December 9, 2011
Winter Vermicomposting-12-09-11
I finally decided to finish off my winter vermicomposting bed yesterday afternoon (while my WF-360 was having a “time-out” on the deck – haha) – good thing, too! It ended up snowing quite a bit overnight and this morning.
As you can see, the design is a wee bit different from my usual “worm composting windrows”. Our street was torn up this fall for water main work, and they ended up yanking out a couple of nice railway ties that bordered the entrance to my driveway. I can’t say I was too pleased, initially, to still see them sitting on my driveway when all the work was complete – but it certainly didn’t take me long to come up with a way to put them to good use!
One of the things I found annoying about the windrow beds was their tendency to be messy – it was very easy for materials to fall out while doing any work with them. The ties will serve as a nice retaining wall, making it easier to keep things tidy. I’m confident they will also add some insulation value as well!
The first thing I did was stuff the space between the ties and the windrow with fall leaves.
I then moved back the upper layer of straw and removed a substantial quantity of wormy material from the bed for the purpose of re-stocking the shelving-unit-worm-beds in my basement.
Next, I added a decent quantity of food scraps, along with some leftover squash etc (chopped up) from the garden, before dumping in the older material from my indoor bins and covering with a thick layer of fall leaves.
Lastly, I topped everything off with a nice thick layer of straw…
…before securing my trusty winter windrow tarp over top! (shown in first image above)
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Previous 2011/2012 Winter Vermicomposting Posts
Winter Vermicomposting 2011
Worm Factory 360 | 12-09-11
They say a picture is worth a thousand words.
In this case, most of those words would look something like this: “@#*$!”
😆
So, yeah…it seems my mellow ways have landed me in hot water…UhhhhGAIN! This time with a different little annoying pest. The day after I added the “1.39 lb” of food waste (see “Worm Factory 360 | 12-01-11“), I noticed lots and lots of fruit flies (more than usual – haha) down in the room where I keep the wf-360 – and, sure enough, plenty of them seemed to be hanging out around the bin!
Obviously, I shouldn’t be too surprised! Raising fruit flies on purpose is bound to land you in trouble eventually, right? lol
OK – joking aside, I should explain that the situation isn’t quite as bad as it looks. My Worm Factory 360 isn’t actually sitting out on my deck in sub-freezing weather – well, at least not anymore! I put the bin out there for a period of time yesterday (perhaps a couple of hours) to see if I could kill off the resident fruit flies. I also worked hard to vacuum up as many fruit flies in the house as I could find (LOTS).
All of this has certainly helped, but I think the main problem was that there were still plenty of fruit flies inside the house, and yes – now that the bin is inside and warm again, it seems they have decided to move in….UhhhhGAIN!
Thankfully my wife is used to my shenanigans (and the critters that seem to follow) by now, so it doesn’t look like I’ll sleeping on the deck myself quite yet – but, I do think it’s time to start focusing a bit harder on getting rid of the FFs! Unfortunately, the nematodes just don’t seem to be up to the task of really keeping them under control (hope to write more about this soon) – especially not in an active worm bin – so it’s back to my “multi-pronged” approach I go.
Needless to say, I won’t be adding more food these week! In their defense, the worms have actually done a great job with the food materials in the bin – so the potential fruit fly real estate has certainly been reduced – but nevertheless, I don’t want to push my luck any farther than it’s been pushed.
Will keep everyone posted.
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