The biggest mistake I made with the do it yourself garden cart worm bin was to not allow enough space at the bottom for the tea to drip to.

The next error was to use a drinking container spigot as a drain valve. It needs to be bigger with the ability to be turned on and left on as opposed to the push button mechansim of the spigot.

The good news is that the worms did great! Which goes to show you how easy it is to grow your own worms. Once the kinks are worked out I think this garden cart will make a fine over sized worm bin. One that will provide buckets and buckets of compost tea in the future.

Since the do it yourself golf cart dump box is working out so well we've decided the Heavy Hauler garden cart can start its new carreer as a large outdoor worm bin.

It took less than an hour to scrounge around for the parts and put it all together.
The spigot was salvaged from a thrift store drink dispenser. (Thanks Mom)

I used a couple of 2x2's cut to 30.5 inches for the bottom support and modified a portion of the willow wall to function as the floor. A small gap at the bottom helps to prevent the spigot from clogging and worms from drowning in their own tea.

Being on heavy wheels makes it easy to manuever and tilt for the most effecient drainage

In looking for ideas to expand our outdoor worm farming I found this clever use of a discarded bathtub as a medium sized worm bin at the pleasant lifeboat.co.nz.

We've decided to give this approach a try along with a few others so we can determine which one is most trouble free.

If you've got a good source of horse manure then you really need to put a small army of worms to work on that manure to speed up the composting action and take advantage of that wonderful worm tea. It's one of those things we neglected to set aside time to build back in the beginning, but sometimes it takes a while to wake up to the wonders of worm assisted home grown compost.

Meet our newest dwarf citrus --- Washington Navel Orange.  Isn't she cute?


Unfortunately, she is the textbook definition of rootbound.  One large root had literally grown all the way around the perimeter of the pot...although the plant had eschewed the stagnant dirt in the pot's bottom.

When  I asked Mark to buy me a pot, he came up with the absolutely best pot possible.  Notice how shallow and wide this pot is?  No more wasted soil on the bottom of the citrus pot!

I teased the orange's roots out and planted the tree in a mixture of partially decomposed horse manure and storebought compost.  I usually try to use worm castings or stump dirt for repotting, but I'm all out!  If the little orange tree seems to be struggling, I'll pop it back out and hunt down some better soil.

The permaculture way is to mix your own compost out of homegrown goodies and waste products from nearby, but our garden has grown faster than our capacity to come up with free compostables.  Last year, I top-dressed each of our vegetable garden beds with about 2.5 gallons of composted horse manure (equivalent to about 0.2 inches of compost, for a total of about 3 cubic yards), and I felt like the garden didn't grow as much as in previous years despite additional mulch.  Feeding the soil is a necessity, so we've broken down and bought storebought compost to allow us to double the application rate for this year.

As always, I have lots of crazy plans for creating as much compost as we need within the next year or two.  Here's a rundown of the top contenders:

• Horse manure.  We've got a steady annual supply of around two to three cubic yards of horse manure from the neighbors.  In the past, we've been guilty of applying some manure which was only semi-composted because we needed more organic matter immediately.  This year, I'm hoping the storebought compost will tide us over so that we can run fresh manure through a worm bin for use next year.
• Black soldier flies are on the horizon for this year, primarily because we want the free, high protein food to supplement the bugs our chickens will peck up naturally in the soon-to-be-built forest pasture.  If we find a source of free food scraps (difficult since we live so far from town and only make the trip once a week, on average), we could potentially create quite a lot of compost in the black soldier fly bins.
• Compost tea from the worm bin and the black soldier fly bins.  In the past, our summer worm bin has been on the ground, which means all of the high quality tea leaches out into the surrounding soil.  Mark's going to build new bins for this summer that collect the tea --- now I'll have enough to use on plants other than the potted citrus!
• Compost piles.  In the past, I've never had a compost pile, because I just threw the weeds and food scraps to the chickens or used them to build new raised beds.  This year, I hope to build some compost piles in the forest pasture to serve double duty as an insect reservoir for the chickens and a way to supplement my other sources of compost.  Potential components in these piles include leaves raked out of the woods, weeds pulled from the garden, wood chips and/or sawdust if we can find a free source, urine, manure from the chickens (naturally added as they scratch), duckweed, and comfrey leaves from my expanded patch.

