Getting all wiggly at the worm cafe

Don't you love it when folk give you a second chance in life?

It makes you feel grateful doesn't it, especially when you're carrying a whole load of guilt about being a...

...Worm Murderer!

Yes a killer of defenceless little wiggly things.

I know. I am guilty as charged m'lord and I don't feel good about it.

Which is why I am thankful for a lovely gift I received from Wiggly Wigglers, which arrived on my doorstep just over a month ago.



It was their latest wormery...appropriately called the Worm Cafe, giving me the opportunity to make up for my misdemeanours.

The Can-o-Worms wormery that I'd previously been using had been going quite well until we hit winter last year, when I really couldn't be bothered to take my peelings and food scraps along the path, past the spikey plants and delve amongst the wet bushes just to feed the worms. It was much easier to bung everything in the Bokashi bin.

If the wormery had been smaller, we could have simply stored it outside the kitchen door and would have been far more convenient to use. However as useful as the Can-o-Worms was, it was just too big to do that and would have got in the way. I know, because I tried it.

But the Worm Cafe is perfectly shaped to fit into the smallest of corners. And just like the Can-o-Worms, it is easy to set up and comes complete with bedding, worms, a lime mix, worm treat and moisture mat when bundled with the Value Pack. It's also made from recycled plastic, so that's great news too.


I'm now pleased to say that our Worm Cafe has now been established just outside our kitchen for over a month and from a convenience perspective is very easy to use, particularly because its lid rests on the edge, so you don't have to juggle that while adding the scraps.



And as we no longer throw so much away these days, it is now the perfect size for my family, especially as we also have chickens and I no longer use the Bokashi bins.

I am confident that at last we've got a fool-proof system but I suppose I'm going to have to get through the Winter and see the first compost before I can truly celebrate.

In the meantime, I'm pleased to pass on our old wormery to our Beaver Scout leader and make my promise to be better behaved with my new batch of worms.

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More information about the Worm Cafe can be found at www.wigglywigglers.co.uk.

No Sex Please, We're British

I know I'm turning into a girl with a one track mind, (not to be confused with THE girl of course), so for a change, I thought I'd break away from the subject of rubbish and focus on worms.

Last week I emptied out the "liquid gold" from the wormery and noticed that yet again, there were quite a number of the wiggly things in there, all dead.

Since I got the wormery in February, I must have emptied out almost as many as came with the can'o'worms.

Forever feeling remorseful for the number of dead worms that get scattered in my garden, I thought I should order some new ones to keep the spirit of the wormery alive and wriggling.

Yet, when I poked about in the crumbly rich compost, there were hundreds of the wriggly wiggly creatures. All looking very happy indeed.

I felt relieved, but how were there so many? Somehow, I couldn't stop my thoughts wandering in the direction of how worms breed.

I know it seems a bit rude to barge into their personal lives, but I thought I'd have a poke around with an old stick to try and find some evidence.

But there was nothing fruity going on in wormland. They were just all going about their everyday business, as little single worms do.

I am not surprised really. After all, what worm wants to meet his beloved for a date with some cold peas and rice under the watchful eye of their keeper? Let alone get it on after their romantic interlude.

So there was nothing for it but to ring up the experts, Wiggly Wigglers, and pose the question "How do worms breed?" They made it sound so easy.

Worms as you know are Hermaphrodites, which means that they all have male and female reproductive organs. They breed by sliding through each other's saddle, which is the thick part of the worm. An egg is formed and fertilised as it travels along the worm's body where eventually it drops off its nose. It then takes around 4-6 weeks for the little worms to emerge...

Awww...bless...!

Anyway, I think I've got that right. I know it's the simple version, but for someone like me who never even attempted O'level biology, this is just the right level.

So having dug deeper (excuse the pun) into the issue at hand, I think that's enough sex for me thank you. After all, I am British and will have to hide my blushes when I next visit the worms.

Yes from now on, I think I'll just stick to my rubbish, happy that the worms seem content enough to multiply.

Anyway if you're interested in finding out more about my adventures with worms and waste, I've written a guest post for the Wiggly Blog, which which will be published this week, so please wiggle over for a nosey.

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Composting for Beginners

I am absolutely amazed at the results of the Zero Waste challenge this far, and much of it is thanks to the solutions that are available for reducing food waste, whether it's vegetable peelings, gone off fruit or leftover scrapings . With a compost bin, a wormery and a Bokashi system it is working a treat.

I thought it would be useful to share some details about effective composting. However, as I am still a novice, I roped in Karen from Wiggly Wigglers to introduce the subject gently. So it's time to grab that cup of tea again and get some more top tips from someone more knowledegable than me.

