mama layers to consider the mix a decent foodsource, and it turns out the small volume of bokashi I used as a start, plus the occasional addition of a small bit of bokashi juice or anything else in the vinegar range*, is sufficient to keep the grubs happily chomping their way through those fruits and churning the leaves toward their natural end, with the help of EM and other IMOs.

There are already saplings appearing in this mix, so apparently chinaberries don't object to dilute acids and disturbance. But they're easy to uproot now, can be tossed right back in to provide more food for microbes and macros, and if they sprout and die now then the eventual soil amendment will not have tons of saplings. It will have a whole bunch of seeds, but after sprouting they're not nearly so pebble-hard as when they're still encased. Cooked stones are a bit softer, maybe? -G-

Being rather squeamish about Repulsive, I'm still planning on aging the grub mix and/or letting the worms have it, but it looks like it should be usable to a less grub-averse gardener in about two months from sweeping, finished enough to use as container fill for an outside planting without further intervention.

And if you weren't doing retail bokashi, this would still be perfectly feasible; a purely lacto fermentation will attract BSF layers. The current favorite among non-bokashi-ing BSFL “wranglers” seems to be fermented corn. Come to think of it, chinaberries in water might well ferment...

There is one major disadvantage to my stack-of-dishpans set-up--I do not believe Repulsive should be allowed to free-range--but now that I know the chinaberries can be useful, I'll build a case or something. The minor disadvantage, that the relatively open stacks require additional moisture, I consider a trade-off, as the relatively high rate of evaporation means I don't have to drain reservoirs of grub muck. Also, the neighbor's AC unit drips more than sufficient water onto my porch, and unless you're using clay or filters, AC water is not recommended for watering plants, so what else am I going to do with it?

Goes well with the whole something from perceived-nothing idea, too.

Are your grubs awake yet? What are you feeding them?





*vinegar, kombucha, bokashi bran mixed with water, even sauerkraut brine, if it's real kraut.

Project Restart: Hoarding Bokashi

[image from http://www.vendingmachineservices.co.uk/]


No, wait, I mean storing. Holding at a particular point until ready to use. Really. I may be something of a miser when it comes to finished vermicast, but all the other composts, plant foods, and rooting media are there to be used--I'll just make more. (Verne et cie would finish more vermicast, too, but only if I refrained from stealing their vermicompost at earlier stages. Which is unlikely.)


This winter past was unusual even for me, and there came a point when I had a bucket of mature bokashi and no post-bucket plans. No planter towers or Repulsive-and-Verne double-decker to feed; no soil conversion units; not even a bag of dried leaves.


It was not, at that point, cold enough to freeze, or I would have appropriated a filled leaf-and-lawn bag from the curbside pick-up, scooped out enough dry matter to make room for the bokashi, and then set the assembly under the porch until spring. If it had been reliably warmer, I might have stolen some worms back from one of the foster-folks and set up a new tower o'Verne. But winter in Austin being what it is, neither seemed likely to succeed.


Bokashi isn't stable at the point we consider finished. Really, it isn't even finished, though the microbes have (we hope!) wholly colonized the bucketed materials, eaten most of the available sugars, broken down some of the cellulose, and so on. My usual practice is to add different microbes at that point--thermophilic or otherwise--but if you left the bokashi alone in its closed container, it would continue to ferment awhile. After some time, the EM would die off, starved or poisoned depending, and other microbes would emerge.


Remember, bokashi works on a principle of dominance; those other microbes have always been in there, just dormant or incredibly slowed. In the absence of thriving EM, other available microbes suited to the environment take over. Those newly productive microbes might be molds, if the bokashi is on the dry side and has any air coming in, or fungi, but in a standard wettish closed bucket, what you get are the dreaded stink-producing anaerobes. I've done that, and there was no way I was going to risk it again!


But...what if you could balance the environment enough to slow everything down without adding any new elements? The dominant set would still be dominant, right?