I've got a whole 'nother set of goals for the mulch that goes on top of the compost, but this post is already too long!  By the way, the careful reader will have noticed that I included a photo of the year's first dandelion --- I guess this spring isn't a solid week behind last year's spring, at least according to the dandelions.

Reports of first frosts trickle down to me from friends in New England.  We're supposed to be safe in southwest Virginia until October 10, but I can feel the change of season pushing against our garden.  Tuesday, I scurried around freezing the year's last batch of corn along with some okra and broccoli.  Cross-striped cabbage worms had crept in amid the broccoli florets while I ignored the garden last week, so I tried to soak the heads in salt water with little success, instead ending up just picking off the caterpillars.

Still to be harvested this week are peas, swiss chard, green beans, basil, and summer squash (ate our first squash from the fall bed Monday!).  We might even dig up our sweet potatoes since they need a warm curing period just like winter squash.

Suddenly, other projects are also asserting their importance.  That water line we nearly buried in the spring needs to be finished, our bathing and chicken waterer construction shed looks awfully important all of a sudden, and even the worm bin will require some care to bring it through the winter.  Since we do our laundry in a wringer washer outdoors and dry the clothes on the line, now's a good time to hurry up and wash all of our bedding before cold weather makes drying comforters impossible.  We'd also like to turn our broken fridge into a cheap root cellar, but that project may not make it onto this year's agenda.  Fall sure is a busy season!

 

What makes a good worm bin better? A series of multiple levels that takes advantage of gravity, making it easy and fun to harvest the super valuable worm juice.

You can spend about a hundred bucks on a fancy commercial worm bin complete with drain spout, or you can build your own home made worm bin for well under half of that and use the left over cash to build a 2nd unit. Why build another one? It might help to experiment with some different kinds of worms to better match your climate, and 2 cups of worm juice is better than one.

The difficult part of outdoor worm bins is finding a warm place to move them in the winter or rigging up some sort of passive solar or electric blanket set up to keep the little rascals from freezing.

 

If you've ever wanted to have a table that eats food scraps and entertains you with visions of worms crawling about, then Amy Young has an interesting design you can build if you've got the stomach for it.

It's basically a fancy worm bin with a low light security camera wired up to an LCD screen embedded into the table for your viewing pleasure. I like the idea, but wonder about the smell level and the possibility of a fruit fly problem?

Our movie star neighbor has an absolutely stunning Dwarf Meyer Lemon that he brings inside for the winter.  Last year, he got 91 delicious lemons from a tree no more than three feet tall (though more like six feet wide.)

Mark's mom heard us enthusing over our neighbor's tree, and Christmas 2007 a baby lemon tree was waiting for us at her house.  We put our tree in a five gallon pot, showered the lemon with love, compost tea, and vermicompost, and ate our first four lemons at this time last year.

This year, there are two big fruits starting to ripen, seven baby lemons no more than a couple of inches in diameter, and another passel of blooms just opening.  But as you can see in the photo above, the older leaves are starting to look chlorotic (turning yellow between the veins), denoting a nutrient deficiency.  Our movie star neighbor fertilizes his tree regularly with Miracle Grow, but we're trying to go the organic route.  This spring, we topdressed with a gallon or two of compost, which prompted scads of blooms, but our lemon has clearly worked her way through all of the nutrients.  I fed her again this week, this time with a gallon of composted horse manure, and am hoping that the recent rain has washed enough nutrients over her roots to keep her producing.

Mark dreams of some day having two mature dwarf lemon trees, which we figure would be just about enough to keep us in lemons all year.  I'm hoping our dwarf tangerine (a year younger than our lemon) will join the mix and keep us citrified.  Citrus is often one of the hardest things for locavores to give up, and we'd like to avoid that sacrifice.

We've learned a lot about animals this year too.  Strider joined our menagerie and has since become an indispensible purrer.  Now that our pet count has reached three, we've gotten a bit more serious about bad behavior.  Last year, it seemed like Lucy picked a couple of garden beds and lay on them every day or so, crushing all of the vegetables there.  Huckleberry would also pick favorite beds and tear up young seedlings in the loose soil.

This year, we've pretty much nipped that behavior in the bud.  When I see the first signs of pet damage in the garden, I loosely stack branches on the bed to keep all animals out.  The branch technique seems to be 100% effective, and branches can be safely removed once the veggies get tall enough to make a scratchy bed.