"A question often asked is, "Why compost at all?" Well, the answer is simple. Over 50% of household waste is organic matter from our gardens and kitchens. If sent to landfill this organic waste gets buried under all the other waste and isn't exposed to air resulting in methane production which is harmful to the environment. It is also a missed opportunity to recycle waste into valuable garden compost.

Depending on the amount of space you have and the type of waste you need to compost there are several different options open to you. Even if you only have the tiniest space, such as a balcony, there is a solution.

If you have outdoor space and generate garden waste, you really need a compost heap. You can buy (or make) various containers from box style composters with slatted fronts to moulded plastic bins which all effectively operate in the same way. Fresh waste is added at the top and composted material retrieved from the bottom.

With an outdoor heap you can add both garden and kitchen waste and you should be aiming to add approximately 50/50 of carbon rich brown and nitrogen rich green waste to achieve good compost. Green waste consists of things like kitchen waste, grass clippings, nettles, old flowers, spent bedding plants and comfrey leaves.

Brown waste consists of things like paper, cardboard, twigs, straw, egg shells, garden prunings, wool, wood ash, feathers and cotton.

However, you should never add cooked foods or meat to an outdoor composter as this will definitely attract unwelcome rodent visitors.

The trick to making the best compost is to keep it aerated. You can do this by turning the heap occasionally and making sure that you have a good mixture of green and brown waste.

If you don't have garden waste to deal with and space is tight a wormery could well be the solution. Composting with worms is called vermicomposting and wormeries are perfect for dealing with kitchen waste. The best shop bought wormeries are those that have several trays, such as the popular Can-o-Worms, as they are easier to use than an “all in one” model.

Composting worms are native to the UK and in the wild can be found on the surface of the ground, generally in leaf litter. They are not the same as earthworms, which are deep burrowing creatures and not suitable for composting systems. Composting worms will eat all manner of household waste from fruit and vegetable peelings, cardboard, paper, bread, pasta right through to the contents of your vacuum cleaner.

It is important that 25-30% of everything added to a wormery should be dry material, such as paper and cardboard. Perfect items to add would be torn up egg boxes, toilet and kitchen roll tubes, torn and scrunched up newspapers (this helps to aerate the wormery) and paper shreddings. By the time your confidential documents have been through the shredder AND the worms you won't need to worry about identity theft. The addition of paper and cardboard not only helps to balance moisture levels within the wormery, but also provides the worms with much needed fibre.

As with outdoor compost heaps, it is not recommended that meat is added to wormeries as it attracts flies.

Worms are nature's composting heroes as they eat up to half their own body weight in food each day and, in return for a few meals a week, provide you with great compost and a liquid plant feed. This liquid feed should be diluted with water at a rate of 1:10 and can be used to give your plants a real lift. The solid compost can either be used as a top dressing or mixed with potting compost.

To see how a wormery is set up and maintained click here.

Another exciting form of composting is the use of Bokashi, which in this case is bran impregnated with effective micro organisms. This is a system that has been used successfully by the Japanese for about 25 years and involves the addition of good bacteria (the same principle as those well known drinks and yoghurts) to your waste to speed up the composting process. You put your kitchen waste and the bran into the Bokashi bucket in alternate layers and, when full, leave to "pickle" for two weeks. At the end of this time you can either add the waste to your normal compost heap or wormery.

The main advantage of the Bokashi system is that you can add meat and fish scraps and all those left over bits of food the kids leave (that's if the dogs don't get there first!). Once these have been pickled they can safely be added to your outdoor compost heap or wormery.

It may be that if you have a lot of waste and the space that you opt for more than one of the above composting methods and this is quite common. However, if you do only have space for a wormery you are still helping to slim down your bin and prevent waste being sent, unnecessarily, to landfill.

If every household composted their food waste it would mean a saving of over a quarter of a tonne of carbon emissions per year. This is the equivalent of approximately 1,000 miles of driving in a car that averages 40 mpg."

You can visit Karen's blog, which she maintains on behalf of Wiggly Wigglers at:
http://wigglywigglers.blogspot.com


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Putting an end to food waste in landfill

So what should you do with chicken stew that's been hanging about in the fridge for four days?

I did my best. I fed it to the kids, the husband and the cats. I even invited some friends around, but it hasn't gone away, despite my best efforts in adding some chinese spices just to make things more exciting. Don't get me wrong. It's delicious, but bad planning has meant that it wasn't used up as quickly as it should have been, not with Mr A being out in late meetings around the region and my lunchtime meetings around town.

Now it's got to that lingering point....you know what I mean...when the stew gets past its use-by-date and just hangs around in the fridge, in a sealed container, waiting to be thrown in the bin.

