Wood Worm Farms

It was a beautiful day! Not only the weather, but also the atmosphere of cooperation and understanding to change our way of living in sustainable direction.
The people changed a lot for the last two years, since we started to participate in such events.
There were no more questions "What is composting?" or "Do you eat those worms?".
All of them had a compost bin (mostly outdoor one), many of them had a vermicomposter at home. This was our greatest success from all the exhibitions.

And all this happened thanks to Cooperative du Grand Orme and, Veronique Vendette personally.
There is no doubt the coop has all it's success due to her hard work and dedication.

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These little jungles at front are 6 tomato plants. They have an interesting history.
I salvaged them from a nursery's garbage heap at beginning of June. All six were relatively dry and broken.
I planted them on soil fertilized with vermicompost and didn't think they will survive.
But the summer was very wet and all tomato plants survived. They outgrew all my supporting polls and brought good harvest of tomatoes. All the summer I never added more
vermicompost or any fertilizer.

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The living force of nature is always amazing.
This pumpkin seed survived crushing blade in fall, squirrels in winter and spring, compost moving and heating on summer.
Now it runs against the time to get a new pumpkin before cold.

There are some worms, survived in this compost heap! So it could be called vermicomost for now.

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Sorry for a long silence. There were two reasons for it. First my camera went for a long trip without me, and second I was busy organizing several new projects.
Following the idea to bring my vermicomposting from the virtual reality to a firm local ground, I was trying to introduce worms into some nearby eco-businesses.
I think the preliminary results are positive.
Another project (following the example of Growing Power) is aquaponics.

(find 11 fish on the picture]
I've built this system myself and it was not too hard. The most problematic part was that the only appropriate lamp was 48" in length. I didn't find anything smaller for a normal price. So the lamp dictated all the stand dimensions.
According to Growing Power's web site, the right fish is Yellow Perch. So I've got some fry, frightened to panic. The main idea was to feed them worms from my bins, but they didn't
touch them. I tried Cichlid pellets, also with no success. I have the fish already for 2 days, but still can't find a food they will eat.
Plant seed are also in place, but still didn't germinate.
Let's wait more...

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Each year I repeatedly try to get my compost hot, but in vane.
This year I decided to turn all my outdoor compost heaps to vermicompost and they all heated up to extreme temperatures... Poor worms. I hope they had time to escape.
Now I know how to heat up compost from grass clippings.
1. Let the neighbors to collect their grass clippings
2. Collect the neighbors' plastic bags.
3. Let the clippings to ferment inside the bags for a week or two, depending how dry is
the grass.
4. Mix the clippings with the last year dead leaves (also collected by neighbors) approximately 1:1 and put on the heap.

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