We have a real opportunity now that we have consolidated into one home, to do more of the sustainable stuff that I have been wanting to do. I am always conscious of the waste that we produce, be it the left over half a sandwich from our son’s school lunch, or the paper bag the mushrooms came home in, all the egg shells that we have each day and tea bags, left over rice and pasta and the list goes on and on and on. When we were living in two homes I would sometimes make the decision to take the waste from the resort and bring it to the chooks or compost heap at the house, but so often my trip was not that straight forward resulting in watermelon skins souring in the heat of my car while I attend a meeting or banana skins permeating every nook and cranny of the upholstery with their pungent smell, YUK!
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| Containers for the Worm Food and Chook Food. |
So now I have two plastic containers surreptitiously placed on the kitchen bench, labeled for either worms/compost or chicken feed. This is working quite well too now that we have half a dozen chookies they are always up for a treat as they graze in the backyard of an afternoon, and the worm farm is teaming with slithery little fertiliser factory workers who previously I couldn't keep enough food up to.
A couple of Christmases ago I ask for a worm farm as a present and happily set it up in a shady corner of the veggie garden. I then had to go and buy worms, which was quite expensive I might add, but I hadn't realised that just any type of worms wouldn't do the trick, you had to have specific composting worms. I named the worms Neeble, after the talking variety on Men In Black the movie, so each day when I talk to them I picture them lazing back on a carrot top smoking, drinking coffee and talking back to me.
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| The Neebles from the Men in Black Movie. |
So each day I go and feed my Neebles with the left over peelings, scraps, paper, tea bags and egg shells, being careful not to give them citrus and onion skins as apparently they aren't good for them. The worm pee is harvested constantly as the tap is left open and an old ice cream container collects the nutrient rich liquid which I mix 1:10 with water and spray on the plants every so often to give them a kick along. Every couple of weeks I flush the system with five litres of water to help keep the environment moist and reduce ants setting up home in there. The residual liquid is also watered down and given to the plants.
This weekend I noticed that the old worm blanket (one of the many components of the worm farm that I thought I had to buy) was disintegrating and so I googled what else could be used to cover them, to avoid having to go back to Bunnings and spend more money. Thankfully I know a Resort GM who has a box of damaged bath mats and face washers that are 100% cotton lurking in a special corner of his Man Cave, so I asked to steal a couple to make a nice new blankie for my Neebles.
This is the result and now they are snug as a bug in a rug, literally!
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| A cozy worm blanket made from two bathmats. |
Worm farming is easy to do and knowing that most families create way too much waste it is an efficient method of reducing and reusing what would have gone into the bin and become landfill. My sister in Sydney set up hers very cheaply using a couple of broccoli boxes, wads of wet newspaper and poking a drainage hole close to the bottom which can be fitted with a tap fitting from the hardware store, so there is really no need to go to a lot of expense to get free fertiliser for ever. So give it a go!
