‘You are what you eat’ it says somewhere above in the blog’s banner – and in a similar vein, the fertiliser from your worm farm is all about what the worms eat. Then the vegies ‘eat’ that, and you eat the vegies… as unsavoury a direction as this may be taking, it is pretty important stuff. I have previously written on the wondrous stuff that comes out of the worms with my feeding them kelp gathered off the beach (here), and now I have knocked it up a few more notches with simple buckets of cow manure.
To get to our cabin, we drive through a few paddocks where cattle graze, congregate near gates, and dump (in doing so also pushing up some decent field mushrooms). While I appreciate that the manure is a key part of the nutrient cycle for the pasture, thus back to the cattle and therefore for my neighbour, it remains that these same cattle keeping ending up through the fence and stomping around my otherwise clean dam. The silver lining to that cloud is a right to cow poo. A bucketful of dry pats flung in a bucket (a game the Boy happens to love), brought back to town and then into the worm farm goes an amazingly long way.
It’s not just that the worms seem to adore it and that manure in itself is obviously good fertiliser, but perhaps mostly that the worms multiply like crazy in it. With a teeming population of worms, everything else in there works better too: The kitchen scraps, the kelp (that also seems to have its gelatinousness balanced by the well munched grass fibre); and since I moved the worm farm to the office salad garden, a fairly healthy dose of coffee grounds and a bit of the shredded office paper. Altogether it pumps out a worm juice that makes that salad garden go nuts plus plenty to spare. Although this may all read like another gardening post, don’t forget that it really begins out in the countryside, foraging. For poo.
Caveat: Cows are often treated with Ivermectin as a drench, primarily as a treatment against worms, so you don’t want their manure in your worm farm if they have had it recently (28 days withholding periods apply for milking or slaughtering for human consumption as some kind of guide). You may want to ask the farmer before you go taking any risks with it.
Father and son picking up cow manure in a bucket for the kitchen garden, what’s better than that?
A 3D movie and $50 worth of its merchandising?… but here’s hoping he survives that parental neglect.