Organic Granny

--> As I mentioned in my last post, I am putting together composting equipment for this winter -- a set of bokashi pails for the kitchen and a worm composting (aka vermi-culture) bin for the side room off the kitchen. Bokashi involves culturing kitchen scraps with a sort of probiotic that one sprinkles on the waste each time it is put in the pail. It is an anaerobic method of composting (meaning there is no air involved-- more like making traditional sauerkraut) and I intend to take the probiotic scraps and bury them in an 18" deep trench in my backyard and cover the probiotic with soil.  In 2-10 weeks (depending where you live), the bokashi will be unrecognizable as kitchen scraps.  It will even digest meat, bone, and avocado pits.  I have been reassured that there is no nasty odor involved in making bokashi. The kit for making my bokashi includes 3 5-gallon pails and 2 tight fitting lids for the pails.  Today I drilled 3 small holes dead center in the bottom of 2

So, this is something I learned last week at the Vermi- culture workshop at the Comox Valley Regional Compost Education Centre : If you have a regular composting bin you don't have to buy your red wigglers!  They live in your backyard! Years ago I bought a pound of red wigglers, a squiggling ball of them in an ice cream pail, from the local Oxfam group in Saskatoon, just around the corner from my then-workplace.  I think it cost $5.  The profits went into programming for youth in the community, one program of which was actually learning to operate a worm farm and to do other forms of composting. I thought that the worms I bought were different from the worms in my garden, a more exotic variety perhaps. Turns out they are the same critter.  And if you want to start your worm colony you only need three things: *the worms *the plastic bin with holes drilled in it and a lid on top *a bed of newspaper and food Use newspaper with vegetable ink print and not the chemical ink