Now you may think with the chooks, a normal compost heap and the bokashi bins, that surely we have nothing left to feed the worms with. Well, we have discovered the chooks don't like eating most of the veggie scraps (ie. carrot peelings, broccoli and cauliflower stalks etc.), but they are great with bread products and leftovers from breakfast, lunch or dinner. The bokashi bins are great at doing the initial fermenting of the stuff the chooks won't eat, which speeds up the decomposition process. But it still needs to be buried somewhere in the garden or put in the compost heap, and therefore needs to be balanced out with an equal amount of dry waste (carbon containing stuff eg. dry leaves, newspaper), which can be hard to find enough of in winter. Which leads to the compost heap, which takes a long time to break down stuff due to the cooler temperatures for a large part of the year here.
So the worm farm will help speed up the breakdown process of our kitchen scraps (that the chooks won't eat) in the cooler months, leaving us with worm manure to add to the soil in the veggie beds and worm wee, to use as liquid fertilizer on the plants too. Both of which will save me spending money and hence make the veggies we grow even cheaper. Also when the worms multiply we can either give some of them to the chooks as a little protein treat or sell them for a bit of spending money.
I commented to Peter that maybe we should get a hive of bees next, to complement our slightly weird choice of pets.
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2 comments:
Do you have to sred the newspaper before adding it to the compost or what? We have a big problem here finding dry waste to put in the compost & I didn't know you could put newspaper in. We have an oversupply of newspaper as Tom gets a free subscription to the daily paper & our new fireplace is not supposed to have newspaper burnt in it (still not sure as to the reason why).
It's best if it's shredded, as it helps with air circulation, but it doesn't have to be.
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