Any young ones in the crowd please close your ears. Cardboard is the perfect singles bar for worms. Worms want to be above ground to have sex, to reproduce, but being above the soil makes them easy prey for birds. So cardboard laid on the ground makes the most perfect environment while protecting them. It’s dark, it’s moist, and promotes a free buffet, and there is a good chance Marvin Gaye is playing sexual healing in the background. With every group that visits our farm and education center I share this and it usually gets their attention. I go on to say, “If you remember one thing from this tour, cardboard is the perfect worm food and worm castings are perfect plant food—a beautiful symbiotic relationship.”

Some of you reading this might be experienced small-scale organic farmers questioning techniques that look a lot like conventional agriculture with excessive use of machinery. Others might be new to, or seeking to enter farming with, a connected, sacred relationship to the soil. On the first farm I owned in the 1980s we used tractors. It was “organic” but the pace and lifestyle was not sustainable. On my second farm where we remain today, I wanted to farm where nature led the way over machinery. With proper planning and thinking ahead I have been able to create a no-till system that is successful without machinery and lets nature do more of the work.
[Read more…] about Creating the Worms’ Perfect Single’s Bar

In the beginning

The tomato plant on the left was grown using man made fertilizer in potting soil.
The tomato plant on the right was grown
using vermicompost in potting soil.
Both types were planted and trasplanted to bigger pots at the same time. Notice the difference in the root balls at the end of the season. The root ball on the right was almost twice as big and the root system was much denser with many more of the tiny lateral roots and mycorrhizal fungal filaments.

Growing up I watched and helped my Mother tend her plants. She got a lot of pleasure from working with them and seeing them grow. She loved her flowers, vegetables and planted many, many trees and shrubs. She was just happy if her plants were productive; they never were expected to be outstanding. I don’t re-member her using any type of chemical; she was content to let nature bring her what it may.

When I started gardening I wanted my plants to be all that they could be (like the Army slogan). Advertisements and nice packaging also influenced my deci-sion to use chemicals. They made it seem like it was normal and even required to use their products. I remember I wanted the biggest, most beautiful roses I could grow. So I would spray them with some awful smelling white powdery substance. When the kids were little I was convinced I should fertilize my lawn. One time I was spreading dry lawn fertilizer with a push broadcaster as the kids ran around behind me. Thankfully, a neighbor walking by informed me not to let them run through those chemicals barefoot. I think I was barefoot too. Another time I applied fertilizer to my perennial flowers in late June. When I re-turned from vacation the plants looked awful because there had been no rain and the salts in the fertilizer had dehydrated the plants.
[Read more…] about Worms at the Devine Gardens

Kaylin and Food Know How community composting program cargo cycle volunteer

The benefits both worm castings and compost add to the vitality of our soils is well documented, as is the effectiveness of these methods in processing food waste and reducing landfill. More and more composting practices are being adopted by homeowners, businesses and even written into policy by local govern-ment, but implementing effective programs and engaging a whole community continues to be a challenge. How do you change people’s perceptions and be-haviors around waste? And how do we increase our ability to grow food in ever expanding urban environments? These are the two interconnected challenges that resulted in the “Food Know How” program, a community composting and food waste reduction initiative I helped coordinate during my two years living in Melbourne, Australia. The initiative was developed by a local non profit, Cultivating Community and the City of Yarra council, among other partners. The program aspired to engage 500 residents, 32 businesses and 3 offices in various composting activities that would ultimately provide compost and worm castings to the community. The idea was to ‘close the loop’, using an extremely abundant local resource (food waste) to give fertility to the soil and increase urban res-idents’ ability to provide their own food.

The program was designed to test different composting strategies including food waste collection, large scale composting, worm farming and residential com-posting at home. I came on board as the cafes coordinator to work with local cafes and restaurants and eventually developed a bicycle based food waste collec-tion.
[Read more…] about Worm Farming for the Community a Group Effort to Reduce Food Waste and ‘Close The Loop’

In Chinese traditions the Earthworm is a respected remedy that continues to be employed to this day. Powdered, liquefied or made into an ash (depending on the prescription), the remedy is sourced from two species of worm: Pheretima aspergillum, (family Megascolecidae) and Allolobophora caliginosa trapezoides (family Lumbricidae). Clinically, worm remedies are considered useful for feverish disorders (malaria, typhoid, childhood fevers). They possess anticonvulsant and analgesic properties useful for treating seizures, rheumatic pain and the after-effects of stroke (hemiplegia). Earthworm has been a specific for disorders classified as ‘true heat’ conditions, and its use is contraindicated when these characteristics are not present. Experimentally, Di Long has demonstrated sedative and hypotensive properties. It has been used clinically for the treatment of essential hypertension – with a good rate of success (90%). Its vasodilatory activity was attributed to an effect on the central nervous system (Bensky & Gamble 1986; Yeung 1985).
[Read more…] about Earthworms for Medicine and the Environment

In Mrs. Prunier’s class of fifth graders, magic is happening. On her desk is what we like to call a “black gold” factory. The employees in this factory aren’t hu-mans; they’re worms, Red Wiggler worms.

Black gold is another name for compost. Compost is gold, for the plants. These “employees” have a very important job, making compost. In order for the pro-cess to be successful, the fifth grade is checking on them and feeding them daily in their comfortable worm bin also known as the luxury apartment.
[Read more…] about Red Beauties