This time of year, for those of us in the dry-summer parts of the country, we hold our breath for rain, for cooler nights and better sleep.

I wonder if we can exhale, even before that relief comes. I hope we can.

This is part of year, as much as any other part. With all the gifts of the cycle and the scale we’re living in. It’s tempting to want to be in a different part of the seasons, or growing at a different scale— to jump to that better time or place in our minds. I often chat with people who discuss how limited their growing is because of time, space, resources. Without downplaying the real limitations of our environments, one key to growing is appreciating whatever unique gifts our environment provides.

You may well value a single beautifully-grown lettuce much more than I do, because despite my best intentions, I take certain things for granted growing at the scale we do. Or you may be growing at a much larger scale, and enjoy that you are growing key staple crops for your community or the world.

While I may not be able to see and appreciate the blessings of smaller scale growing, there are blessings of our scale, as well: While I sometimes fantasise about larger scale farming, I relish the fact that I can do a little bit of everything on our farm, that I can bear witness to all the ways things fit together. I can still be a little bit impractical.

There are special gifts to your scale, as well, even in this moment of heat and drought.

Worms 101

I received a question about worms and thought I’d spend a few minutes listing out a few top tips, recognising a lot depends on the scale and the goal. A few points are restructured from last week, so that if you forward this on to friends they have last week’s info as well.

• For small spaces, worms can be a good choice, but you need a large system for an average family’s kitchen waste. E.g. If you have family of 3 or more, a classic worm tower and eat a lot of food from scratch, you will probably have too much waste for the worms to consume.

• If worms are overfed, the environment attracts rats. Rats can eat through hard plastic. They are not fun.

• If worms are overfed, the environment becomes overly acidic and burns the little worms bodies. Not good.

• If worms are overfed, the environment can become very wet and anaerobic— again not a good environment for worms.

• Worms can eat anything, the key is never feeding them more than they can eat in a week. Yes, they can eat acidic foods/meat/etc, they just need to be able to retreat to cardboard if the acidic foods become a bit much.

• Worms don’t have teeth. The smaller/softer the pieces of food they’re eating, the easier it’ll be for them to eat it. You can increase the capacity of a relatively small worm system by soaking, blending or chopping waste up.

• Worms need bedding. You add waste to the middle of a large nest of bedding, and cover with more bedding, so that it is always their choice to go for the food. The bedding in the long term will be worm castings. In the short term, it can be moistened carbonaceous material of any kind- cardboard, newspaper, straw, sawdust, leaves- whatever you have freely available.

• An intermediary fermentation stage, in a sealed bucket, can also help bridge the capacity gap. If you have a small space, you can find a friend who is willing to take your excess waste. It doesn’t need to go to landfill. Our farm is willing to receive kitchen waste and cardboard.

• Worms can live on carbon, so you can feed them moist cardboard, and they can retreat to the cardboard if your kitchen waste volume is too high.

• Get a second worm tower OR add layers to your 3-tier OR a bathtub, and a lot of worms. If worms are too expensive to buy bulk outright, consider your first year to be a stage or worm breeding and building capacity, and gradually build up until you have sufficient worms to handle your waste and supply you with compost. Worms multiply quickly!

The compost:

• Vermicastings is pure worm poop. It tends to be relatively low in volume, but unparalleled in quality when it comes to good bacteria.

• You can remove worms from the compost by hand, or by stopping feeding in a particular spot, and allowing the worms to migrate naturally out before you harvest. Worm sorting is a very fun group activity. Seriously. It’s great.

• Small amounts of castings go a long way, but you don’t have to worry about burning plants with too much vermicastings. Their nutrients are stable and the compost has tremendous water carrying capacity.

• If you want to multiply the positive impact of vermicastings, create worm tea. Worm tea is aerated (stirring or with a small bubbler), and can be produced by placing a handful of castings in a bucket (with or without a permeable bag) for about 24 hours, with sugar/molasses for extra energy for the microbes.

• The water that collects at the bottom of worm systems is not worm tea, it is leachate. It tends to not be oxygenated, particularly if it’s been sitting. If your worm system is healthy and doesn’t have a lot of undigested/rotting food, you can create a version of worm tea by pouring water/leachate through your worm system 2-3 times, then immediately diluting and applying to your plants. The probability of disease-causing bacteria is higher with this approach, but as long as you’re not pouring directly on leafy greens, you are very unlikely to consume disease-causing bacteria.

Workshops

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