La Bonne Terre

This past week I have been busy harvesting worm castings for this springs crop of soil amendments, soil blocks, and potting soil mixes. It's a painfully slow process, but so worth the work and to boot, even on cold days when the temps are in the teens it's at least fifty five in the wormhouse (so long as the sun is out). On days like today where the outside temp is in the fourties, it just darn near feels like late spring in the wormhouse with temperatures approaching 80 degrees.


I have been vermicomposting for about four years now, trying new means and methods here and there as I go, having started out on the small scale with a couple of totes bought from the dollar store, moving up to 20 of those in what is now the primary turkey shed, and now with 13 4 x 4 x 4 wooden bins located in a 20 x 36 greenhouse called appropriately "The Wyrm".

Vermicomposting is a form of cold composting, a form of composting inherently better for plant fertility since you are not loosing valuable micro-biological life to extreme heat or loosing nutrients as readily via off gassing. There is a trade off in that you can if not carefully choose to feed diseased plants into the bins and the diseases then get passed into the plants that you fertilize with worm castings, however a few things in a worm bin are working on our side other than just the worms. The micro-biological rich humus organisms do a lot to fight off disease, both plant based as well as diseases which can occur in nature and infect humans, couple the work of these microbes with the action of black soldier fly larvae and sow bugs which are capable of digesting and destroying heavy metal particles and disease particles and your good to go!


As you can see above, the Homegrown Worm Harvester talked about on the blog here many times is still being put to good use. Currently I am in the process of harvesting 3 bins of material with a further two ready to go. The material in the bins is close to 95% finished castings, the only issue is that much of this material is still wet which means that once it is run through the harvester it has a tendency to "stick" together in moist balls. There is a solution, but it is, as said above, painfully slow. The first step in harvesting a bin is to create a refuge for the active worms to escape into which can be moved into a new bin, this started on December 1'st 2009. We use bread racks from a convenience store and place new organic material on it moistened down to attract the worm heard into the new material, after a month many of the worms have moved into this material which you can then pick up and move into a new bin. Afterwords I remove the top inch of material into a new bin as well just to pick up some of the worms that were a bit slower than the others, since most of the composting worms work within a couple inces of the top of the compost this method works pretty good, but you will never "rescue" all of them and you'll be surprised at the numbers left in the remaining finished compost.


Since I have not yet found a cheap and convenient continuous flow system the castings on the bottom do have a tendency to get waterlogged so the first thing we have to realize is that there is going to be a "drying time" for the castings. We let them set without water for the entire month of December while the worms are moving into their new bedding, once the worms are moved we begin the harvest. On the first pass through the harvester you only get about 8% of the bulk of the material as harvest able due to the moisture, we usually run one wheelbarrow worth through the harvester three times, pulling off about 15% of the bulk. At this point the other material, which is completely finished but wet, is bulked into empty worm bins where it will set for 1 to 2 weeks while we allow the worms to break it up again without the aid of any water wherein it will be harvested again with a gain from the bulk of 80% pure castings, the remaining material then goes into a new worm bin.

One of the big advantages of the initial harvest is that air is allowed to work it's way into the material that was located in the bottom of the bin and is the most moist. This turns portions of the bin that were a bit anaerobic to material in an aerobic state facilitating the breakdown of the majority of the material that was left undigested as well as accommodating a quicker dry down of the finished material.


Five years ago Kim and I decided no chemical would touch our soil again, creating thermophilic compost on farm and a worm farm went a long way, but there was never enough of this material to take care of all of the crops, for the first year in those five years we will not have to supplement our compost harvest with any bought manures or organic amendments with the exception of course of lime. We currently also have 5 4 x 4 x 4 containers in thermophilic mode of chicken/turkey/ and guinea material as well.

We will use these castings for just about every purpose here on the farm, fertilizer, potting soil, and soil blocking recipes, as follows are the methods we use to produce Bishop's Homegrown "La Bonne Terre" (the good earth) in it's many variations.


La Bonne Terre Soil Blocking Receipt:
We have struggled in searching out a way to create potting and soil blocking mixes completely self sustainably from material here on the farm. It wasn't easy, but we have found something that works well for us.

