100 worms in a lunchbox

Exactly what it says- the latest experiment. 100 Eisenia Hortensis worms, from my can o worms, placed in a lunchbox with compost sprinkled with an eggshell/ oatmeal/ cornflour mix. Lets see how many cocoons I can get out of that!

Review- Leaving the World by Douglas Kennedy

Douglas Kennedy is an American born writer, now living on this side of the Atlantic, dividing his time between London Paris and Berlin. Following a career in theatre and newspapers, he wrote a number of travel books before writing three well-received thrillers between 1994 and 1998. In 2001 he changed genre completely to write 'The Pursuit of Happiness', a literary romantic tale set against the back-drop of the Mc Carthy witch-hunts. He has continued to write intelligent fiction about complex characters in novels including 'A Special Relationship' (2003)and most recently 'The Woman in the Fifth' (2007). He is a self-confessed culture addict and his books are filled with frequent and lyrical references to film, literature and music. 'Leaving the World' is no different.
The book opens with a declaration by heroine Jane Howard on her thirteenth birthday, that she will never get married or have children. “No one's actually happy,” she adds. But words, as her mother (and life) will continually remind her, 'have consequences'. Her father leaves home the next day and Jane's mother will spend the rest of her life mythologising her marriage and blaming Jane for its loss.
Douglas Kennedy's strength lies in producing finely drawn characters thrown by the randomness of life into unbearable situations which, though not their own fault, arise through their flaws. Fans of Kennedy's will quickly recognise this in Jane Howard. She enters adult life starved of approval and with a terror of abandonment and pursues success in her academic career so rigorously that she leaves little time for friends. Her love affairs are with men as damaged as she is. She refuses to commit fully to David, the love of her life and the one man who might save her. And, when she is similarly unable to save him, he dies in an tragic accident.
Jane escapes into a career in finance, deciding to 'make real money' to bolster her self esteem. She is successful but her life soon implodes once again when she makes an unwise decision motivated by the desire to impress her long-absent father. A retreat back into academia leads to an on-off relationship with the with the wildly unstable film-fanatic, Theo and they have a child together. From here things go rapidly downhill for Jane as Theo's involvement in a risky film venture eventually drives her close to bankruptcy and towards heartbreaking tragedy.
By now, her damaged psyche leaves her unwilling or unable to trust those who have her best interests at heart, and Jane 'leaves the world'. Cutting off all contact with her old life, she builds a new life away from anyone who knows her. It is only when a child from a nearby community disappears that she must chose whether to remain anonymous, nursing her damaged sense of self back to life, or follow her instincts and get involved.
'Leaving the World' is a fast-paced, stylishly written novel. But at times it feels over-plotted. Some of the plot-turns feel like devices to set up later action. For example Jane's brief foray into the world of high finance is interesting, but short and unsatisfying, giving the impression that it is included merely to submit her to the final destructive betrayal by her father and leave her in a healthy enough financial position to be a target for later fraud. Similarly the final denouement, the story of the missing child, although it reads like a good thriller with a high potential for horror to keep the reader gripped, (Kennedy is making good use of his early writing experience), it is only loosely tied into the rest of Jane's story.
But for all that, Kennedy has turned out a book that will be popular with his many fans (he is translated into sixteen languages and has sold millions), and he will win readers over with his well written and lyrical investigation of how single random events shape lives.

Leaving the World by Douglas Kennedy
Hutchinson
451 pp £14.99

This review first appeared in the Irish Times Weekend Section on 14t March 2009

Cocoons.

This a picture of the second lot of cocoons I rescued from the compost in the 'vermi-powering'
experiment. So all in all, I reckon I harvested over 300 cocoons from 600g worms in compost for six days. Not a bad way of increasing stock!!

Result of vermi-power experiment

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!

An experiment using worms to vermi-power compost without having to wait for finished castings.

Researchers have found that adding vermicompost or worm castings to seed compost can enhance germination and reduce diseases such as damping off, so I was determined to give it a try this year.
Unfortunately the bottom tray of my can of worms still contains a fair bit of undigested matter. For obvious reasons I don't want that on my windowsill exposed to flies etc. So I thought I'd try an alternative method of adding vermi-power to my compost.

I took about 10 litres of unused, finished garden (not vermi) compost, sieved it and placed it in a plastic crate. Then I added 600g of worms (Eisenia Hortensis or European night crawlers). I added some food to the system, just to help the worms settle in, but there should be a fair number of microbes and organic matter in the compost for the worms to consume- my hope being that in a week or two, most of the compost will have passed through the worms' intestines and have been “vermi-fied”. The food was added at the top of the compost, on a knitted cloth, to stop food from mixing with the compost, so that when I 'harvest' my compost I won't have food mixed through it.

Also, I have noticed in the past that there tends to be a concentration of cocoons near the cloths, perhaps because the worms like using the holes in the weave to anchor themselves while shedding the cocoon. So hopefully I'll be able to rescue some cocoons before I use the compost for potting up seeds.

Some references:
http://www.codis2008.ch/documents/posters/P13-Lazcano-Session4_1.pdf
http://www.ecoyardfarming.com/wormcompost/seed-germination-trials-with-vermipost/
http://www.redwormcomposting.com/interviews/interview-with-allison-jack/

Some pictures:


Worms removed from can o worms ready to move into their temporary home. (the cloth is so that when they move away from light, through cloth they will leave behind any traces of their old bedding).









Lifting cloth to show worms travelling through it.























Worms have settled in













Food in place
















Moisture cloth in place