I know from past experiments that newspaper works as a carbon source, but does not carry any of the necessary soil-borne microbes to start my usual second-stage composting. As I strongly prefer wholly composted bokashi--using the gardener's definition of the term: a product homogenous in appearance and safe to use as a primary element in potting media, as top-dressing, etc.--I hadn't bothered to do much with paper since determining that. It's useful to balance moisture in a bucket if you've got the volume to spare, won't impede the fermentation unless there's not much moisture to begin with, breaks down well enough once the composting starts but will slow the composting if allowed to clump or used in whole sheets, and there's no real difference between adding it during or after the fermentation. Overall, far inferior to dried leaves as a future-garden item, but since it's free and widely available, I expect it gets used far more in other people's buckets, and since it doesn't carry insect eggs, it's a better choice for indoor tests. (Assuming you've used all your shredded phone books, anyway.)


It might, I thought, serve to wick away just enough moisture to slow fermentation. So I split that one bucket of otherwise homeless mature bokashi between two buckets of hand-shredded paper, sandwiching each non-homogenous glob of ferment in a thick black-and-white nest, weighted one and wrapped both in plastic to ensure no additional airflow.


And then I waited. For months. I would have ended this test at the first sign of failure, of course, but when no such sign came...well, I'm lazy, and I was curious, so I let it keep going rather longer than I had planned. Almost three months in all.


The result is still a non-homogenous glob in a black-and-white nest, the weight creating a damper and more compact upper layer than the other but generally the same. It has a faintly disagreeable odor beneath a still-perceptible vinegar tang, and the pH is so nearly neutral that my standard low-tech tests don't register the difference. The literature isn't as clear on this point as I'd like, but generally tends to imply that this material would be safe to use as a subsurface fertilizer even in contact with roots at this point. To date, I have found exactly nothing about its suitability as a primary component of rooting medium for short-season crops--assuming your chosen additions addressed the stability and airflow concerns--but I figured I'd risk a few Verne-bits and a transplant or two on a real-world trial. So I scattered some vermicompost and dried leaves in the bottom of two planters, dumped my stored bokashi-and-paper atop that, then added a basic potting soil and blood-veined sorrel in one and a worm-seeded mix in the other, with a lavender.


Neither has died yet as of this posting, nor has there been a mass exodus of wrigglers, but at not quite a week from planting it's maybe still too early to say whether or not this is a success*. At least it wasn't a failure as far as the storage goes; and it might be worth trialing a bucket or two of fermentables cut into the retailer-recommended tiny pieces, fermented as usual and then mixed with cross-cut paper and sealed up again, to see how long it takes the pH to normalize that way. The resulting product still won't be as versatile as compost, but smaller bits mean less of an ick factor, and if paper and bokashi alone, in the absence of air, can be used to create a slow-release fertilizer suitable for use with food crops, just imagine how much cheaper start-up gardens might be!

--to be continued in another post, as there are a whole lot of words here and I'm not yet finished babbling. -G-

TTFN,

DSF


*First sighting of Repulsive's winged form this weekend. Not, I am happy to report, in or around either of those test planters. But one never knows what he (she, in this instance, but Repulsive is always male to me)gets up to when I'm not watching.

Time to wake--oh, hai!

Warning: Repulsive image ahead.

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...Still here? Well, at least you've been warned. Me, I had no clue. Took the lid off the rescue-attempt unit, and:




The fire and subsequent clearing destroyed my winterized double-decker BSFL-wormery; these relatively few grubs were all I could salvage, and they were sluggish with chill when I stuck them in their temporary home. Tossed in some food and some leaves so they could choose whether to eat or sleep, and pretty much forgot about them after the week of uninterrupted winter we suffered through this year; there wasn't much insulation in the improvised planter-and-weight assemblage, nor sufficient grub-mass to generate any heat worth considering, and I figured they were all either dormant or dead.

I should know better. Repulsive is as difficult to discourage as any movie-screen monster. (Not that I'm saying he's out for brains--though he would eat them if you offered! It's just that uncounted masses of quickly squirming things like King Ludwig's take on maggots rather irrestibly call cinema horrors to mind. Or is that just me? -G-)

Grub season is still officially two months away, but apparently Repulsive doesn't like naptime.

The Grub That Will Not Sleep. Does Gary Larsen write horror scripts, do you think?

DSF