Watering with worm castings - 2024 07 26

 

South end of east boulevard garden received a watering with worm castings.

Yesterday I extracted another 10 to 15 gallons of worm castings from my 10 bins. I'm estimating based on pulling 10 handfuls from each bin to make room for new food and bedding mix.

I still had at least this much worm castings left from my last two extractions so I decided to use them up by watering every plant in the garden with a mix of water and worm castings. I would fill a 2 gallon bucket 1/2 full with worm castings and then top up the bucket with water. Using a small saucepan, I would stir up the water mixture and pull a four cup measure from the bucket and pour it at the base of the plant. Using this method, I used up all the worm castings and watered all the garden bags, the food plant beds, the raspberry canes, the in ground flower plantings along the house, and the transplants in the indigenous boulevard bed.

This south end of the east boulevard has never done well. When it was grass, the grass was never in very good shape. When I sowed clover, I had a patchy result. I thought the indigenous planting would do better because it would be used to growing in an understory, but these plants have not flourished, although they are surviving. This month I am going to try feeding worm castings and carrying out a more diligent watering program. We will check back in at the end of August and see if there was any improvement.

In the meantime, I have been sorting out my worm farming method and starting to settle on a routine. 

Worm bedding - brown compost - a combination of super-heated compost soil from the city (nice texture, no microorganisms), coffee chaff from the local coffee roaster, cardboard recycled from Amazon orders

Worm food - green compost - a combination of old alfalfa pellets (originally purchased to use as garden mulch, but they had too many seeds, now a bit moldy), chopped up vegetation from the garden (this time I added lettuce plants that had gone to seed), rabbit droppings and bedding (we get a 2 gallon bucket once a week from our friend with pet rabbits)

I soak the cardboard for at least 24 hours to make sure it is soggy and pull off as much tape as I can that comes loose from soaking.

Worm bins - medium sized mortar mixing tub

Each worm bin is made up of two tubs - the bottom tub is intact, the insert tub is aerated with holes drilled in the bottom to allow for excess moisture to drip out and to allow air to circulate

The mixture of bedding forms a base layer. The food mixture is added on top and then covered with a layer of soaking wet cardboard. The food mixture and wet cardboard adds moisture to the bin. I have been finding the layer of bedding and castings is staying nice and moist without watering the bin.

During this recent heat spell, I noticed the cardboard layer was getting dried out while the bedding and food stayed moist underneath. I am experimenting with some kind of waterproof cover that will allow for air circulation but trap moisture evaporating off the top of the bin.

These are my basic components for the worm bins. 

In the worm barn, I am using 2 and 3-step step ladders so I can stack the bins and take up less floor space. 

I have been thinking about how worms live in the wild. Whenever I move my outdoor compost bins or garden bags, which are heavy, underneath I find healthy worm activity. That tells me that they are not getting their airflow from above. The soil underneath is full of worm tracks. The soil is usually moist. This tells me that the worms create a habitat under heavy stationary objects on the ground that provides for air circulation and retention of moisture.