Emptying the bottom layer of your worm bin
In many of the discussions on worm bins people ask about either adding the next layer or how do they go about emptying the bottom layer (or even knowing when it's ready to empty).
I generally empty mine when the top layer is almost full (generally twice a year with my family) and I try and do it in the Spring and the Autumn i.e. while the weather is still reasonable.
A common misconception is that all the worms will have vacated the bottom layer and moved up. I've owned a wormery since 1998 and I have never yet known this to be the case - there are always a few of the stubborn ones quite happy in the bottom layer.
So how do you separate them from the compost?
You have a few choices:
- The first is don't bother. You can just empty the whole bottom layer in your border or compost bin where the few stragglers and eggs will either live in the garden, become live food for the birds or in the case of the compost bin carry on regardless. I like the last option because they can then colonise your compost and thereby speed up that process as well.
- You can empty the whole lot into a barrow or onto a plastic sheet and hand pick them out, either adding them to your wormery again or even box them up and head off fishing. The choice is yours.
- Put the bottom layer on the top with the lid off. Scrape away and remove compost until you come across some worms and then leave it for a bit. Worms hate the light and will burrow down into the compost that remains. Repeat this process until they have all burrowed into the layer below, by which time you will have harvested all the compost.
Be warned though that this is a lengthy process.
When you remove the bottom layer you will almost definitely find that the sump is full of worms. Many beginners panic and worry about worms getting in the sump but they always do.
It's yet another reason to make sure you empty the sump regularly so that they don't drown.
They can and will climb out when they are ready but you're very lucky indeed if you never find any there.
As you can see from the pictures both my bins have plenty of worms in the sump. So while we're emptying the bottom layer make sure you empty the contents of the sump (drain it of liquid first though) into the top layer. It tidies the sump up as well as helping establish worms in the new top layer.
So now you've emptied the bottom layer and cleaned out the sump you can place the now empty tray to the top of the bin.
When adding this new layer be careful to make sure that it fits snugly. If there's too much stuff in there then a) you'll be squashing them with the new one and b) they can get out of the sides.
I just add the layer and start adding waste - they will move up when they are ready i.e. they have eaten most of the layer below and fancy some of the new stuff.
I guess it wouldn't harm to take some of the bottom layer and add it to the new one, especially if it's quite full and stops the new layer fitting snugly. Definitely add the moisture mat (or a layer of cardboard) as the darkness will further attract them into the new layer.
As you can see from the pictures, adding what's in the sump can make the wormery look quite wet and soggy so make sure you add a fair amount of shredded/scrunched paper and/or cardboard to help dry things out.
You can never have enough paper in a worm bin, something that people often forget. It helps keep things dry and adds a god dose of carbon. The worms will munch their way through it as fast (if not faster) than the food scraps and the resultant compost will be of a higher standard.
Labels: can-o-worms, compost, Simon Sherlock, Wiggly Wigglers, Wormery
Creating a raised bed for vegetables
For the last few years I have grown a few vegetables in pots: spinach, tomatoes, dwarf beans and even a single runner bean plant. They have all done well, as have the odd lettuce and rocket.
With my small garden I've relied on these pots (and the greenhouse), while keeping the main garden for lawn and borders full of flowers, as well as shrubs for attracting birds and insects (it's also nice to look at).
This year though I have decided to expand the vegetable production and will be utilising two raised beds by the greenhouse for this purpose. I purchased a
link-a-bord kit from
Wiggly Wigglers and have today set it up. The kit itself took all of 5 minutes to assemble and is made from recycled uPVC. I think I would have preferred wood but this kit is light, simple to assemble and won't rot.
I didn't fancy the back breaking job of digging up the turf so laid some cardboard on top of the grass. This should stop the grass growing through yet still allow the bed to drain well. By the time the season is over the grass should be dead and the cardboard rotted enough to just be dug over like a normal plot (well that's the theory anyway).
Next came a bucket of Bokashi for the base followed by a layer of home made compost from my third
bin. Both these will add nutrients to the soil as well as help stop the soil drying out. I did exactly this in my pots last year and had the best crop of veg ever, even though our summer was atrocious, so I'm sure that it will help just as much this time around.
Finally I topped it off with some John Innes multi purpose compost as that will be ideal for planting the veg plants into. Once established in this the roots will find their way down to the compost and Bokashi and all the nutrients they contain will keep the plants fed and healthy.
The second raised bed kit is on order and I'll be setting that up next to this giving me quite a bit of growing room. I'm hoping to utilise this room properly once I've read
Growing Fruit and Vegetables on a Bed System the Organic Way
by Pauline Pears.
