Farmer Jon--Part One--Worms, Soldiers and the Soil

What started out with a frustration over the endless stream of junk-mail in conjunction with the entertaining, informative and frightening little movie, The Story of Stuff, (a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns) has taken me on an incredible journey of exploration and discovery, followed with some action.

Skye and I have made a couple of trips to the recycling center so she could see where the stuff in the Blue Bin goes and what happens to it.

I've been checking a lot of stuff on urban farming, recycling, composting and on and on ...

Which brings me to my own little recycling program, Extreme Composting.

Junk mail, newspapers, cardboard, almost anything made of paper can get shoved into this heavy duty shredder. The shredded paper then goes into either the worm farms or the compost drum.




The worms eat kitchen scraps, cereal, produce that's gone bad. I often puree it in a food processor to speed up the process.




That's a total of 5 worm farms with literally thousands and thousands of earthworms, (Eisenia fetida) making amazing fertilizer out of my garbage.






Since we don't have a lawn and not much in the way of leaves, our green bin typically finds itself filled with branches and shrubbery that is somewhat woody. Trying to compost this would take forever unless I had a heavy duty shredder/mulcher that would pulverize the vegetation, speeding the decomposition enormously.

Just be very careful, it could literally rip your hand off.







This compost tumbler is pretty cool. To aerate you just spin the drum a few times a week. A little help from the sun coupled with the shredded mulch mix gets you a nice compost. I can use it like that or put it in the worm bins to further break it down and make an even more nutritious mix for the garden.

So the end result is now we don't contribute nearly as much to landfills as before and we get a lot of worm castings (worm poop), mulch and compost.



At some point I ran across in the compost drum, the larvae of the Black Soldier Fly, Hermetia illucens. At first I thought they were maggots and that I was creating this massive fly problem, but after doing a little research, I found the opposite to be true and yet another way to decrease our landfill impact.





THE BIOPOD™: Food Waste Composter & Grub Grower


Unfortunately my first attempt to set this up was less than successful, so it is a work in progress. I am however very excited about getting it up and running. Like worm farms the initial set-up can be a bit tricky, where the lack of patience can lead to not such good results. Will keep you updated.