One of the perks of plugging away at a website for a number of years, and building up your audience, is that you end up connecting with lots of interesting people and being presented with a variety of interesting opportunities. Once such “opportunity” which recently fell into my lap was an offer from “High Caliper Growing Systems” to test out one of their “Compost Sak” fabric composting bags. As it turns out, they ended up sending me TWO to play with, so I am pretty stoked about the situation!
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Needless to say, one of my compost saks will be used as a vermicomposting system. I’m curious to see how effective these bags are when used in this manner. My suspicion is that it will work very well since there is lots of room (they claim more than 100 gallons) and everything should remain well oxygenated. I think it will be even MORE fun to combine compost tumbling with Compost Sak vermicomposting, so this is likely where a lot of my tumbler “gold” will end up over the next couple of months.
What I’d like to do with my other Compost Sak is turn it into a potato tower! Some may recall that I didn’t have much success with my last potato tower attempt, but I’m pretty sure the problem was that I was trying to get the plants to grow well in an active vermicomposting system. Clearly, some types of crops do a lot better in that sort of environment than others! This time, while I’ll certainly be using lots of vermicompost in my soil mix, I won’t be trying to maintain a population of Red Worms.
Anyway – as always, I will be sure to keep everyone posted!
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Looks like that gizmo would be handier than sleeves in a vest…I’m betting that it would work very well.
Bentley, your enthusiam is highly contagious. Please keep infecting as many people as you can and don’t ever lose that enthusiam…It always makes me smile and want to continue preaching the VC Gospel…
Out of curiousity, what fabric is the bag made of?
Also, I think ya need some more cute kid pics on the website.The little ones grow up so fast…
Mrs. Ortman’s worm bin has been passed on to Mrs. Swininger to keep over the summer. I am happy to report the worms are doing well in her laundry room. ( I smuggled them some Purina worm chow this evening)
Have a great weekend!
Speaking of sacks.
Whatever happened to the winning Worm-Inn-Mega? How is that product moving?
This looks like a great composter. Was looking at these about a month ago
at my local nursery. Thought about doing the same and putting worms in it. The problem I saw with it was when it gets full, how would you get the compost out without disturbing the worms? This was the only “con” i Icould think of. If you cut a small door on the bottom side, How would you be able to close it back up to keep compost from falling out and Keep the four legged critters from getting in and chowing on the worms. Tipping it over
and dumping it out is the only way. That is a lot of sorting and sepperating
worms from the vermicompst.
JOHN – thanks for the kind words, as always! The “Sak” seems to be made from some sort of heavy duty landscape fabric (a thick felt essentially).
As for the kids, I was hoping to snap a picture of Adaia in the sak so as to provide some perspective (actually tried doing some self shots with the timer but it didn’t work out so well – LOL), but she is staying at her aunts place for a few days so I’ll have to be patient!
Glad to hear that the school worms are being taken care of over the summer!
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TED -Great question. Reminds me that I never did get that update post up as I had planned! Unfortunately, things kinda fell off the rails with the Worm Inn Mega project. Jerry wasn’t able to find/build a stand that was able to withstand the weight of a full Mega Inn. Not sure if he has continued to look into this or if it’s on the backburner. I’ll certainly let people know if I learn anything new.
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JEFFERY – What I will likely do is just keep adding stuff over time, and then simply let it sit for awhile once it is basically full. At some point I will then dump it out and separate the worms from the vermicompost using my “turbo light harvesting method”. This is why it would be nice to have two or three of them so you could start on another one while you wait for the first one to finish.
What a cool idea! Do you have any thoughts on winterizing or bringing this indoors?
I’d also like to echo John’s comments on your site. I really appreciate all that you do and all of the information you share. :).
lol I just fineshed harversting compost and thought why not use this smart pot for a new worm bin . I currently have a 30 gallon smart pot bought. Then second guesed myself and went with a polypropylene reusable bag. My main reason for this was I have now why of collecting the tea and feel this could become problem. was intriged to see you already had a post about these smart pots. I was even thinking of making a worm bin in this 30 gallon smart pot and then transplanting a tomato plant in to grow. I would then need to grow inside as I live in nevada and fear the heat would kill my worms. any ideas on this
ANNA – While I’m sure it COULD be brought indoors, you’d almost certainly need some sort of catch tray underneath it, and I’m not really sure you’d want it sitting in a puddle of drainage liquid (guess you could prop it up on a false bottom of some sort).
P.S. Thanks also for the kind words!
🙂
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SHANNON – Not sure what you mean by not having any way to collect tea (or why this might be a problem). Using a compost sak in Nevada would likely require a shady location and lots of watering. I suspect that these systems offer excellent evaporative-cooling.
Hey, sorry I’m a few years late…but have been composting for sometime and just looking into this Compost Sak as an alternative to the piece of junk plastic tumbler that I currently have…so how did the compost sak end up working? I live in Chicago and am worried that this will be a source of food for our already over populated city rat problem. How did your experiment go with and without worms?
thanks for feedback on this system.