Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Michael Nevin <mikepnevin@yahoo.ca>]

Hi - can you put lots of wood shavings, shredded newspaper or other more or less dry carbon source into the fetid bags?

Keep the stuff covered and try to let the worms go to work on it.

Good luck.

Mike in Toronto

Michael Kaer <michaelkaer@yahoo.ca> wrote:

I am a "worm farmer", at least that is how it is listed for StatsCan on the last census. A closer term would be a worm casting producer for my gardens. I currently live in a small city in Canada on a good sized lot( for the city, about a 1/5 of an acre). On it I have 2 herb gardens up front and a much larger garden in the back.  Worm castings is powerful stuff. I have pictures with a few friends from the Green Party ( their party symbol is a sunflower) standing in front of my sunflowers. One reached as high as my second story window and ended up around 18 feet tall.  I was  tossing  organic matter into a bin that was going to feed the worms and I ended up with too much( my mother was helping to feed the worms,who lives next door). I had tossed in a bunch of news papers bundled on top and forgot about it over the winter. Opening up the bin today was a chore I could not put off any longer. The wet newsprint had formed a seal over the rotting veggies and the stink that came up was pretty bad. Mom had just come home and dad made the comment  " Did you step in some dog  s--t, mother?". With the fence in the way they did not know what I was doing. I yelled over that it was me making the smell and I would have it taken care of quickly.

 That got me thinking about the future of small gardens and small flocks in urban and sub urban settings. Just like at a farm, there will be some processes that will not smell nicely and the neighbours could complain. What can be done to keep these types of situations from happening and if they do happen how to remedy them?. My solutions was to seal it in a plastic garbage can and I will drag it to the back and open it only when people are at work or school, and feed it to the compost pile,bit by bit.

 The future may well be bad enough without getting our neighbours to hate us.
 As a Side note, I plane on moving to a farm in 5 years or less, then I do not have to worry as much about smells.

 Michael J. Kaer

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