Before and after image of compost. Six days work by the worms! Yesterday I looked again at my 10 litres of compost with the worms in it. The texture was unbelievably changed. So dense and like pure worm castings that I thought I'd better remove the worms from it. The volume had dropped by at least half.
It is too dense to sow directly into so I will have to mix it with compost before sowing. I had initially thought that a few days of the worms in the compost would just add enough castings to improve its quality and give it some of the properties that make castings so valuable, but maybe the sheer quantity of worms managed to process virtually all of the compost. It would certainly be a good way of getting some castings in a hurry- for example to set up a growing experiment or to give to someone to convince them of the power of worm castings.
The unexpected result I got was the number of cocoons in the bin. I pulled out over a hundred, but as I said the compost was so dense and sticky that I'm sure I missed plenty. I'm leaving it in the sun to dry today to see if I can extract more.
So I set up a new container of compost to start again. But this time I am adding twice the amount of compost and leaving it for the same six days to see what result I get. Why? Just because!
2 comments:
Cath,
Did you add moisture or did you just leave the compost as it was?
I added some water at the beginning of the six days, but then the compost had no lid, just a damp cloth. (the picture in the first post is after compost was wetted.)
Post a Comment