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Preparation

Previous: European Night-Crawlers

Monday, August 01, 2011

Above is a photo of a 3-gallon (?) pail I’ll use for mixing. But first ...

Here is a 3 Kg feta Cheese pail filled with paper slurry.

It is a grey yucky mess; be careful not to slop it over the floor!

Here are the food scraps for a couple of days.

I wouldn’t normally blend my food scraps, but right now I’m trying to make a homogenous mixture, so ...

Here we are after about 4 seconds on “Liquefy”.

That’s more than enough.

Here is a margarine tub of castings soil scooped from the top of my Fines tub.

I use a plastic tea-spoon to paw through them, looking for any worms or eggs. I can see neither, so I am fairly confident that the castings are just bacterial source, with no chance of Red Wrigglers hatching out of it.

Later: I realized that I could have made and strained a bacterial “tea” from these solids.

Oh well!

Here is that 3-gallon pail loaded with paper slurry, food scraps, and castings.

I stirred it for about thirty seconds, enough to put a bit of everything in contact with a bit of everything else.

I have placed it outside in the shade to ferment, and to dry out, for a couple of days.

Thursday, August 04, 2011

After three days sitting in the pail, I’ve spread the slurry out to dry on a large plastic tray.

You can see – by the water lapping at the near corner – that the slurry is water-logged, and hence not a fit home for worms.

Once the slurry is dry, I can break it into fragments which will provide a food source for worms.

The new bins will, of course, hold damp shredded paper as the lower layer; the slurry is just a fast way to introduce a stable population of bacteria into the bins.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Delivery is scheduled for next Thursday 25th.

Here is a shot of my food-cake prepared three weeks ago.

The slurry has dried out to a dry cake about 1 cm thick and about two square feet.

Here is a close-up of the cake, looking like a sub-arctic glacial deposit in a lake in Northern B.C.

I am encouraged by the shades of colour, browns mainly, to think that bacteria have worked their way through the matrix, and that, broken up into chunks, it will provide some fast-food for the babies when they arrive!

Next: Delivery

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Toronto and Mississauga, Sunday, June 09, 2013 9:55 PM

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