I wanted to post a quick update on my most recent “Homemade Manure” project. As you may recall, I chopped up a bunch of zucchinis and mixed them with my stove-pellet-alfalfa-cube homemade manure mix.
I had originally planned to wait a week or so before starting to use the mix – but as it turned out the zucchini ended up breaking down quite quickly, and I started putting the new HMM to good use a matter of days after creating it.
What’s cool about this mix is that even when it gets a bit sloppy and anaerobic (some rainfall + water released from zucchini contributed to this) it doesn’t seem to get really foul. I actually ended up adding some of the anaerobic stuff to various systems and it seemed to become aerobic, and loaded with worms very quickly!
In my VB48 – one of multiple badly neglected systems – I actually added it over top of some chopped up comfrey (partially broken down by that time), and when I checked back a day or two later, the area was just teeming with worms!
I also added it to my Euro stacking system and again, the worms have been going crazy for it (below shows a before and after). It actually seemed to draw a LOT of worms up from lower trays, which is very cool. Perhaps this could be a way to get your worms to migrate more readily in a stacking bin?
I mentioned my “multiple neglected systems” above. The good news is that I should have updates for all of them very soon!
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Pureed watermelon brings the worms up pretty quickly too
Cool tip, John – thanks for sharing!
Hi Bentley.
I was not sure where to post this so i think this is a good a place as any as it is sort of related.
I have been receiving food scraps from neighbors (all good stuff) for some time now. Recently i have been getting them in tied compostable carrier bags.
Any idea how long they will take to compost in my (outside) worm bin. I would hate to put them in and find out they take years to degrade and have to take them out when i need to harvest.
Many thanks.
Chris