Gardening by Mistake

I’ve got to clear up something that drives me absolutely nuts. Many people refer to “worm tea” but they are actually talking about leachate. The two are not the same thing and are not interchangeable. So what’s the difference?

Worm “tea” is better called “vermicompost tea” because we’re brewing the vermicompost and not the worms themselves. It is made from finished vermicompost or worm castings.

Leachate, on the other hand, is that liquid which may drip from your stackable worm bin system. That tells you that your bin has more liquid in it than it needs. A worm bin that is too wet can easily become anaerobic. It’s important to know that the leachate likely contains harmful compounds as well as helpful. For instance, anaerobic decomposition produces alcohols and other things which are toxic to your plants. These can be present in the leachate. The problem with the leachate is that you just simply do not know what you are pouring onto your plants. Some people use it and like their results. My guess is that those people have systems which are well run and perhaps use the same inputs most of the time so that they get pretty much the same leachate each time, a leachate that happens to not be full of harmful compounds. There’s no way to know for sure, however, until you’ve poured it onto some plants. You won’t know if there are harmful compounds in it until your plants crisp up and die or show other signs of damage. Why risk it? If you do risk it, you’d be wise to dilute it a lot first or pour some of it onto a weed and see how it reacts before applying it to plants you value.

With vermicompost tea, you can be much more confident about what you are pouring onto your plants if you are using finished VC. The one exception I can think of to this would be a vermicompost high in salts. This might happen, for instance, if chicken feed containing salts was used as the primary food source. Over time, that salt content is going to built in the VC and it’s possible it could end up at a high enough level that the tea could be too salty for the plants.

It’s so hot outside (heat index of 115) that I’m not even worrying about getting out there. Yes, knowing the weeds are there is driving me crazy, but not so crazy that I can’t wait until it’s not 100 degrees outside. In the meantime, I’m harvesting my worm bins.  This is a good time to get it done. In a few weeks, when it’s cooler, I’ll want to be outside finally catching up on weeding, getting more of my WS plants into the ground, spraying my roses, etc. It also works out well because the bins won’t need to be harvested until winter sets in and I have little in the way of gardening tasks.

The question is: is it okay to add pureed food to the worm bin?

The answer is: yes, but…

Pureeing the food before adding it to the worm bin is a double-edged sword. The benefit of doing this is that it helps the food decompose more quickly, becoming worm-ready more quickly. Pureeing the food opens up many times more surface area for the microbes and the worms to begin munching on. The disadvantage to pureeing is that it introduces a lot of liquid moisture at once. It’s no more moisture than the food would contain if put in the bin in an un-pureed form, but that liquid would become freed up from that food at a much slower rate. People who puree the foods before adding them to the bin often do so in conjunction with adding something else that is dry at the same time, to help soak up some of that moisture. For example, adding rolled oats or even newspaper or cardboard shreds. The idea is to keep the liquid from collecting and pooling and turning the bin into a muck. Adding dry materials to suck up that moisture keeps the bin in balance.

There was a time when I did  the pureed food. That was a long time ago. It was a hassle to make it, for one thing, and it did make moisture control a challenge.  If you happen to have food that is already pureed (say, left over baby food or some such), by all means add it to your bin. If you are wondering if it’s worth the effort to puree your scraps before putting them into the bin, well, it may not be. Maybe you’d rather spend your time and energy on something else and let the worms do the work for you.

One other consideration: many people keep worms as part of their efforts to be good stewards of the environment. For these people, it doesn’t make sense to use electricity to puree the food when the worms will do the work on their own slightly slower schedule. They see this as incompatible with being “green.” That might be the case for you, too.

I am experiencing a fruit fly infestation. Don’t think, though, that this is something that will happen to everyone who has a worm bin. It happens to me when I get careless. It can be avoided.

