Mishaps and memories in a tropical wonderland. Currently I am focusing on increasing my worm population and their yield of vermicompost so that I can use the humus to improve my garden soil and as soil blocks for my seedlings. This blog will follow my experiments in the garden and is open to questions and suggestions. Enjoy!
About a week and a half ago I was starting to get some fruit flies interested in my worm bin. Since the trays aren't deep enough to cover the newly added kitchen scraps with enough bedding to keep the fruit flies out, I've been looking for other means to deter them by. I happened upon some fresh coconut husk that I decided to pull apart and add to the top of my tray as extra bedding since worms like coconut coir. Turns out it does a good job of minimizing fruit fly activity. As it breaks down and more items are added on top, it also provides excellent aeration.
UPDATE JAN. 24, 2010: The shredded coconut husk helped for a week or two, and then the fruit flies learned how to navigate through it.
This past sunday, I embarked on a desperate mission to eradicate the extremely invasive New Zealand Mud Snail.
According to the Center for Invasive Species Research in Riverside, California, the color of the snail shell is variable, and can range from gray and dark brown to light brown. The snail is usually 4-6 mm in length in areas that have been invaded, but snails can grow to almost twice this size, up to 12 mm, in New Zealand where populations are much lower. New Zealand mud snail is a nocturnal grazer that feeds on plant and animal detritus, algae, and diatoms. Invasive populations have an unusual mode of reproduction. New Zealand mud snails can reproduce asexually and female snails are born with developing embryos inside them. Consequently, all populations consist of genetically identical clones. In New Zealand, native mud snail populations consist of sexually reproducing populations (the males make up less than 5% of the populations) and asexually reproducing females. Each snail can produce around 230 offspring a year, and reproduction typically occurs during the spring and summer.
Snails can live for 24 hrs without water, and for up to 50 days on damp surfaces. The snail is . . . tolerant of estuarine conditions and can live at depths of up to 45 m on solid and silty substrates. Once introduced into a new area, New Zealand mud snails can reach densities exceeding 500,000 per square meter. (http://cisr.ucr.edu).
Upon my discovery as to what the snails in my bin were, I set to figuring out how to get rid of them. After discussing things on a couple of different forums, I decided that the only way would be to get rid of all of my bedding, wash my bin with the hottest water I could stand, and rinse off my worms and cocoons the best that I could. Then I put them in fresh bedding and left them alone for several days. The best way to kill the snails is to put them in salt water, so I took all of my contaminated bedding and dumped it in salt water and then disposed of it.
Today I checked my worms to make sure that I did have a few at least, that survived the stress. They were happily munching away on the rotting food and bedding I had provided for them. Hopefully there are no remnants left of the snails so I won't have to put my worms through that again.
Today I made a worm farm for my daughter. The idea was from a book with kid's crafts. It is a jar with a layer of sand, a layer of potting soil, another layer of sand and another of soil and then the worms and compost with aged leaves on top. Am hoping to teach her about what worms do and to allow myself the opportunity to observe them a little bit closer. I just it in a dark place and kept the lid off so that it can stay aerated. The sand I used was from the beach that I flushed several times with fresh water. Below is a time lapse of the worm farm taken over a period of one month.
Today I invaded my worm bin trays on a mission. Since I learned this week that papaya seeds are very bad for my worm population, I decided that I had no other choice than to pull out all of the seeds. I quickly realized that was a hopeless task. There were papaya seeds everywhere, and very difficult to distinguish in all of the vermicompost. After a few minutes, I changed my strategy. I was going to have to extract the worms and worm eggs instead!
After sifting through the two trays which had papaya seeds in them and placing the worms and eggs in a different tray, I dumped the contaminated vermicompost and bedding into my husband's compost bin.
Fortunately, there were many fresh eggs and newly hatched worms, so I was able to save my worm population from an impending sterilization even though the seeds had been in there for several weeks.
Hopefully the transition won't shock them too much and they'll go back to eating, pooping and procreating soon!
What is the one thing you're not supposed to feed your vermicomposting worms? Sure, there are several things which aren't beneficial to the system, but what item can actually be quite damaging to your worm farm? Papaya seeds. Worms love the flesh and the rinds, but the seeds can cause them to become sterile. The seeds don't decompose for a very long time and continually leech a toxin into the bin which causes the worms to lose their virility. Which means, if you're not careful, your worm population could die off.
So the next time you throw your papaya into the bin, be sure to remove those seeds first. Incidentally, if you live in the right climate, they can be quite easy to sprout and grow trees from.
One more tidbit to remember, when feeding your worms, be sure to mix up the type of food you give them, if you constantly give them a lot of wet, fleshy foods, it is possible that the bin will become too wet which makes it all to susceptible to unfriendly conditions for your trusty little red friends. Include scraps of dryer items regularly as well to help keep a balanced moisture level in your bin.
When I left for vacation a few weeks ago, I assumed that I would need to buy another pound of worms upon my return because there were precious few that I found when I was transferring the contents from my homemade bin to my Gusanito bin. In a last ditch effort not to lose my last few Indian Blues, I put some papaya rinds and seeds in the bottom two trays which also had a lot of newspaper bedding and hoped for the best.
Two weeks later...
As soon as I got home from the airport I opened up my bin and to my surprise my two bottom trays were teeming with happy wigglers! There must have been several eggs hatch during my absence. It was expected to see them acclimatize to their new environment so rapidly.
Before I went on vacation (pre-papaya). Incredibly, my original bin looked like this for many months despite several feedings. There was very little decomposition and my worms began to slowly die off. So, I determined to by a decent bin, and it's made all the difference in the world as you will see in the pictures below.
This is what my bin looked like when I got back home. Unfortunately by the time I took this picture, I had already opened the bin up a couple of times so most of the worms had already burrowed down. But you can see that all of the food scraps I had left are gone. After taking this picture I added some more papaya and avocado rinds.
One week later.
Evidently, worms love papaya because it doesn't take them long to turn it into lovely compost. And lucky for me, I have two papaya trees in my yard which have born very well this year.
Part of the reason that the worms began to flourish, is not only because the Gusanito bin eliminated the pest problems I was having (slugs and lots of coqui frogs) and improved the aeration and compartmentalization, but also because I wasn't opening up the bin and disturbing them as often. It's also more pleasant for me, because now my digging down into the vermicompost most likely won't result in the unpleasant discovery of a centipede (which was a fair possibility in my previous bin). The key is that a healthy bit of neglect provided the opportunity for them to make themselves comfortable in their home, but they were not abandoned to the point where they would have been forced to go and forage for food elsewhere.
LESSON LEARNED: Keep your worms fed, but don't become another one of their common pests.
The worms are going up and down through the holes in the tray bottoms. They are looking for a nice place to make a nest. The bottom tray is too hot due to the fresh food I put in there a couple of nights ago, the second tray has a lot of coffee grinds (but I did spy a worm swimming its way through them!) and the tray above that has food that is nicely composing and doesn't look like food anymore, but doesn't resemble castings quite yet either. That tray is currently the most habitable tray for them I believe.
I bought my original batch of worms about 2 months ago, and I don't have many castings yet, just bits here and there. It is exciting to see everything transform, I can't wait to see how the next few weeks go!
The aspiration of Firefly Gardens is to help make people more aware of vermicomposting, it's benefits and how easy it is to do. Hopefully others will find the information found here to be inspirational and helpful by learning from my experiences in worm farming. Although the majority of the blog centers on raising worms and creating compost, there will also be other helpful information about gardening and homesteading.
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