July 16, 2010
Vermicomposting Pancakes!
Friday is “Daddy-Daughter Day” at the Christie household – the one day during the week when my (almost) three year old stays home from daycare and hangs out with ol’ pops (and often “grandpa” in the afternoon). This time of year it’s always fun to get outside to “play” in the yard, while I try to sneak in a bit of garden/worm maintenance, but today, I thought it might be fun (and different) to do the Worm-Head’s version of “arts and crafts”!
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This post is definitely dedicated to our good buddy Larry Duke, since he provided the inspiration with his recent Vermi-Pizza video! Rather than being TOO much of a copycat, I thought it might be fun to try some other recipes instead (haha). It just so happened that we had some oldish apples and blueberries in the fridge, basically just waiting to be added to my food scrap collection (some people collect stamps and coins – I collect food scraps!) – so pancakes seemed like a natural choice!
After “good ol’ pops” chopped up the apples (along with some watermelon, and old baby carrots for good measure), I got my daughter involved. She loves to “help daddy”, and seems to appreciate daddy’s “wormies”, so needless to say she was pretty fired up about the opportunity to “help daddy makes yummy pancakes for the wormies”!
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Start ’em young, I say…start ’em young!
Once we had a lot of cardboard fairly well shredded, I put it into a larger tub and we added some rainwater.
It was still a pretty sloppy mix, so I thought it could benefit from having some coco coir mixed in as well. It took some time to pry apart the wet coir brick and get everything broken up and mixed together, but we persevered! We ended up with what could have been the starting place for a very nice batch of homemade manure! It was definitely time to make up some pancakes!
I transferred some of the cardboard/coir mix over to a mixing bowl containing some of the fruit melange, and then, as per Larry’s recommendation, I poured in some cornstarch to (hopefully) act as a binding agent.
Once the batter was ready, all we had to do was smoosh the material into pancakes (OK, so they definitely look more like “home burgers”! haha).
It was getting close to lunch time, and the thrill of vermi-pancake making seemed to be waning in my daughter’s mind, so I decided to call it a day and put our little batch of flap jacks out on the deck to dry a bit.
On my own, I ended up adding the rest of the fruit mix and a fair bit of cornstarch to the rest of the cardboard/coir, and pressed it all down to make a sort of fruit cake (just like me!). This was also put out on the deck in the sun.
I am quite curious to see 1) if these “cakes” are going to hold together at all, and 2) what the worms will think of them once they are dried out then re-hydrated.
Perhaps this might be a way to make up and store large quantities of homemade manure mix without worrying about it decomposing “too much”.
Anyway, I will be sure to keep everyone posted! Thanks again to Larry for the inspiration. We definitely had a lot of fun – and I know the worms are going to enjoy the nice feast we prepared for them!
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Worm Inn Tomato Garden-07-16-10
I thought it might not be a bad idea post a quick update on my hanging “Worm Inn Tomato Garden” today. I am happy to report that the tomato plant seems to be doing fairly well, and we even have a ripe fruit already. As was the case with the other hanging tomato garden (which is also doing quite well), there was an initial period of decline – likely due to the stress associated with being flipped upside down after being grown to a decent size in a normal manner. The next time I do this, I will definitely start with small healthy plants and see if that makes a difference.
There seems to be a LOT of worms in the Worm Inn garden, and the level of material inside has been going down a fair bit. I have added one bag of old green tomatoes (diced) from last year, but have otherwise not added any food scraps. The worms seemed to appreciate the gooey rotten tomatoes, even though they started to stink and grew a nice coating of mold (I didn’t really bury them very well) – I decided to spread them around a bit just to be safe.
The other day I topped up the system with a nice thick layer of rotten straw mixed with old goat manure that happened to be sitting in one of my backyard composters. I think this will help to ensure that the worms continue to have a nice habitat zone, even with the tomato roots continuing to encroach on their space. One of the things I’ve noticed about the bucket systems is that the tomato roots basically take over the entire vessel, likely making it next to impossible for a populations of worms to live in there as well. I think the worms are doing better in my big box systems though (will provide an update on those soon) since there is more space for them, and I have created a habitat/food zone for them near the surface in the middle of the beds.
I am definitely interested to see how the Worm Inn tomato plant grows from here. While certainly looking nice and healthy, both hanging garden plants are still quite a lot smaller than most of the other Tomatoberry plants I have growing in various containers and beds.
Will provide another update in a couple of weeks or so!
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