Some of you may recall the neighborhood pumpkin raid I went on last year. I ended up with a pretty good haul, and my worms were undoubtedly impressed with the wonderful feast laid before them!
🙂
Well, unfortunately I haven’t really had time to do something similar this year, so I was pretty happy when Larry D emailed me to tell me about his own (2010) pumpkin pick-up! I think he might have still been feeling some glow from the nice words I shared about him in the the book when he decided to start carving some of them! Haha
This was a craigslist find for free. I literally thought I could help this lady out. She has five sites in town. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera on the table. When I got there, there was literally a semi trailer full still left. I contacted someone else, who was going to try and contact the food bank! Imagine a semi load x five going to a landfill! But I know every year I got a pumpkin supply!
I call this “The RWC Great Pumpkin Patch” composting experiment! I made some crude Jack-o lanterns,that I filled with dry horse manure with bedding. It should be interesting to see if the worms climb in them, or wait for them to collapse. I will keep the manure topped off, so the worms can live inside when they start breaking down. This isn’t one just any one should try. These are 30 pound pumpkins, I would guess. And I actually cut up two more and divided that between this and other bins. I picked up 30 pumpkins total. So that was some mega weight. I’ll snap a photo here and there on their progress! Happy worm Halloween!
Thanks again, Larry!
8)
One word about a bad experience from last year. ‘SEEDS’. Don’t just toss in the pumpkin whole with the seeds. They are chock full of seeds that will germinate and sprout in your worm bin. Toss the seeds out, and feed the meat to the worms.
Thanks for mentioning this, Don
Larry actually sent me a follow-up with info re: what he was going to do with the seeds. Hopefully he will chime in and let us know.
8)
I enjoy the pumpkin sprouts in my bin. It gives me something useful to do when I have the urge to futz with my bin. This year I also had 20 fully mature pumpkins off of the pumpkin vine that volunteered from my VC.
Here it is…
Hmmm…now that was supposed to have a picture attached. (Technical advice, Bentley???)
Dang nabbit – that picture adding feature is annoying!!! LoL
Let’s see if this works…
[img]https://www.redwormcomposting.com/images/anna-pumpkin.jpg[/img]
Hope I got the right one, Anna!
Thanks! That is ONE pumpkin volunteer :).
Bentley,thanks for the big honorable mention in your book.It means a lot to my family!
Now i just want to mention that this can be dangerous.Luckily,i can still count to ten! But i hope maybe some of you might just enjoy a laugh or two.Maybe i just find my antics amusing.
I just posted this video on youtubehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Z3KU6I5ro
It shows what i do to amuse myself.Just be careful trying some of my antics! I’ve been playing around for a long time.So i hope i can say i am a professional.Don’t try this at home!
Most of our compost goes out on the garden beds, so I don’t mind a few random seedlings. Often a few cantaloupe seeds end up in the worm bin, and inevitably sprout. I just pull them up, expose the root to air, and it goes back into the bin as more worm food. Seeds that pop up in the garden get the same treatment. I just bury them under the mulch after they’ve shriveled some.
If you have pumpkin seeds, eat them! You can also dry them and dye them for kids art projects, too.
Gotta love those left-over pumpkins. My coworkers & my wife’s coworkers are all donating a bunch to my “feed the worms” campaign.
Larry, I think your antics are great!
Sorry the link didn’t work.Maybe it is trying to tell me my sense of humor is bad!HEHE! Try this link!
http://vermicomposters.ning.com/video/pumpkin-grinding-through-my?xg_source=activity
Here is another one on pumpkin carving for worms! HeHe!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDBIjhy6O50
Hope it works. Me and computer are like oil and water sometimes.Or maybe i spilled some on my computer!
I reckon i should learn how to post links in one post.Hey at least it adds to the comment total! May show up on some rankings somewhere,so i don’t finish in last place!He He!
Any way! This one shows how i am pre-rotting the remaining pumpkins in two separate horse manure piles.Once the horse manure is hot composted,i don’t worry about wetting it until i feed it to my worms.This may be a bad approach.But the worms don’t seem to care!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzz0YFiLwlg
Larry, I’ll bet your worms will love the ground-up pumpkins!
I’ve got a 5 tray stackable plastic bin in my garage. The garage is about 50 degrees right now & the internal bin temp is about 65…How much will the pumpkin heat up the bin?…I’m still kinda new at this & don’t want to kill my herd by over feeding
Not just anyone should go this overboard.Burying will add heat.But if you leave this much stuff uncovered,you will get a swarm of various flies.Mine is outside.I even leave large pots of rice exposed.If i bury it,it will get really hot! But my worms have plenty of room to move out of the way.And i have loads of worms.Don’t overfeed your worms! It could be bad!
Leaving it uncovered lets out the heat.But lets in massive flies.I will try some flytrap designs next year!
As a side note.The RWC letters already have worms under them.The C pumpkin is tilting backwards.I may correct that one.It tells me there is a bunch of worms on the backside of it.
Another neat thing i found is, you can make wafers by grinding seeds and pumpkin meat.Then pouring it on dry manure bedding to extract the water.Not sure what i will call them? Maybe a Pumpkin Newton? HEHE!
Larry…Thanks for the info…The majority of my pumpkin stash is going in a very large compost pile (30′ x20’x 6′) to which I’m going to add a bunch of worms. I’ll freeze a bunch for my worm bin too.
Larry, I just read the portion of Bentley’s book about you. You are an inspiration to us all, I salute you, dear.