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Esme shares her family’s vegetable harvest

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Dr. Monique Mazza: Hey y’all! This is Dr. Monique Mazza from Earthaven Ecovillage with part two of our vermiculture video. In the first part we already went over how to feed our worms and set them up so they’re going to be happy critters and producing worm castings for you in the first two levels.

Today I’m going to show you the finished layered level three, as all the castings have been processed through the worms body, and what to do with the castings.

So here we go…We’re going to take off these first two layers and be careful with your back because it’s pretty heavy and voila!

Usually this finished layer has no visible worms in it. There’s probably going to be some down below, it kind of looks like a dehydrated version. There should be no leaf matter or no real visible evidence of food and if we just start going through here we could see it’s a real fluffy kind of material. Usually little circular, little pebbles looking. So we’re just gonna scratch it a bit and the best way there are likely to be worms down at the bottom of this. But really because you’ve been feeding the two upper trays there’s perforations in the trays when the food is gone from this level they will naturally start to crawl up into the layers where there’s active feeding happening.

So, typically to harvest this we create a pyramid because there’s likely to be worms in here that we don’t want to get stuck in our casting buckets.  See, here’s one that’s still eating something. So we create a bit of a pyramid and as natural nature has it bugs the worms do not like to be in the sun. So what we do is by creating this pyramid we make them a little bit uncomfortable and then the worms will dive down to the bottom of this. Then leaving this for about 10 minutes like that and then we can come back as the worms will now dive down.

They’ll have evicted this top layer and then we can take this and put this in a bucket and it’s ready to be applied to the plants. There are some egg shells in here because I think that that just helps aerate it but that’s fine if they’re part of it.

Storing this is best in a bucket with a closed lid. This is alive with lots of probiotics and so using this as soon as possible is best. If you have to store it, store it with a lid so it retains its moisture.

Basically what I do is take one handful of this per plant. If I’ve just transplanted some seedlings, some small plants, I would just take a handful of this and scratch it around the base of the plant. Then let nature do the rest.

These are our worm castings one of nature’s free best composting that I could find and help our plants be more medicinal for us. So use your worms, use your kitchen compost, and enjoy!

Thanks for watching the video!

Courtney Brooke: What’s going on with that spout down?

Dr. Monique Mazza: There? Oh, the spout is basically the leachate. This is the water that comes down and this is not really supposed to be used.

It’s keeping drainage happening. So this is always open. If it gets too wet it’s a problem. So we want to have it the right level of moisture. So we wet our leaves before we put them in there but we don’t put them in dripping. We actually squeeze the water out before we make the bedding.

Then this leachate typical it said not to put this directly on plants. What I do with this is I dilute it and then I put this in my main compost pile. So I think there’s benefits to it but I think that it’s too strong. It could burn the plants. So diluting it and then I throw it in my big compost pile for further breakdown.

That’s it. It’s really fun and it’s so rewarding. Your worms will love you. So enjoy the worm castings and have vibrant plants!

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(transcript from video)

Hi! This is Monique Mazza. I’m a Naturopathic physician and I live at Earthaven Ecovillage.

I’m going to show y’all today working with my friends the worms to help us make really nutritious fertilizer for the soil which helps us have more medicinal foods. Part of my passion is helping people understand how foods can be medicinal and my worms are a big part of that.

Introduction and Benefits

So we’re working with a worm vermiculture system that I inherited and it’s a three-stage system that uses our common kitchen scraps which are mostly vegetables. Here I have some chopped up carrots brussels sprouts and a little bit of leftover tofu that we’re going to feed them.

This is a three-stage system that will first show you how to feed the worms so that they proliferate, they will ingest the food, and then basically process it into what are called castings. Those are one of the most nutritious things that I found that helped boost my little baby plants. So they create a casting which is a fertilizer that’s filled with nutrition that’s readily available for the plants.

I’ll show that at the end but in my history of working with gardening I haven’t found anything that gives a small seedling a rapid boost of growth and green compared to the worm casting. So I’m really passionate about it. It also helps us keep our kitchen waste out of the landfill.

And it’s a really doesn’t have any smell so we keep it in a warm place in our home during the winter and then in the summer we put it usually in a shady spot on the north side of our house.