Labels: Bokashi, compost, link-a-bord, raised bed, vegetables, Wiggly Wigglers
Keeping your solitary bees warm in the winter
During the recent cold spell in the UK where temperatures were below freezing for over a week and fell as low as -12C in places I brought in my solitary bee nesting tubes and put them in the fridge to keep them warm (a fridge keeps them at between 3 and 4C, still cool enough to stop them hatching).
Having written about this on the
Wiggly Wigglers Facebook group Heather also mentioned it during
Podcast 165 so that other people could save their own bees.
During the podcast Richard questions why I would do this so here are my reasons: Bees in the UK (solitary, Bumble bees and honey/hive bees) are suffering a lot in the wild at the moment and disappearing from our gardens at an alarming rate. By putting in these nesters we are encouraging solitary bees, such as the Red and Blue Mason bees, into our gardens thereby saving them the bother of hunting around for suitable nesting sites and encouraging pollination of our plants during the summer. Plus they are amazing to watch, none aggressive and therefore suitable for a garden that also has children.
However, they suffer the effects of the crazy British seasons just the same as anything else. For the last few years they have hatched early only to find there are very few flowers for them and this year we have had the first real Winter in years where it didn't get above freezing for over a week.
So by putting the tubes in the fridge for a few days you actually keep them warm enough to survive the very low temperatures but cold enough not to start hatching in your fridge (and thereby saving me from an almighty talking to from Mrs Sherlock!).
I originally got this idea from Christopher O'Toole, author of "The Red Mason Bee", which is available from Wiggly Wigglers by clicking
here.
Although he does state that they can be over-wintered in a shed or greenhouse he also states that a fridge is fine as it keeps them at a constant temperature and stops them emerging too soon into a cold Spring.
HOWEVER, I would recommend only putting them in the fridge when you know the temperature is going to drop very cold i.e. -10C or slightly less if it's for a prolonged spell and even then only for a few days at a time.
This is because modern fridges (often with auto-defrost) don't appear to keep the required humidity very well and you run the risk of drying the cocoons out. There is more about this on the
Beediverse web site.
Another reason for using your fridge is when Spring looks like it will come early. As mentioned above this then keeps them cool enough not to hatch out too soon. To quote Christopher O'Toole again:
"... keep an eye on the weather and check with the long range weather forecasts. About seven to ten days before you think the fine weather will begin, put your bees out on your plot."Labels: Mason bees, solitary bees, Wiggly Wigglers
Just how quickly does Bokashi break down? - compost bin
Further to
Just how quickly does Bokashi break down? the wormery is looking rather wet and miserable after all the rain we have had recently.
Normally I would have added a good dose of shredded paper to help dry it out (as well as add some much needed carbon), but for the purpose of this experiment I haven't so that I can see what is happening with the added Bokashi. However, the temperature recently has dropped considerably, which has slowed everything down and, in true British fashion, it hasn't stopped raining so the whole thing is looking wet and slimy. Rather than hide the Bokashi with shredded paper I have added a
Wiggly Wigglers moisture mat in the hope of drying things out a little and giving the worms some much needed warmth so they can continue their job.
I also have a Bokashi bin ready to empty:
and decided to add it to the compost bin so I can compare how that breaks down against within the wormery. Here's the bin before I added the bokashi:
and here it is after:
Let's hope the weather doesn't get too cold over the next few weeks so that we can see some progress...
Labels: Bokashiton Bokashi, composting, Wiggly Wigglers, Wormery
Not Quite Gardeners Question Time
On Friday I travelled down to Ledbury, dropped the family off at some friends and then (with an awful lot of help from Digital Doris, TomTom for short) drove on to Preston-on-Wye for "Not Quite Gardeners Question Time", a talk being given by Terry Walton (allotment guru from Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 show) and Richard Fishbourne of
Wiggly Wigglers
Amazingly I made it in time for a glass of mulled cider and was made very welcome by the team from Wiggly's, all of whom I have dealt with electronically in the past but never actually met. For me it was worth the journey down to actually meet everybody in person as much as to hear the banter between Richard and Terry, and even more so to find that they are all just as pleasant and easy to talk to as you expect from listening to the weekly
podcast. Even Michael, technical wizz behind the podcast, catalogue, web site and just about any other form of media used by Wiggly Wigglers, put up with me asking questions behind the Wiggly's
web site and how it all works.
The talk itself was fantastic, light hearted and full of audience participation; Terry makes stories of vegetable gardening entertaining, amusing and, above all, extremely informative, while Richard steers the conversation around to various composting techniques (standard, wormeries and Bokashi) and wild life, such as how important bees are in the garden etc. The only downside to the evening was being forced to sing "My. My. My. Dahlia" to the (not quite) tune of Tom Jones' "Delilah"!
Part one of the talk is available as
Wiggly Podcast 0153.
And thanks again to Heather for inviting me down, being so welcoming and above all, not mentioning the cat argument from
podcast 60!