My son put a the remains of a banana into one bin and didn’t get all of it covered. On top of that, I didn’t cover the entire surface of VC with a several-inch thick layer of newspaper shreds. So, the fruit fly eggs on the banana peel hatched and those fruit flies found a great place for further reproduction. When the problem didn’t resolve on its own, I decided I was going to have to take action. Yesterday I filled the entire empty area of the worm bin with newspaper shreds. What isn’t full of vermicompost and material the worms are eating is full of newspaper shreds. This should prevent the adult fruit flies from getting back to the vermicompost and materials from outside the bin. They will have to penetrate a LOT of newspaper shreds, and they just won’t be able to do much of this. So they won’t be able to lay more eggs. And conversely, those eggs already present that do hatch will be prevented from leaving the bin easily. It may take a couple weeks, but the infestation should resolve with these measures. (Of course, if a person with this problem has other sources of fruit flies around a house, then the problems with them will continue until those are fixed, as well).

In addition to making sure scraps are completely covered within the bin, there is another thing you can do to reduce the odds of a fruit fly infestation: freeze your scraps before adding them to the bin. Usually, I freeze my banana skins (and other fruit) for a couple days before adding them to the bin. The freezing kills the fruit fly eggs.  Next time, I’ll tell my son to put the banana skin in the freezer, instead of the worm bin!

I get more questions about roaches than probably any other topic. People want to know if worm bins will attract roaches. On the surface, it seems like worm bins could be ideal environments for roaches. However,  I’ve not heard of anyone ever having a problem with them. The only time I had roaches in a single bin was when I introduced materials that, unbeknownst to me had some roaches already in them. I had some great leaf mold/decaying leaves that I thought the worms would love. Turns out, other critters were already enjoying them, but I didn’t know that until after I added the material to my bin. Oops. What happened? I was fortunate in that it was a small bin and small numbers of roaches. Whenever I took the lid off that bin, I made sure I had something that I could use to squish the roaches. In this case, it was only one or two roaches running around at a time. After doing this several times, the roaches were mostly gone. I would get one here and there as it hatched. But they never had a chance to keep the cycle going. Now, in an environment where roaches are common, it might be different. In an outdoor setting, roaches are going to be in the worm “bin” at least occasionally as will many other critters and that isn’t something that would worry me.

This website has information on some common roaches and pictures of the egg cases. If you do have roaches in your worm bin, you can start to fight the problem by keeping on the lookout for egg cases. If you see any, remove and destroy them immediately.

Yesterday evening I started brewing a batch of AVCT (aerated vermicompost tea),  my first batch this season.

At 7:15 this evening I realized I’d better get a move on with the tea spraying. I grabbed my sprayer for the first time this year, opened it, saw the residue at the bottom and said, “Oh crap!” I’d forgotten one tiny detail: I can’t use this sprayer. Doh! This sprayer was used to spray mancozeb and other heavy-duty anti-fungal chemicals on my roses last year. Putting my microbial-rich tea in that would be an exercise of stupidity since it would kill them. So, I need a new sprayer. Dang it!

Well, spraying was out. So I had a choice: I could let the tea brew another day or I could apply it as a drench. I chose drench. I used a 1:5 ratio so my 3 gallons of tea would make 18 to apply. I added a couple of additional substances (like liquid kelp) and carried it out to the garden in 2 1/2 gallon batches. It took 7 trips like that. That might not sound like a lot, but my garden is far away. And each trip it seemed further. Next time I’m going to be smarter and take the tea and a hose out to the garden and do my diluting in situ. That would save a lot of time and effort. I didn’t have that brilliant idea until after I was done tonight, of course.

I didn’t have enough tea for all the plants, so only my roses got it, and I didn’t have enough for any roses outside of the rose beds. But those roses got 24 ounces apiece, except for some really small minis which got 12 ounces. If I could have, I would have given them each quite a bit more, at least a gallon apiece.

I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to do the foliar spray I’d planned on, but this tea and effort was not wasted by any means.  It feels good—very good— to have it done now.  Next time, hopefully, I’ll do the foliar spray. Just have to remember to get a new sprayer first!

I’ve got a fair amount of vermicompost accumulated. I’ve probably got 30 gallons in the garage and another 15 I’ve just set aside, and of course my herd is busy producing more all the time. It seems like a wealth of VC— unless you want to spread it on top of a garden in any thickness.

So what can I do to make the most of the vermicompost that I have?

