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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Worming their way
  • Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 20:25:28 -0600


Worming their way
Ron Strauch is showing Eldorado residents how to use worms to reduce waste
and enrich soil
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/main.asp?SectionID=9&SubSectionID=42&ArticleID=43770
By CHRISTINA BOYLE | The New Mexican
Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Ron Strauch thrusts a shovel into a mound of compost made up of fetid
garbage, pine shavings and manure. He raises the clumpy earth to hip level
and says: “Look in there. Do you see them?”

A group of novice gardeners standing around the mound squint, bend and tilt
their heads. “Now, why can’t I see them?” asks Jan Lurie, a bit frustrated.

Lurie plans to compost in her back yard in Eldorado this summer for the first
time and wants to learn more about vermiculture — or how to raise worms to
eat garbage.

Craning their necks further, Bob and Nona Richardson spot several red
wigglers twitching from the clump briefly before diving back into the rich,
humid dirt.

Like Lurie, the Richardsons are interested in how to put the lowly worm’s
greedy appetite for livestock manure and rotten food to use as a viable
waste-disposal alternative.

And 42-year-old Strauch is glad to teach anybody who’s interested how to put
the little critters to work at home and in the garden.

Strauch conducts worm workshops from his home and has held classes at Plants
of the Southwest in Santa Fe.

He studied agribusiness in college in the 1980s.

“Education about the power of the worm is my main interest,” Strauch said.
“Teaching about worms and raising them is useful to me because they can do so
much; they reduce the waste that’s headed to landfills and they replenish the
soil.”

Worm populations can double every four months, but it’s a matter of creating
the perfect environment, Strauch said.

That’s not easy to do if you’re not a worm wiz like Strauch.

“Conditions can’t be too hot, too moist or too dry for them,” he said. “They
breathe through their skin and they need the right amount of moisture,
ventilation and heat to survive. I like to show people how to create that for
their household or the garden, especially here in New Mexico where conditions
really wreak havoc on the worm.”

At 7,000 feet, microbes fight to survive the harsh ultraviolet rays of the
sun; microbes burn off leaving soil short on the very stuff that helps plants
grow — nutrients.

But worms can change that.

“Worms love eating microbial waste,” Strauch said. Kitchen scraps and almost
any livestock manure break down into microbial waste. Worms eat the waste and
then excrete it as premium organic fertilizer packed with nitrogen: Farmers
call it black gold.

“It a constant recycling process,” Strauch said. Worm waste or worm castings
are the secret ingredients for healthy soil.

Worms also replenish soil because they are natural tillers, Strauch said.

“The castings they leave behind bind with other soil to create a more organic
environment,” he said. “The microbes break down the food, and then the worms
consume the waste of the microbe. What worms excrete creates another supply
of food for the microbes. The process frees the nutrients in the soil —
something the soil in New Mexico is in great need of.”

Many folks in Eldorado, where drought and the bark beetle have killed off
piñon trees, are creating organic gardens with compost soil, Strauch said.

“It’s a great way to introduce nutrient-rich soil to your back yard,” he said.

There’s a second benefit to the twists and turns of the worm.

“Worms really help to break things down,” Bob Richardson said. “At home we
break up the kitchen scraps that have tough skins like peppers and oranges
before we add it to the compost. Splitting the skins breaks the food down
three times faster than if you didn’t.”

That gives the worms a running start, he said. “Not that they’re in a hurry.”

Richardson said his family has cut back on adding waste to the landfill by 25
percent since they started composting with worms.

Though the Richardsons haven’t had great success growing a garden in the last
three years, they are hoping this year will be different with a new supply of
worms from Strauch.

“Our main interests in learning how to compost and use worms are to recycle
waste and improve the soil,” Richardson said.

“We came to the worm workshop because we lost our first family of worms and
are here for our second,” he said.

Strauch sells free-range worms by the bucket as a compost starter and gives
worm workshops in Eldorado for free.

“Raising worms is a spiritual experience for Ron,” said Strauch’s wife,
Melissa White. “They really resonate with him.”

On the worm ranch in Eldorado, Strauch’s worms devour about 3,500 pounds of
organic waste a week.

Strauch knows he’s raised 1,000 pounds of the little critters by the volume
they consume.

“The rule of thumb is it takes about 2,000 worms, or roughly 2 pounds of
worms, to eat 7 pounds of scraps in a week,” Strauch said.

Twice a week, Strauch fills the bed of his pick-up truck with food scraps he
gets from Whole Foods to feed to his worms.

“I’m focused on increasing the population,” Strauch said. “I would like to
open a municipal site in the future where people can buy worms by the pound
on site, or on the Internet.”

But for right now, Strauch is content teaching people how to start a compost
pile and how to put worms to work as natural recyclers in a gentle, organic
way, he said.

“Since I started doing this in 1990, I’ve probably worked about 100,000 yards
of compost and mulch,” Strauch said. “It just keeps recycling itself.”

Strauch will conduct a worm workshop in Eldorado May 15 from 10 a.m. to noon.
For more information, call 466-2620.




  • [Livingontheland] Worming their way, Tradingpost, 04/24/2004

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