We've also added two new types of livestock to our farm this year --- earthworms and honeybees.  We're still learning how to make the best use of them, but I'm thrilled to learn that both are relatively easy and that honeybees aren't scary.  Probably by this time next year, I'll have something more to say about bees and worms.

Eventually, every homesteader will be faced with the thorny issue of livestock.  Chances are that your homesteading dreams included lots of animals giving you fresh milk, eggs, and meat.  The reality, though, is that animals can use up your time so quickly that you're working for them instead of vice versa.

My first piece of advice for new homesteaders is to make a distinction between pets and livestock.  Use your own judgement on the pet front --- we love our cats and dog and believe that the time we put into them is totally worth it for our own mental stability.  We don't even pretend that our pets pull their weight on the farm with their limited mouse-catching and deer-chasing abilities.  But we also know that having more than our current two cats and one dog would be too much for us to handle.

In the world of livestock, as I mentioned earlier I do recommend that all homesteaders start out with a worm bin.  Most homesteaders will also be able to handle a few chickens either their first or second year, especially if they are careful to start small.  If you are big honey eaters the way we are, I would recommend getting honeybees around year two or three, once you're established and have a bit of time to devote to their care.

What about bigger animals?  We divide larger livestock into three main categories --- draft animals, dairy animals, and meat animals.  Due to our own failed experience with mules, I recommend that unless you've had experience with draft animals in the past and have at least an hour a day to devote to them, you save draft animals for later (if ever.)  To me, dairy animals are in the same boat --- you need to be willing to be tied down twice a day for the rest of your life.  (With just our pets, chickens, bees, and worms, we can go out of town for a few days without needing to find a farm-sitter.)

If you want to branch out beyond worms, bees, and chickens, I would start with meat animals.  Even so, I wouldn't consider embarking on the project unless I had a good pasture and a place to store hay for the winter.  Small meat animals like poultry and rabbits might fit into year three or four of your ten year plan, but I suspect that larger animals would be closer to year nine or ten.

Of course, as with all parts of your homesteading plan, you should decide what's most important for you.  If all you've ever dreamed about is having a milk cow, then by all means move it up to year two and put off the garden until year four.  After all, the best part of a homestead is the way it allows you to choose your own adventure.  Don't forget to have fun!

Unless you happen to have bought a farm from an organic gardener, chances are that fertility should be your first concern when it comes to gardening.  Although I don't recommend that beginning homesteaders do much in the way of livestock, I do believe that everyone should start a worm bin immediately.  Worms take nearly no time and create some high quality compost to get you started.

If you have a half hour per day to put into the operation, I also recommend that you build a chicken tractor with two to five chickens in it.  (Start small!)  You can use the chicken tractor to add fertility to worn out parts of the soil while you start gardening in higher quality areas.

Next, start scrounging for free fertility in the surrounding area.  If you live in town or near town, stock up on garbage bags full of leaves in the fall.  If you're out in the country, start asking your livestock-owning neighbors what they do with their manure.  Chances are they'll give it to you for free if you haul it away.  If your farm has a large wooded area attached, you should also go out hunting stump dirt, which is some of the best potting soil around.

Stop and chat with the tree cutting folks and ask them if they will dump some mounds of wood chips in your yard --- they often need a way to dispose of these chips and will give them to you for free.  Be aware that you need to let wood chips rot for a couple of years before using them as mulch.

Building the fertility of your soil is a long term investment in your land.  Not only that, mulch will cut your weeding work in half while increasing yields.  You will have a better garden in the long run if you hunt down fertility sources before planting a huge garden.

I have a dirty little secret.  I'm an organic gardener, and I don't compost.  Ssh!  Don't tell anyone!

Every organic gardener I know is obsessed with their compost pile, with the perfect mix of browns and greens, the perfect temperature, the perfect moisture content.  But I'm lazy, lazy, lazy.  I take my food scraps and I toss them to the chickens, then I let the chicken manure drop straight into the soil.  I only harvest the results two times removed when I mulch with grass clippings.  I also truck in horse manure from a neighbor and use pulled weeds to build new raised beds.

