What are worm castings? A detailed look at our vermicomposting process!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ก.ค. 2024
- Welcome to our vermicompost (worm poop) farm! We are excited to take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of our small operation, where we transform organic waste into nutrient-rich worm castings. Discover the fascinating process of vermicomposting and learn how it benefits soil health, plant growth, and our environment. If you want to learn more about what we do visit us online at backtoearthworks.com
We began vermicomposting about 6 years ago with a goal to reduce food waste in our landfills and have since grown and adjusted our operation as we started doing urban landscaping applications for our city of Fort Wayne, IN. Through this service derived our 'regenerative gardening kit' which focuses heavily on reintroducing vital biology that your garden and landscape plants love. Remember that biology in the soil works directly with plants and their roots to help process nutrients for the plants. We are supporting this ecosystem with a goal of reducing and limiting chemical inputs which have shown to harm our environment. Increasing water absorption and reducing runoff, offering naturally resistances to plants, and much more.
Our kit is crafted specifically for homesteaders and those who want to grow more nutritious plants naturally! Contact us if you have any questions or leave a comment below!
Great work and good luck in business
Hi there, I really enjoyed your video. It was Jan packed with information I can use as a domestic worm farmer. New subscriber!
~ Sandra
You have a nice worm system up and running.
Thanks for checking us out!
Love your worm set up 🇳🇿🪱
Oh my gosh thanks so much for checking us out!
Thank you such an informative explanation this one video saves watching 100s to get the amount of information. My father and grandfather farmed in this way naturally with cow manure worms and fertile soil and over the years this has declined to dry cracked hard soil.
Good luck for the future.
We were actually at a regenerative farm a few weeks ago and they farmed next to a 'traditional' farm and the differences were night and day
Awesome man, looks like you got the right idea. I wish you great success.
Thank you so much!
Fascinating stuff, are you yourself a fellow soilfoodweb school graduate? You seem very well versed in soilfoodweb concepts. I am lucky enough to live in Southern California near the coast and can worm farm year round outside. My red wigglers heard has grown quite large after doing this for about 4 years. Good show 👏👍, cheers
We definitely took Elaine's course and we were at a conference a few weeks ago where we got to chat with Liz Haney a bunch which was awesome
Please tell us more about your climate controlled sections. Keeping red wiggler worm active over winter at scale is a problem for those of us who regularly get below 40F (which is where worm death begins.)
How are you heating those over winter areas?
We try to keep the climate control simple. Just a space heater plugged into a timer plug that sits inbetween two of the worm bin stacks. We set the timer to run the heater generally for an hour every other hour and that typically keeps it about 60 degrees F inside the climate control room.
@nicksorg170 So, essentially you build a shell/frame to accommodate a stack of bins 3 high & 2 wide, then skin it with reflective foam board?
If you could tell us more about dimensions & materials, that would help...Also brand & wattage of heater.
(I did something like this with a Johnson-Su Bioreactor, but lost it to freezing when an ice storm took out power for 3 days. No back-up power. A JSB is essentially a big stand-up worm bin. RIP worms. 😭)
@@flatsville9343 I'll make sure he sees this and gets back to you
You got it right, lumber frame with reflective foam boards, the thicker the better, seal them with insulating tape. Dimensions can be whatever you need them to be. If our power ever went out that would be a problem, never thought of that haha. Guess we'll have to get a generator in case. As for the heater I don't have specifics on brand or wattage. Whatever the most efficient electric heater you can get from a Menards or big box store will do the trick. The worm bins do a good job of capturing the introduced heat from the space heater. Just make sure it is sized appropriately for your climate control room.
this is great ill have to build myself some stacked bins i dont own equipment tho but it triples his sq footage
It definitely helps to be able to store moving up, we use less space for the temp controlled rooms, which means less equipment goes into maintaining the temp, less spending overall
I've heard of people building racks that they can slide totes in and out for handling by hand. Same concept smaller size
Great video great information. You may be new to TH-cam, but it’s evident you’re not new to Verma composting and the science behind it. How does one get his hands on some of your product?
Hey there you can visit us online it's our (brand name) dot com. We sell two sizes of vermicompost bags at the moment but we are mostly focused on our regenerative kit, our vermicompost is just a portion of that!
Maybe food scraps from restaurants or grocery store would be me ecological than fish emulsion.
We were doing this, we had a connection to a some local restaurants and were collecting food scraps, unfortunately a lot of food that comes out of restaurants is super processed, it took a lot of time and effort to gather scraps every week, and we didn't see as good of results as when we adjusted our feed mix
Fish emulsion is different from hydrolosate, or however it's spelled
@@dribblingdrooler3616 Correct! Fish hydrolysate is a liquid made from fish parts, like heads and bones, that are left over after processing. The parts are ground up and broken down using natural enzymes, which turn the fish proteins into smaller pieces. This resulting liquid is typically very rich in nutrients like proteins, amino acids, vitamins, and minerals
@BackToEarthWorks right on! I use leaf mold from my woods to help with the process. I fully enjoyed your video and had to subscribe. Thanks for the knowledge.
How do you make your BioChar? -Thanks
would you mind sharing where you get your testing done? im looking to get my castings tested.
We are in Indiana and we use a soil scientist up in Michigan I believe (I'm just the marketing side of our company so I can't say for sure) If you want to shoot us an email (ourbrandname)@gmail we can forward you her information
Here is a link for testing. She does a great job, knows her stuff well, and is reasonably priced compared with others.
pottfarms.com/products/soil-biology-testing
Would you be a soil nerd or soil hippie ?
Do the hay seed from the horse manure die? I thought they’d have to go through a thermophilic compost.
If you let it age as he was doing then run it through the worms very little seeds will make it. When I used to use horse manure in my process I did thermophilic compost it first to destroy weed seeds and to kill potential pathogens. I had to stop using horse manure because much of the local feed stock are tainted with persistent herbicide which does not break down in a compost pile fast enough. I really like his process here, not enough vermicomposting is done with leaves on youtube. Leaves are gold ✨️💛👌
@@Soilfoodwebwarrior we are hoping to source from regenerative farms in the future but we use a local farmer who really takes care of his animals and sources his feed from other locals. We had an incredible trip to a regenerative farm recently and it opened our eyes. We are always learning, growing, and adjusting what we do and we are excited to see so many awesome comments and responses from the community we are hoping to build as well! Thanks for taking the time to reply!
@@Soilfoodwebwarrior bingo baby