By Susan Ellis of Key Life Journeys

So the castings from my vermiculture efforts in the basement continue to be spread in the garden to fertilize my plants. I am always amazed by how much my worms eat and how little food waste has to go out in the green bin. I do wish all the stuff that does go to my curb was converted into methane gas for use as a really green fuel. But not likely in my city where the mayor believes cutting costs should be done by digging a hole and putting everything into it.

However I read an article in the Toronto Star’s Friday July 8^th edition called “Keeping the red worms happy” by staff reporter Patty Winsa. She had met up with Carol O’Dwyer, an employee at Ontario Place where a compost station is part of the new on site eco-learning centre. O’Dwyer asks the kids “what they know about composting, the process of turning food waste into soil, to try to get them excited about the value of food waste.” The best way to do that is to “Show them the worms.”

Wonderful!!!  Here they are.  These are my red wigglers. If even one child learns that we will destroy ourselves by continuing to be a throwaway society; if one child changes his/her behavior, O’Dwyer will have done her job.

                                        
                    Castings ready for the garden and with water added it makes worm castings tea

However my real interest was tweaked when I read about how she prepares the food. They use a second hand blender; the resulting mix is frozen into ice trays and then dished out to the worms one at a time. Now here is an idea worth developing. Firstly it would compact the food and certainly save me the time of chopping things up so finely. Worms don’t have teeth so must wait for food to decompose before feeding.

I have been keeping the food for the worms in the freezer for three reasons. I always like to have a supply waiting and storing in the freezer gets it out if the way. Secondly by having a period in the freezer fruit fly eggs that may have been present can be killed off. There is nothing worse than a swarm of fruit flies in the worm chalet. The third reason for the freezer is that this summer I have been cutting up weeds, pruning trimmings and dead headed flowers from the garden and feeding them to the worms. I do not know what livestock I would be bringing in – so into the freezer. I do have a composter at the bottom of the garden but have never been very successful at getting the temperature high enough to get much action.

Now one thing I have to be very careful about is separating the worm food from my own stored food in the freezer. Last winter I mistook a zip lock bag of chopped up leak leaves and roots I was saving for my red wigglers for a zip lock bag on chopped up leeks for my stew pot. I had to do some quick ladling when I realized my mistake. That batch of stew had a decidedly chewier texture. But I digress. I wanted to share my experience with my blender.

Blenders don’t work well if you are filling them with weeds. You have to start out with liquidy, pulpy stuff or the blades won’t go round. I don’t really want to add water as the living quarters of my worms are quite gooey enough. Then I remembered that my blender came with a separate plastic contraption, wider than the blending jug and with a slicing blade. With this I had more success. I could layer things better because it had a wider base. The end result was a much finer cut than I was doing by hand and took up less storage room. I won’t be using ice cube trays, but larger containers – well marked before they head for the freezer.

          

Now I brought some kale in from the garden for freezing - for me - this afternoon….where did I put it?