My worm bin does create compost from the few food scraps chickens won't eat, but only a gallon or two at a time.  Just right for our potted citrus, but not for much else.  Lately, I've been experimenting with ways to increase our output, and my newest experiment is to soak cardboard and add it to the bin.  I've been looking for a good use for our junk paper and cardboard --- so hard to recycle when you live an hour from the nearest recycling center.  It's early days yet, but I have high hopes that the cardboard will add to our vermicompost.

On the other hand, if you want to go the traditional composting route, you might want to check out this page of composting pointers which Everett put together. It's got short, sweet, and to the point articles about why and how to compost.

In a permaculture situation, worms have other uses beyond soil health.  The best example comes from Harvey Ussery, who has built massive worm bins in his greenhouse.  He uses the worms to create compost and also harvests the worms as a high protein treat for his chickens.  Maybe someday we'll have that many worms!

How about in the garden?  Earthworms can be very useful, speeding up decomposition of organic matter and working it into the soil.  Their burrows also form channels which fluff up compacted soil and give roots an easy avenue to grow down.  So far, I haven't seen anybody saying anything negative about earthworms in an agricultural setting, though please comment if you know otherwise!

The best way to expand your garden's earthworm population is to go no-till.  One study suggested that tilling up a garden dropped the earthworm population to a third of its former levels.  Mulching is another way to increase your earthworm levels, as is adding lime to raise the soil's pH.  Chemicals are a definite no-no if you want worms.

If you live north of the glaciation line, you might want to check out this pdf key to invasive earthworms.  You can read about the ecological groups of earthworms here, and can also see photos of some of the worst invasives.  We should all be very careful about any earth-moving operations which can introduce invasive worms, and should definitely refrain from dumping excess bait worms in the wild.

The question I really wanted answered, though, was --- should I hunt down my vermicomposting worms and smash them?  Lumbricus rubellus is an invasive species which is occasionally used in worm bins.  Luckily, most vermiculture worms are Eisenia fetida, a species that appears to be safe to use, even though it's not from around here.  You can identify the troublesome L. rubellus by its dark red to maroon color with a yellow underside and no striping between segments.  If you have it, kill it!  Luckily, it looks like our worms are Eisenia.

Just because we have native earthworms, though, doesn't mean that the invasives aren't a problem.  We've introduced species from elsewhere for bait, vermicomposting (gulp!), and accidentally in plant roots.

The biggest problems from these invasive earthworms is occurring in previously glaciated areas where native earthworms don't occur.  There, invasive earthworms are totally changing soil dynamics by eating up the duff (leaf litter) on the forest floor, which in turn affects the trees and wildflowers which grow there.

Even down here in the South, we have invasive earthworms.  When competing with native earthworms, invasives tend to gain a foothold in disturbed and fragmented forests.  Scientists are beginning to realize that invasive earthworms down here may be linked to the spread of invasive plants like the extremely troublesome Japanese Stiltgrass and might also compete with our forest salamanders.

In gardening circles, worms are considered a panacea.  In ecological circles, though, you'll hear talk of the dangers of invasive earthworms.  So, what's the dirt on wrigglers?

I've heard it bandied about that there are no native earthworms in the U.S.  Wrong.  The Wisconsian glaciation, which ended 12,000 years ago, did wipe out earthworms under the ice, but this only affected the northernmost states.  Since then, the native worms have advanced back north a bit past the glaciation line. 

Here in southwest Virginia, we've got native worms.  Unless you live out west or way up north, you probably do too.

I've spent all week writing and editing so that I could turn in the first complete draft of my book yesterday.  Words may be a bit scanty on the blog over the next few days as the well refills.

For now, enjoy a visual journey through our garden.  Self-seeded chamomile and poppies are blooming, the sweet potatoes are rooting, the worms are slithering, and the peaches are swelling.

Worms are one of our newer permaculture additions to the farm.  Just like chicken tractors, worm bins add animals and fertility back to the garden ecosystem in a controlled manner.  You can read about our experiments with an indoor worm bin here.

Last week, I decided it was time to move our worms to larger quarters outdoors.  Although we'd been planning on trying an outdoor worm bin eventually, the move was mostly the result of a mistake I made.  All winter, I kept the bin healthy by feeding the worms solely on Mark's tea bags.  But a month or so ago I started cleaning out our winter stores, throwing in a lot of rotting sweet potatoes and nasty frozen peaches.  It was way too much food all at once (and too wet because of the peaches), so we ended up with a fruit fly paradise.

