Last week when I posted Part 1 of Lazy Ways to Compost a couple of you commented that the easiest way to compost was to just pile compost up and do nothing. This is certainly a valid point, which I will come back to. The idea of being pretty inactive about the whole process reminded of my own childhood experience of compost.
My dad was in charge of mowing when I was a kid. He had an old-fashioned gas-driven (petrol for UK friends) mower with a kind of barrel of spinning blades. In front of the blades was a metal catcher which had to be emptied several times in the course of cutting our various areas of lawn. When the catcher was full he would take the grass cuttings round to the back yard and dump them in an ever-growing heap, which was then ignored. Now, my mom (mum) was the gardener in the family and she decided to build a lean-to greenhouse right about where our heap of grass clippings was. We were going to have to move it. Until that point I’d never given a thought to why the pile of clippings did not grow and grow and grow beyond a certain height.
When we dug below the top layer of grass clippings the first thing we found was stinky half-rotted grass. Below that was a steaming, hot layer. And right on the bottom was the most wonderful, fresh-smelling, dark, rich, moist compost. How could that be? How could green grass turn into something that resembled dirt (soil). The rich dark compost was full of worms. It was a lesson well learned for me because I now knew exactly where to go if I ever wanted to find a wriggly worm for any reason. This came in handy later. But I digress, I was supposed to be writing about worm compost.
Worm Composters
Worm composters have a lot going for them; many people swear by the compost work their little worm pets do for them. They seem to be easy to care for, can be kept inside, and produce not only great worm castings for the garden, but also compost tea which is wonderful for both indoor and outdoor plants. So far so good.
I’m a lazy gardener though. Worms are animals and as such need to be cared for. At this point in time I don’t need any more pets. You need to supply your worms with bedding as well as cut up food scraps and you can’t include any animal matter in the leftovers you feed them. I imagine myself in a fever of nightmares over whether my worms got enough to eat before I came to bed, and whether their bedding was soft and sweet enough for them. Now, I don’t want to put you off worm composting, especially if you could use a few new pets, because many gardeners love what a worm composter does for them.
Even though worm composting is not the way I will be going, be sure to check out this option before scratching it off your list. Here is a link if you want to know about how worm composting works. For most of us it’s too cold right now to be playing worm games outside – I will post some of these in the spring.
Earthworm photo through Creative Commons at Flickr.com. Find Worm Composting items at Amazon.com.
Sponsored by LaZyGreenPeople – join the Lazy Green Movement at LaZyGreenPeople.
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I don’t think worms are too demanding. We kept some in a jar for a while and couldn’t see them, but they ate the veggie scraps. When the scraps were gone, we would add more.
We have lots of lazy piles in the yard, but we do turn a couple of them occasionally. It composts faster that way.
Peace and Laughter!
Cristina
Cristina, that sounds like a fun way to learn about what worms do. I’ll keep it in mind for the spring.
Whenever we plan something in the “yard” we’ll turn up a worm or two and I will pick them up and show them to the kids and explain how they help aerate the soil. That’s about as far as we’ve gone. When they’re bigger we might let them try their own experiments.
We had that same shrinking clipping pile in the corner of the backyard too.
Starting a wormery has proven to be so much fun. We started out with a stackable operation and we are now eliminating several pounds of food waste every other week. I believe we