Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Hey Uncle Zev. What are you doing?

Zev: Oh, hey! I’m  emptying out this liquid duck gold.

Courtney Brooke: Duck gold?

Zev: Yes.

Courtney Brooke: What does that mean?

Zev: An unspoken treasure. This is our duck water from the sweet ducks. The ancona ducks have been swimming in here the last week About once a week we empty this out and spread this water around to different plants that need it, with its beautiful phosphorus and all the nitrogen and nutrients in there and the duck oils which make this cool rainbow colored oily skim on the top and feed all the plants with it. It’s one of the amazing yields of the ducks. Along with the eggs, and their manure, and their beauty and companionship, and bug eating, we get fertigation water. So that’s what I’m doing. Fertigation…. fertilize your irrigation. It’s like saying wave irrigating in ways that are also fertilizing the plants because of everything i just said.

Courtney Brooke: So do you recommend having ducks?

Zev: Definitely yeah

Courtney Brooke: Who do you recommend having ducks? Why? who should have ducks?

Zev: Well probably people who have a few other companions, a few other crew to do it with. Once I had ducks by myself, when I lived in someone’s backyard in a salvaged metal and earthen building I built. That meant that if I ever went away for the night or was just really tired or something then it was always like “oh god, I gotta go deal with the ducks” or get someone to duck sit the ducks. But if you got a few compadres and comadres then somebody can take care of them when somebody else goes.

So, people who have a little crew, and who have a little diversified landscape. Especially where you can rotate them through different areas. Different paddocks, kind of mini paddocks and rotate them through the garden at the right time when they’re not going to trample teensy plants. Rotate them through the forest garden and around the mushroom logs when the mushrooms are coming out so that they eat the slugs before they damage the mushrooms and around the house to eat the termites. So a diversified landscape, home scale is one of the ways ducks fit really good.

Also, people in traditional Asian cultures use them in big large scale rice paddies. So they’re all manner of things. The trick is, that we didn’t do here yet, is to have the water they swim and be high in the landscape so you can use gravity to get fertigation water to other points. So, this is currently down here for convenience and that’s a little inconvenient.

Courtney Brooke: Hey ducks!

Zev: There’s six of them but there’s only five here because one of them’s in there right now sitting on eggs breeding. They’re hopefully going to hatch out into a new round little ducklings.

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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…

The post Dr. Monique Mazza’s Vermiculture Mini-Workshop. Part 1. At Earthaven Ecovillage appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

1-Aesthetics: Let’s face it. Little baby lambs are cute. There is nothing quite like walking by a big beautiful pasture full of lush green grass and mama sheep with tiny new lambs.

2-Wool: The Gateway sheep are sheared twice a year, in the spring and fall, and the wool is available for sale to Earthaven residents and friends. Just imagine wearing a hat knit by one friend from yarn spun by another friend with wool that was grown right in your own back yard!

3-Pasture Fertilization/Integrated System: Gateway is one of several farms at Earthaven and the sheep are one piece of a farm system working towards sustainability (while realizing that we have a long way to go.) Sheep, chickens, turkeys, winter storage vegetables, bio-fuel, house building, solar energy and human connection are some of the many pieces involved. Poop makes great fertilizer.

4-Education and Radical Responsibility: Two Earthaveners slaughtered one of the Gateway lambs to serve for the Thanksgiving dinner served in the Council Hall. One had experience with animal slaughter and the other was excited to learn. Both were taking radical responsibility for their food by being a part of the death that gives them life.

5-Meat: The lamb meat was roasted in the oven at the Village Terraces common kitchen while we listened to food songs on WNCW, drank wine, and prepared stuffing and gallons of gravy. The meal was a sort of pre-arranged potluck and folks could choose to purchase (at cost) turkey and/or lamb. YUM!

6-Haggis: “Made from all the parts of the sheep the English won’t eat” read the sign in front of this dish that many of us have only heard about in old stories. This version was made by one of our Dutch members using the organs to create a surprisingly (to me) tasty treat.

7-Head Cheese: No it’s not cheese, and Yes it is made from the head. A molded gelatinous ring making good use of even more parts of this animal that would often be discarded.

8-Fiddle Strings: A friend heard that a sheep was being slaughters on the land and called to ask if he could have the intestines to make fiddle strings. The request was of course honored and perhaps he will honor us with some of his music in the future.

9-Testicles/Stretching Our Comfort Zone: The testicles, batter dipped and fried, were served as an appetizer before our incredible dinner. My mind was a bit squeamish (ok, repulsed) at the thought of eating testicles, but I certainly wasn’t going to pass up this rare opportunity. I pushed through the discomfort and was rewarded with a superior taste sensation. I mean really, batter dipped and fried? You can’t go wrong.

10-Stock: After dinner the lamb bones came back to the VT kitchen where they spent 24 hours simmering on the stove to create a rich delicious nutrient dense stock. We love to use this for soup, cooking grains, or mix it with miso and drink it. We also pressure canned a round of it to use in next Thanksgivings’ gravy.

One more

11-Hide: The lamb hide is currently undergoing the tanning process. You just might see it as apparel at next years’ dinner.

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