There it waits and waits and waits, cluttering up the fridge, until it's the right time to be thrown away. Timing is everything. After all I don't want it smelling out the bin or turning into a health hazard in the fridge!

However, that is about to change because....thanks to some great advice from composting guru Simon Sherlock, yesterday I received my new bin from Wiggly Wigglers. It's not just any old bin...oh no...indeed it is a very special bin, which should help me solve our food waste problem.



Regular readers will know that I don't create food waste lightly and I've been making great inroads into reducing what we buy and how it is cooked to ensure that portions are correct and that food doesn't go to waste...but guess what...I am only human and can't be perfect all the time.

Determined to get rid of food waste in time for the Zero Waste challenge, I have already made great use of the wormery, which arrived a few weeks ago and which accepts food scraps and kitchen waste. However, food waste that contains meat or fish cannot be place directly into the wormery so this is where my new bin comes in.

Its official name is the Bokashi Empowered system. Now that sounds all posh and technical for what appears to be a fairly normal looking bin (Bokashi is in fact a Japanese word for Fermented Organic Matter). Now, I'm not technical, but my understanding is that the bin itself is made of a special plastic that has been injected with EMs (Effective MicroOrganisms). It can be placed in the kitchen and used as a normal kitchen waste bin for most food waste such as vegetable peelings and leftover scraps.

Of course, the aim is to reduce leftovers but there are times when you can take the horses to water but there is no way you can make them drink! This means I now have somewhere to put those annoying leftovers that the boys don't manage. Whether it's tuna, potato skins, pasta, rice, chicken, lamb, beef, fish pie, shepherds pie, breakfast cereal, or many other things that don't take their fancy.

The technique is to place all the food in the bin and sprinkle a layer of Bokashi active bran over the waste and then keep adding in layers until the bin is full. It is then left sealed for around two weeks. In this time the waste ferments. Liquid can be drained off for use as plant fertiliser and then the fermented food waste can be added to the wormery.



Those who are quick off the mark will no doubt be thinking about what happens to the rest of the food waste that is generated while the bin is left to ferment for two whole weeks. That's easy. The kit comes with a second bin, which can be placed on top of the other one or even at its side. My challenge with such a small kitchen is to find some space for the system. However, one bin is only the size of an average kitchen pedal bin, so it shouldn't be a problem. If I can't find a space, there is always the option of leaving it outside the kitchen door.

With this system in place. I am hoping that the next official "weigh-in" will see the bin bag drastically reduced in size. That's a whole week to go, so keep your fingers crossed. What's more important is that I am confident this will bring an end to the smelly black bin syndrome that penetrates the air in the warmer summer months.

If you want to know more about the Bokashi System, there is more information about how it works at the Wiggly Wigglers site and at Wikipedia.
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Cleaning with Waste in mind

The photo of the brush reveals a great deal about my approach to cleaning. Take a closer look and you'll see what I mean.

It's not the most eco-friendly sweeping brush in the world. Just look at all the garish colours on the plastic handle. The manufacturing process of making it must be much more complex than that of a plain old broom. However, even though I am reasonably environmentally-friendly, I make no apology because this multi-coloured brush is fun and as I am no domestic goddess, it makes the job of housework just that little more palatable.

I'd love to tackle cleaning with the same levels of joy as Kim and Aggie, the UK's "Queens of Clean", but I think I'd need a whole personality transplant to make it possible. You see, I'm more like cinderella, easily distracted by chatter, sing-song and the thought of going to the grand-ball.

However, with the little that I manage, I have stepped back and reassessed my habits, not with regard to how to clean better (that's beyond help) but how I can produce less waste in the process.

Regular readers will have noticed that since starting The Rubbish Diet, I have changed my food shopping habits. I have also made some changes to my range of cleaning products along the way.

Before, I had been a real fan of everything disposable, things you could use once or perhaps several times over and then throw in the black bin. If I was expecting visitors, you could almost hear my black bin groan with exhaustion, filled to capacity with cleaning products and forced closed withing seconds of the doorbell ringing.

So, second to food waste, cleaning waste has undergone the widest review.


OUT WITH THE OLD

Many people will probably be shocked at my previous levels of wastage, but after some fine adjustments I have now replaced my old habits:

1. Washing up sponges, which were once bought in large packs. Their life would start at the kitchen sink, then plunge the depths of the bathroom sinks, followed by a quick flirt with the toilets before being sent to die in landfill.

2. Anti-bacterial wipes, for surfaces, floors and toilets, which would be used once and sent the same way as the sponge.

3. Lots and lots of kitchen roll, used for light-cleaning of surfaces and windows and a saviour for quick mop-ups, where the final destination for the soggy paper mess was again landfill.



