Hi all! This is Dr Monique Mazza from our home in Earthaven Ecovillage and I’m inviting you today to talk about our raised beds. These are  three or four raised beds that we have here.

Why do we have raised beds instead of planting right in the ground?

Well there’s several benefits. For the main reason, for us here in this setting, is because there are a lot of vole creatures. Voles and moles who like to burrow underneath. They’ll take the plant roots out so destroying the growth. So by creating a raised bed we have a secure environment these raised beds are lined with hardware cloth underneath at the bottom. So it’s an impermeable layer it allows drainage. It’s not plastic; it allows drainage of fluids and passage of roots but creatures can’t get up from it. So we’ve created little greenhouses here over the winter. This thick plastic has been been covering these collards that have been lovely and vibrant. Then we have a really nice crop of chickweed which is a highly mineral dense plant that’s great to eat as a spring tonic.

Raised beds hold a lot of moisture. So it’s a really great way to grow if you’re not into watering so much. The compactness of the soil holds a lot of moisture we have a drip system in place  on this bed that I’ll show you.

This is a bed where we’re demonstrating the use of shade cloth and usually we’ll put lettuces or something in here that likes to be a little cooler; spinach and lettuce in particular. This is kind of a cinching system that works that just kind of brings it up when you’re ready to harvest or plant. There’s a series of ropes here that just holds it up.

We have our three layers of three layers of drip tape here. You can see there’s a main line that comes in the bottom and then each bed is fed with a pipe off of a stand pipe further away. We could turn each bed on or off individually. That then leads into three little drip tapes that go down the entire bed so it is a slow way to irrigate with more penetration down into the soil. It keeps it more evenly irrigated.

This last bed we’ve had this great cover crop of clover growing all year. We like to keep them green and growing with something so that the earth is never bare. That keeps all of the healthy soil organisms alive all year. So, either cover crop or in this case we’ve just used chopped leaves to keep the beds warm.

Another benefit of having raised beds is if you’re in an environment that has had bad soil below, say clay soil, or a lot of rocky soil, or even an area where they may not have been using organic practices and you’re concerned about that, putting up a raised bed is pretty simple. So you can create your environment of brand new soil fill with your organic amendments your compost or healthy soil. Then you’re starting on top and you’re likely only growing vegetables that are going to create root system in the top six inches, eight inches, 12 inches max. Usually a raised bed is about 12 inches from the ground and the roots are only going to be exposed to the soil that you choose to put in there.  So it’s a great way to just start from scratch if the ground below is questionable.

Another benefit – it’s an opportunity to use materials that may be lying around. Most of this is just scrap wood that we found – pieces of sheet metal. If you look on the inside you can see this is old roofing material on one side and old sheet metal on the other side and it looks great. It’s really durable it allows the soil and water to be held in place so that’s one of the reasons why they’re so likely to retain moisture.

And, as you get older, it’s sort of easier to garden. You sit here; it’s a nice place to sit- and do your weeding. It gives you a little bit of a built-in bench.

So many benefits of raised beds. You can paint them the color you want. I hope that you all are inspired and make your own! Thanks for joining us!

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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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