Notes From Zone 4

After almost a week of waiting, all three blooms on my amaryllis are open. I’m still giving all the credit to the worm casting tea. I don’t follow any of the rules for caring for this, such as an enforced period of dormancy, and still, this is my third year of happy blooms, so I

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We’ve been going slow on adding garbage to give the worm population time to build up, but we seem to be okay now. We’ve got the second bin about half full of garbage, and it’s just squirming with worms. We also got a quart of worm tea for the houseplants. The first bin still has a bunch of worms in it, which is good because the coir bedding that came with the bin still has a lot of decomposing to do. I suspect we didn’t add enough garbage, because that seems to be gone. I’m taking this as meaning that we can now start putting all our garbage in there, which is great since it means I won’t have to go out to the compost pile in the snow. The downside seems to be the flies. They’re there there, and the manual for the composter pretty much implies they’re a normal feature. Oh well.

I haven’t been too happy with our worm bins. (From Magic Worm Ranch). The drain seems to stop up, the worms don’t seem to thrive, and harvesting the worm castings takes an hour or so of manually fishing out worms. After looking around, I bought a Worm Factory from Composters.com. It’s a five bin tower. You keep putting kitchen scraps and roughage (shredded paper for us) into the top bin. Hopefully by the time you get all five bins filled the worms have finished with everything yummy in the bottom bin, and moved on. So you empty the bottom bin and make it the top. Meanhile, there’s a reservoir with a spigot in the base, which accumulates the worm tea. We harvested the existing bins, getting a couple gallons of castings and just shy of a pound of worms which went into the new bin. I’ve got high hopes that this setup will work better.

We finished the compost bins today. We made pretty quick progress, actually. From bags of coffee grounds to finished compost bin, hopefully brewing away, in two days. And the best part, according to my Yankee Husband, is that we didn't spend a penny. All made from scraps in his wood pile, which never seem to get any smaller. I layered the coffee grounds with alternating layers of leaves and wood ash, and Frank hauled over some of our mulch pile with some dirt, to try to jump start it. I feel like I need to add something else, but I'm not sure what. We only half filled one bin, though the temptation to get some more from the coffee shop is very strong. Maybe next week.