When we have time, we'll probably make a more professional outdoor worm bin, but for now I put a quick one together in an afternoon.  I placed a few cinderblocks in a rectangle to form a basic perimeter, spread my current worm bin contents over the ground in the center, and topped it all off with a load of grass clippings from the mulching lawnmower.  It's essential that worms stay cool and damp, so I put the outdoor bin in the shade behind the trailer where it also gets runoff from the roof.  In a few weeks, I'll give you an update on how our exterior bin is doing!

I've been meaning to post a worm update for a while, so I appreciate the question.  The savvy reader will recall that we were given a bunch of worms three and a half months ago and made them a low tech worm bin which gave us a bunch of compost tea a month later.  And then I stopped talking about them.

The reason you didn't hear any more about worms is because they are the easiest livestock you'll ever have....

Our worms seem to be having a good time in their worm box, though the cold makes them a bit sluggish. 

We put the box under the sink where there's a bit of drip, so water slowly works its way through the composting leaves and organic matter to collect in our bottom container.  The drip keeps the worms nicely damp and has also made us quite a bit of delicious compost tea. 

Since I started watering our lemon tree and tomato with the compost tea, they've both been growing much faster.  Yay for compost tea!

Worms!  Some slightly dehydrated annelids arrived Thursday.  Most had crawled out of the box and into the paper wrapping, which Dennis had luckily taped very well before mailing.  Thank you so much, Dennis, for the new additions to our farm!

I re-wet the leaves in our worm box and put the little wrigglers in.  Most sat on the surface, stunned, but a day later they had spread down among the wet leaves where I had to dig to find them.  They didn't seem to have touched the tea bags which I buried as starter food, but worm castings were in evidence.

For those not in the know, the worm of choice for vermicomposting is red wrigglers, a name referring to two species which are both a good deal smaller than the worms you probably dig up in your garden on a regular basis.  I've never tried vermiculture before, so I'll be sure to keep you updated about their adventures, though will try to refrain from my urge to poke at the worms several times a day to see what they're up to.

I hate to leave folks dangling, so I feel obliged to give a heads up on a few projects which don't yet merit a full post.

The wriggling worms didn't make it into my grubby little hands Wednesday, but our buddy promised to mail us some soon.  So hopefully sometime in the next few weeks I'll get the worm bin up and running!

In between cutting wood and a thousand other projects, Mark and I have been working on our water problems all week.  Mark got the big pump in the creek running again, so our thousand gallon tank is full of wash water.  Meanwhile, I figured out that the reason our well pump wasn't running was because it was unplugged, though I didn't get it pumping since there's ice in the line.

The biggest part of the water project is burying the lines, which Daddy warns must be done at a two foot depth to prevent freezing.  I'm so bad at judging the time it will take to complete farm projects, so I put that on my agenda to complete for Wednesday --- the picture here shows the 5% of the trench I've dug since then.  Currently, we're musing over whether it'd be cost effective to rent a ditch witch.

Finally, I got my web design, grant writing, and biological inventorying website up and running.  Check it out, and give me a holler if you have any projects to send my way!  I'm at the stage where I could really use some word of mouth pointing folks toward my consulting business.  Thanks in advance!

Tomorrow, we'll be adding dozens of new livestock to our family.  Yup, it's time for worms!!!

Mark has been trying to talk me into worms for months, but I've resisted since I hate to take any scraps away from the chickens and I don't like using up indoors space.  (Outdoor worm bins don't work in cold weather.)  But I was won over by the promise of rich compost tea to help our houseplants thrive, and by the free worms being offered to us by Dennis from Florida.

The simple worm bin I built this afternoon is based loosely on Whatcom County's Cheap and Easy Worm bin, but is only a one tray bin with a large reservoir beneath to collect the compost tea.  Many sites recommend simply placing the lid of the container under your bin to collect the liquid, but that seems prone to spillage and I want lots of tea.  Also note the air holes drilled around  the sides and in the bottom of the worm bin tray.

I filled the bin halfway up with wet leaves, including a few handfuls of dirt and eggshells, then covered the bedding with a wet piece of cardboard.  Once the worms arrive and settle in for a few days, we'll begin to feed them.  I'm looking forward to learning about the wonders of vermiculture!