I recently read The trophic diversity of nematode communities in soils treated with vermicompost. This study found that vermicompost applied to the soil had significant positive effects, particularly in reducing the number of plant parasitic nematodes and an increased yield. This likely isn’t news to any gardener who also vermicomposts. I crunched some numbers to turn their hectares and meters into square feet. At their lower rate of 5 t / ha, it turns out I’d need twenty-six pounds of vermicompost just for one of my beds. Good grief. Suddenly 45 gallons of VC doesn’t seem like so much.

But 45 gallons of VC is a veritable fortune when it comes to making vermicompost tea. At a cup per gallon of water used, a gallon of VC can make 16 gallons of tea! And a gallon of tea can go a tremendous way if it is applied as a foliar spray. Obviously it doesn’t stretch as far as a soil drench unless it is diluted if needed to make it go further. It simply means fewer microbes being applied per volume of water than when it is not diluted.

Clearly, for me and for many, vermicompost tea is the way to go. Now, there are a few very significant differences between applying vermicompost directly to the soil and applying it as a tea. While properly brewed VC tea contains far more microbes than the vermicompost itself, there are some components of the vermicompost that won’t transfer or multiply in the tea. Vermicompost contains auxins and other plant growth hormones which are very soluble. They will be in the tea once brewed, although they will not be multiplied as the microbes will be.  Vermicompost has qualities that make it a good soil conditioner and it absorbs water much more quickly than soil, so there are also a strong arguments for applying the vermicompost to the soil around plants.

The cool thing about making vermicompost tea, is that you can do both! Once you have brewed your tea, you can then apply the “spent” vermicompost around plants.

I may not have 100+ pounds of vermicompost to apply around my garden (I need to weigh what I have just to see, realizing of course, that the weight of the vermicompost varies depending on how much moisture it contains), but I can do a whole lot with the amount that I have.

I should note, too, that just because one study finds a particular application rate works doesn’t mean that there are not benefits to applying it at a lesser rate. The aforementioned components of vermicompost will still be beneficial, but perhaps not at the same degree as if applied at a heavier rate. A second note: more VC is not always better. Multiple studies have found, for instance, better growth rates of plants grown in soil mixes with as little as 5% VC compared to using 100% vermicompost.

After writing the other night about mold and fungi in the worm bin, I got to wondering: what is the difference?

In short, mold is a subset, a type of, fungi.

In the 1600′s, the first man to look through a microscope and see cells, Leeuwenhoek, studied fungi and observed several differences between plants and fungi:

• Fungi have no chlorophyll and therefore cannot make their own food.
• Fungi digest food outside their bodies by excreting enzymes that ooze out of the fungus body, and then absorb digested material through the cell walls.
• Fungal cells are simple in structure and function Ð each a clearly visible central body with nucleus. Most are tubular in shape, connected end to end and thereafter deploy as circular growths of hair-like material*.
• Fungi cells do not differentiate and therefore Fungi have no roots, stems, leaves, bark, etc.
• Fungi cell walls are made of chitin and other polysaccharides, not cellulose (Plants) or protein (Animals).
• Fungi reproduce by producing spores which are little more than a fragment of the parent fungus cell. Sexual reproduction is possible for some Fungi under certain conditions, but is infrequent. In most cases spores are produced without any cross-fertilization and, except for mutations, most spore are genetically identical to the parent cell.
• Virtually all growth occurs by elongation of hypal tips, i.e., the organism grows by elongating threads of itself, whereas it propagates by producing spores.
  

What Leeuwenhoek didn’t know and what scientists are still learning about today is that some types of fungi and most plants have a very intricate relationship, a mutual symbiosis. That’s a subject for another time.