All in all I had a great time and it was a real shame I had to get back to Ledbury and therefore turn down the offer of a pint afterwards...
Labels: Allotment, Bokashi, Gardeners Question Time, Heather Gorringe, Richard Fishbourne, Simon Sherlock, Terry Walton, Wiggly Wigglers, Wormery
My new (eco friendly) lawn mower
I recently bought a new
mower from
Wiggly Wigglers and have been so impressed with it that I have written a review for them.
The review can be seen on the
Wiggly blog Labels: Brill, lawn, mower, razorcut, Wiggly Wigglers
Wiggly Podcast nominated for award.
My favourite podcast,
The Wiggly Podcast, has been nominated for the best gardening podcast in the mouse and trowel awards. As it's by far the best podcast you'll ever hear please vote for it at:
http://www.inthegardenonline.com/mt/All about nature, farming in the UK and general state of the countryside, global warming, why cats murder defenceless little birds and just about any other garden/nature/farming rant you can possibly think up the
Wiggly Team provide weekly entertainment that will help you start the week in style (not that it's particularly stylish when you spit your drink all over your keyboard and the rest goes up your nose because you've started to laugh uncontrollably, but hey it's definitely funny)
Labels: podcast, Wiggly Wigglers
More Wiggly Cat Arguments
Further to my
blog-post on the wonderful
Podcast 60 by
Wiggly Wigglers there has been another corker,
podcast 68, which is also well worth a listen.
As the latest mentions it was down to me the whole hilarious episode started I wrote a small article on how cat lovers and
normal people non-cat lovers could work together and, hopefully, sort out the whole sorry issue so that people can live next door to a cat or two and still have wild-life in their garden.
Heather has kindly posted the article on the
Wiggly blog and we hope that it will become
the place where people can go for answers to this on-going situation....
Labels: Birds, Cats, Wiggly Wigglers, Wildlife
Podcast 60 from Wiggly Wigglers, and the hilarious cat argument
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear.
Further to a perfectly innocent email I sent to Wiggly Wigglers enquiring about the hopefully cat repellent properties of Bokashi treated food waste I managed to cause dissent on the Wiggly sofa. The utterly hilarious Podcast 60 is available from
http://www.wigglywigglers.co.uk/podcasts/Wiggly%20Podcast%200060.mp3and should come with a warning: If you intend to listen to this and drink at the same time then don’t, especially if sat at a computer because you run the risk of spraying your drink all over your monitor, which is not only unsightly but can cause a lot of fizzing, electrical problems and possibly death as a result.
Richard and Heather were brilliant; Heather the ‘my lovely cat can do no wrong’ cat lover and Richard the ‘shoot the bloody lot of them’ anti argue back and forth for a good few minutes and it is a laugh a minute. Heather made the following good points:
- You should NOT stop feeding the birds just because there are cats about, but you should try very hard to make your feeding area inaccessible to them. Of course this is a lot easier in a larger garden like the Wiggly farm garden (which also only has the one cat, compared to the 3 that regularly use my garden as a toilet)
- Cats do bring lots of comfort to their owners (as well as lots of little, sometimes still twitching, presents). It’s just a shame that the comfort they bring their owners is mirrored by the stress they cause the neighbours who choose not to have one, whatever that reason may be, and end up with their plants strewn all over the place so the little blighter can defecate (or fertilise, depending on your view) in your borders.
Richard on the other hand obviously loves to hate cats and I think it would be even funnier if you could get him on the subject after a few beers.
- He, quite rightly, points out that there are a lot of people who don’t want somebody else’s cat in their garden for whatever reason but mainly because they would like to feed, watch and encourage birds and other wildlife into their little patch of Eden without the fear that said wildlife will be mindlessly tortured, sometimes eaten (and likely puked back up on your door step) but generally just frightened out of its wits.
- Dogs have to be confined to their own garden so why not cats? I should add that it is very hard to fence for a cat compared to a dog but if you can’t be bothered to keep your cat in your garden you shouldn’t own one. If I was to keep deer in my back garden they would be hard to fence for as well, but it would still be my responsibility!
Anyway, I’m starting to waffle but I will quickly mention that responsible cat owners should read the following to help the birds (though it won’t stop them prowling unwanted in my garden):
http://www.rspb.org.uk/advice/helpingbirds/unwantedvisitors/cats/collarthatcat.aspI should also add that Heather very kindly asked me to be a guest blogger on the Wiggly Wigglers site and if you haven’t lost the will to live yet you can read my efforts at:
http://wigglywigglers.blogspot.com/2006/12/simon-sherlocks-top-five-wiggly.html and view a few pictures of my garden at:
http://wigglywigglers.blogspot.com/2006/12/simons-garden.htmlLabels: Bokashi, Cats, Garden, Wiggly Wigglers
