Winter Worm Windrow–03-08-10
Garbage can full of old lettuce – the worms should enjoy this!
On Friday, my worms got a nice treat in the form of 60-70 lb of old lettuce (just a guesstimate) that my dad picked up for me at the local food bank.
I haven’t been feeding these worms as often as I had hoped (a lot of my own food waste is being diverted into other systems, such as the Worm Inn), so I was quite pleased to receive an email from my contact at the food bank last week. They don’t end up with all that much in the way of perishable worm-friendly food materials, but I’ve been more than happy to take it off their hands whenever they do!
I was originally planning to chop the lettuce up quite a bit before adding it to the bed (to help speed up the decomposition process), but didn’t end up having enough time to do so. No biggie though – I’m sure it won’t take long for the material to produce a nice microbial buffet for the worms to munch on!
Adding the lettuce to the bed simply involved pulling away a bunch of straw/hay from the top, dumping it in, then covering it up.
We’ve had many sunny (and rather mild) days as of late so I think my only concern at this point is that I might end up overheating the system. Unfortunately, my indoor temperature monitor doesn’t seem to be receiving accurate readings from the probe buried in the bed, so I will definitely need to do some manual readings this week (not a big deal, since I want to check on things anyway).
I’ll definitely keep everyone posted!
Written by Bentley on March 8th, 2010 with
3 comments.
Read more articles on Winter Composting.
Bentley
#1. March 9th, 2010, at 1:58 AM.
How do you plan to harvest worms come spring time with so much material mounded up? What are you going to do with all the unused material (which looks 2-3ft deep)? What do you think about adding green manure to heat up your winter windrow? I think you have a great site! Keep up the good work!