I wrote the other night of sometimes seeing mold on bread in my bins. That mold was one specific form of fungi. The same is true for those couple of times when I’ve had a mushroom pop up in my bins. (A mushroom, incidentally, is the fruiting organ of the fungus and the fungus is there long before a mushroom sprouts). So, that white, webby cotton-candy-like fluffy stuff that I’ve found engulfing my bedding in the past? Fungi! And while it might be disturbing to see it in the worm bin, it’s just another member of the worm bin ecosystem of decomposers. (That doesn’t mean you have to allow all that fungus to remain in your bin, however. Remember, I removed it from mine). From the point of view of the worms, the fungus serves a dual purpose as both being food itself and also breaking down lignins and cellulose in leaves and other plant materials into forms bacteria (another food of worms) and worms themselves can utilize. Fungi excel at this. One interesting thing I learned while reading about this is that ruminants (cows and other animals who have four-chambered stomachs designed to digest cellulose in their vegetarian diets) have specific kinds of fungi living in their stomachs. Like all animals, ruminants have no enzymes capable of breaking down cellulose. Without those fungi, plants wouldn’t provide much nutrition or energy to those animals who rely on them as food.

There is one caution when it comes to fungi in worm bins that I didn’t think to mention the other night: allergies. If you have severe mold allergies, you need to be cautious. Although I don’t think you’re likely to have a problem unless you have such a high concentration of fungi that you smell and see it and see fruiting bodies, it’s not something I’d bet on. I do have mold allergies but, if it helps any to know this, I’ve never had any problems with reactions to mold in my bins.

A lot of people visit this blog, worried about mold and fungus in their bins, so I thought I’d address this. First of all, whether you see it or not, there is mold and fungus in your bins. Over the years I’ve had mushrooms sprout in the bins (only once or twice, but quite a surprise at the time) and once I even had a slime mold make an appearance. Yuck! Those are fascinating, but I’d just as soon not look at them. A commonplace mold in the bin is on breads.

Molds and fungi are just part of the decomposition process. But it’s the mold and fungus that people see which concern them, particularly the fluffy white stuff which can take over a bin.

I’ve had this more than once. It almost looks like cotton candy sometimes. I have only had it when I’ve used a shredded newspaper bedding.  The first time I opened the bin and saw a mass of white cotton-candy stuff, I was alarmed. I “stirred” the bedding around, to break up the mass. That didn’t eliminate the problem, though. So what I ended up doing after that was simply removing that bedding any time I found it.

I ended up setting up what I called my “fuzzy” worm bin. That was a bin containing nothing but the fuzzy bedding and whatever worms were in that at the time I removed it. My original reason for doing this was to see how the worms did in an environment where there was nothing but the newspaper and the fuzzy stuff for food. I wanted to know if it was harmful in the regular worm bin. As it turns out, the worms did just fine. Their population grew, although not nearly as fast as in a bin full of a variety of foods. (Newspaper by itself is a pretty lean diet for worms and I don’t know how much the fuzzies added). But the population did grow, so it clearly didn’t hurt them. Once I saw this, I just removed the bedding any time I found it getting fuzzy and tossed it into my fuzzy worm bin. I don’t believe there would have been a problem if I’d left that bedding in my bins; I don’t think it would have harmed things. I just didn’t like looking at it, so I put it in its own bin where I left it alone for long, long periods of time.

Eventually, I no longer ended up with bedding that got fuzzy. I don’t know what was different about it. I did move more to leaves as bedding, and that must have had a role. That is something you might try. I think the shreds got compacted in places and that is what led to the fuzzies forming. So, fluffing newspaper shreds and making sure they don’t clump and compact will likely help, as well.  Mixing with leaves would help prevent the clumping and compacting.

My husband told me he wasn’t sure what to get me for Mother’s Day but suggested we go to one of the big nurseries and I could browse and pick something out. I wasn’t particularly interested in that, but last night I ordered my gift and then thanked my husband for being so thoughtful.

What did I order? African nightcrawlers. What mom wouldn’t want worms for her special day? Ha! At any rate, I was feeding all my worms this evening and got to wishing (again) that I still had some Africans. I decided to quit wishing and get some. I ordered only a pound. We’ll see how it goes.

What’s so special about the Africans? From what I saw during that time I had them they produce castings at a much higher rate than the EFs. Since I have more garden than I have vermicompost for, I need all the castings production I can get!

(Incidentally, for Mother’s Day my wonderful daughter gave me a great card that came with coupons. One of the coupons was for a cup of worms she’d collect in the back yard! What a kid!)