[compost_tea] Worm food

From: Scott Alexander <daylily_at_bigpond.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 21:07:30 +1000


  Maybe this email has nothing to do with compost teas but I think anything to do with microbes is relevant.

  Stuart mentioned "Talking about worms and chickens in this context it's worth remembering that *neither have teeth*." If a food won't break down to very small particles or go soft it won't pass through a worm."

  I'm no expert on earthworms but it is my belief that worms don't eat anything other than microbes and their residues. I put some old wood chips covered in fungi (Active F 41.3 & Total F 1055 Hyphal Diameter 3) on my bathtub size worm farm and covered it with wet sacking. Within a couple of days they had devoured them. Does this make my vermi-compost highly fungal? I would say so.

  I've heard folks with small home worm farms say that their worms clean up lettuce leaves very quickly. My understanding is that bacteria quickly covered the lettuce and the worms got stuck into the bacteria. One day I must conduct an experiment with lettuce and worms. In one bucket put lettuce leaves washed in distilled water, add few dozen worms, put the lid on, and see if the worms are interested in the leaves. In another bucket just add lettuce leaves and worms, and see which leaves get consumed first.

  Another worm story . . . . . Early this year I bought 60 cubic yards of poultry manure/sawdust litter blend to use to make a huge compost heap. Things didn't work out the way I planned so i left the heap to "cool down" for 6 months before using a thin layer of it as a mulch. During that six months some kikuyu grass had grown up onto the pile and when i took the manure from there I saw the most amazing thing. Under the grass and amongst its roots were 1000's of big native worms but elsewhere there was not a worm in sight. What were the worms "eating"? Roots? Decomposed manure? Bacteria?

  If you're still with me, here's another worm story . . . . I poured the remains of my last CT (tea and sludge which had gone anaerobic overnight) over and under the sacking and cardboard on one worm farm but not the other and the difference in worm activity between the two after two days was incredible. It would seem that the worms in the first one had deserted their usual food source and headed for "desserts" which was made up of zillions of microbes.


  Stuart continued "A better bet might just be the addition of rock dust to the worm bin food supply to act as a grinding agent in the digestive system of the worm."
  I spread tons of rock dust * on the pastures a couple of years before I intend making the new stockbeds for my daylilies. It's my understanding that the microbes will very slowly break the dust down into its mineral components and these will eventually become food for my plants. (* 10 tonnes per hectare)
  BTW - several farmers in our area used rockdust exclusively every second year as a "fertiliser" before they stopped dairying (deregulation of the dairy industry forced many farmers in our area to give up and turn to cattle)

  Scott Alexander
  Maleny. Queensland
  daylily_at_bigpond.com
   




Received on Tue Oct 21 2003 - 11:22:14 EDT

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