Another benefit of worm castings besides nourishing our plants is it’s actually can be made a foliar spray. So you can take the castings…I won’t demonstrate this but maybe in another video… taking the castings soaking it in water and using that water as a foliar spray diluted. It’s the actual pesticide so it helps give the plants defense, sort of like a microbiotic a probiotic boost so they defend themselves from the bugs that are around.

So many benefits, but let’s open this up and see our worms how they’re doing today.

Feeding

So we create a bedding for the worms out of simple soil and some shredded leaves you can also do this with any other clean material like newspaper.

I like to keep it as natural as possible so I like to use shredded leaves that are wet and we create about a two inch thickness of that. Then we have some soil and we’ll find our veggies in here and then normally we’ll find a spot where our worms are working and… Excuse me, little guys and gals here…

We have our nice blob of worms eating eating and producing their poop which are their castings.

So they’re busy at work here. I pretty much always keep them covered. Some people feed on the surface. I found that putting the food the scraps a little bit below definitely below this layer of leaves, because that’ll keep the bugs away. I just find a little hole and I try to work in a clockwise position but really it’s so simple there aren’t many rules to this. The simpler the better.

I don’t have a weight ratio that I feed the worms I just kind of keep an eye on it. If you’re feeding them too much, the food’s going to be sitting there and it’ll cause lots of fly so that’ll be your signal that it’s too much. Just wait a few days let them eat that down come back.

I’m creating a hole. I’m burying the scraps that are chopped up in small pieces and then I’m just gonna cover it with the soil first and then go back and cover it with the leaves.

Again moisture is really important because without that the worms will dry up and they won’t be happy. They’ll actually start crawling out of this. So giving them a little bit of darkness we put the lid back on.

I’m feeding this first tray; this is my working tray and it has holes at the bottom.

So there’s another tray here. I’ll show you that they’ve been working on that tray for a little bit so if we lift this one off see this is our intermediate tray, you can see that there’s still some worms in here working and this is not yet processed. This is still unprocessed, this is not yet castings. It’s on its way but you can see there’s still large leaf material, there’s pieces of root here.

Continued in Part 2…

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We have recently added a new regular activity – documentary night. We gather suggestions far and wide, which gives us a chance to learn what our community members are interested in, and then we gather to watch.

In our selection process we try to see things that are ‘meaningful’ and also mindful of the times we live in, in order to advance our understanding of current events. Further, we try to balance serious with interesting and fun. A little education AND a little amusement. This is what we have come up with so far:

• On the lighter side – Dr. Bonner’s Magic Soap Box is a delightful look at the soap product we have become accustomed to, how it came to be and how it has evolved since the ‘hippies’ made it a big seller.
• Life in a Day is a cross cultural look at life, especially how many people have good lives with little.
• Kumare is a thoughtful look at transformation through a rather peculiar methodology.
• Being an intentional community, we, of course, saw Wanderlust and in that same vein we will be seeing Random Lunacy, a look at a family’s very adventurous and fulfilling life on the fly as well as Choice Point, a young couple’s bicycle tour in search of community.
• Happy is a highly recommended international look at what makes life satisfying.
• On the more serious side we have seen Carl Sagan’s look at our precious earth in the last of a seven-part series, Who Speaks for Gaia?
• Queen of the Sun, on the dangers of hive collapse, soon to be followed up with Vanishing of the Bees.
• Zeitgeist Three; Moving Forward has been recommended but it is a bit long but not as depressing as one and two.
• Life and Debt is a look at the manipulation of the poor by international banking.
• On the savory side – Dirt, which contains some depressing parts and Botany of Desire, which  is a juicy look at the plant and human relationship.
• On our ‘to watch list’ is Searching for Sugarman, The Gatekeepers, Favela Rising, Five Broken Cameras, Life after Life, Chasing Ice.

Suchi has been living at Earthaven since 2002. She resides at the Tribal Condo in the Hut Hamlet neighborhood. Suchi created the Peace Garden and has been a leader in social organizing. She is currently studying Nonviolent Communication, Body-Centered Psychotherapy, and Zegg Forum. Everywhere she looks there are new opportunities to learn.

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