IN WITH THE NEW

On an early trip to the supermarket I chose several products to replace my black bin nasties and I have been very pleased with the results, especially after the initial shudder at the financial outlay. These include:

1. A reusable sponge that can be thrown in the washing machine (along with my trusty old mop cover) and washed 300 times and I bet even after that it will still be useable.




2. A pack of four very pretty looking cloths (remember, I need the injection of fun), which can be used for all kind of surfaces, (even cleaning windows) and then washed again and again and again.




3. A vileda heavy-duty floor cloth, which will tackle even the most difficult of tasks.

I admit to keeping some kitchen paper because after such a life-long dedication, it would be hard to give that up completely, but I have now changed to a Recycled product. I now only use it for light tasks, dipped into ecover washing-up liquid and can then discarded into the compost bin.

With Zero Waste in mind, these changes have proven to be extremely effective in reducing my residual waste and I have seen a great impact on the bin. Admittedly, I did spend a few extra pounds than might have been necessary and if this is a consideration, alternative suitable products could be sourced from hardware stores as well as local markets.

For those who want to take things a step further down the path of environmental enlightenment, I can recommend the range of Ecover products.


As well as being environmentally friendly, Ecover's range offers another bonus to eco-aware consumers and that is the option to SUPERSIZE.

You won't normally find Supersizing being recommended with any form of diet and certainly when thinking about attempting size zero the word would would send shudders down certain spines, but not in this case.

If you're attempting to reduce your waste rather than your waist, supersizing with products such as Ecover is the way to go, as it also helps to reduce the packaging sent for recycling and in addition to that it can save some money too.

The starting point is to upgrade from a 1 litre bottle to a 5 litre container of your usual product. These can be found in local shops such as Bury St Edmunds' Butterworths or the local Longwood Farm, which is a few miles outside of the town centre.

However, if you're based further afield, online companies can also satisfy your order, sometimes with even larger containers. Examples include:

Ecotopia
Ethical Superstore
Wiggly Wigglers

Wiggly Wigglers also offers a ReCover service, providing refills on as many products as possible, They even include a free return-postage label so you can send the empty container back when finished.

If you live in or near Bury St Edmunds, Longwood Farm in Tuddenham St Mary also offers a refill service, where you can take along your empty containers and refill them on the spot.

With all these options available, it should make my cinderella duties all the more easier. However, I still prefer my usual distractions, even if there is risk of my carriage being turned into a pumpkin at midnight.

At least it could be carved, cooked and composted.

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Look at my lovely worms

As you know, my Can-O-Worms arrived yesterday and I was like a child at Christmas, very excited about unwrapping it and setting it up. It was extremely easy to put together and within about 90 minutes, I had it set up and ready to use.

Most of the time was spent soaking the bedding, which I just left in a bucket of water for one hour. I didn't take photos of the whole process, but Jane at Horticultural did and I recommend taking a look at her Can-O-Worms blog post, so you can see how easy it really is.

The hardest part for me was the thought of unpacking the worms. One worm I can deal with and perhaps two, but any more than that represents a squirmy wormy, wriggly wiggly jumble that affronts my squeamish side. I could never really have made it as Charlie Dimmock, as Mr A reminded me when I created our garden a few years ago.

However, a quick snip of the packaging (having shaken the bag to make sure that that no worms would be damaged in the process) meant that I could just pour them into the wormery. A couple had escaped and I managed to scoop them up and pop them back in.

Having been all "eurgh" about the wriggly creatures, I seem to have developed an immediate fondness for them and have adopted them as our new pets. As with all pets, it was time to give them some food, a breakfast of banana skins, bread and egg shells, with the odd piece of red pepper.



After that, it was time to cover them up, leave them to it and get on with some work (both me and them).




I am really pleased that I found a great sheltered spot in the garden, which has suitable screening, where they can be left undisturbed.

I'm now looking forward to giving them the leftover cheese sandwiches from last night's tea, which would otherwise have ended up in the bin. We have to be very careful to not overfeed the worms at this stage and take it very slowly, but once it's fully up and running, this new addition to our garden will make a valuable contribution towards my Zero Waste goal.

If you've been inspired, have a look at the Wiggly Wigglers site for more details and if you have any queries, the lovely people there will be very happy to help. They even have a blog, which covers lots of other interesting topics.

If you want to take a look at more applications of composting, I've just received a link from Simon Sherlock, which will answer many of my own novice questions: http://www.sherlock.co.uk/blog/2008/02/my-composting-setup.html

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