We use 2 parts worm castings (1 part is roughly four gallons by volume)
2 parts garden loam - Heavily amended clay based soil
1/4 part sand
1/4 cup bat guano
1 cup of lime
1 cup diatomacious Earth

Mixed together well and moistened this holds together as well if not better than any store bought mix or "homemade" mix with blood meal and imported coco-coir (food miles self sustainable guys?) or the non renewable sphagnum. We feel this also makes our plants far more adapted to their future planting than any other method we have ever used, and trust me, I've used all of it. To sterilize the garden loam and prevent fungal disease, weed seeds, and insect damage to plants or seed we use an old wash tub filled with garden soil to which we add 2 five gallon buckets of water and place above a fire on our outside wood pit. We heat it to 160-170 degrees for sterilization purposes. Works wonders and costs nearly nothing minus the lime. This is the same mix we use for potting soil with the exception of adding leaf mold and Forrest dander for water retention as well as gravel at the bottom of the pots for drainage.


La Bonne Terre Soil Amendment/Fertilizer
This is our main fertilizer at this point. In previous years we have added composts directly to the soil along with unprocessed animal manures which have led to many seed and plant pests as well as weed issues. Until this year we have never had enough of any self produced material to create this mix on a large enough scale to feed all the crops including the new orchard crops and raised bed greenhouse crops.

It works like this:
one part castings, 1/8 part bat guano, a cup of lime per five gallons, 1/8 part screened high nitrogen compost (poultry litter), mixed with one cup diatomacious earth per five gallons. The diatomacious earth eliminates seed and root destroying pests. We have found this mix to be perfect for every crop that we grow, some have thought it might be two high or two low nitrogen for some things but we have found the ratios to be about ideal for an already decently balanced soil. We should point out that our soils have been heavily amended over a five year period with probably close to 40 tons of organic matter added if not more, to the entire area of cultivated land. It should also be pointed out that the worm herd gets fed a very diverse diet, mostly composed of high nutrient feed stocks as opposed to bulking material like sawdust and cellulose as is fed to most commercial worm heards, this gives us access to most of the micro nutrients that are missing from most commercial casting mixes as well as access to higher NPK numbers than commercial castings. The last test that was done ran 3-3-3. We also have to realize this isn't a nutrient shot like commercial fertilizers, the nutrients are slow release but they are active and more available to plants than in almost any other type of fertilizer. About a month after planting everything will get side dressed with another dose of La Bonne Terre and occasionally we make a tea to feed to certain plants. I should also point out that last year we placed several bat houses around the farm from which we ethically harvest bat guano for on farm use. This material as well as the castings contain Chitin's, the broken down proteins of the exo skeleton of insects, known to be an insect repellent.

Humanure/Solar Shower Project And Composting Chicken Litter and Bread.

First up, some pictures from my birthday (Feb. 22) adding 600 loaves of out of date organic bread to the existing chicken litter compost pile. The temp outside was in the 30's but the compost was hitting 140 F!









Second, the new on site, "outside" composting toilet facilities/Solar Shower room complete with water catchment and "dug in" active and passive bins for composting (to catch and prevent leachate from entering groundwater




Just a quick update of on farm projects.

Cleaning out the chicken coop!

On Valentines day Kim and I spent some quality time cleaning out the chicken coop and composting the resulting litter. Kim snapped a few pics of me and the chickens and new proverbial "huge pile of shit" (yeah, I know, It's getting old now!)

"The Wyrm": Modifications and aggressively harvesting worm castings

I've had to go back to the drawing board on "the wyrm" project due to some circumstances. In particular with regards to catching the water using plastic lined bins with wells. The issue didn't decide to make itself apparent while I was running the wood stove, presumably because the water was evaporating quickly due to the heat and I was watering on a relatively common basis. If your wondering what the issue that I am having is, it was a massive die off of worms. There are many reasons for this die off including an accumulation of stagnant water in the bottom of the bins coupled with a low oxygen environment, an acid build up due to using some composted chicken manure in an experiment and just overall a build up of issue upon issue of mistakes, including having to cut the power to the greenhouse and subsequently the heat during the coldest part of the year and only a day after watering, due to an outrageously high electric bill that we still haven't figured out (it was shocking to see the number on the bill to say the least and the electric company won't admit it was a mistake even though they admited there was a problem with the meter that they replaced, in other words the worms got cold and migrated deeper into the bin where the stagnant, anearobic, and acidic environment of the lower bin quickly overwhelmed the population.

Don't get me wrong, my friend Paul (my co-conspirator) has a great idea when it comes to reusing the water from the worm bins and it would have worked well for myself too if I weren't already in the habbit of watering my worm bins as though they had drainage and in a routine from my four previous years of vermicomposting here on the farm, when I find a system that works and works well I just have to learn to stick to it. The good news is that Paul now has access to the last four wooden bins needed to complete the infrastructure of "the wyrm" project. His help and friendship has been greatly appreciated!

Needless to say the last couple of days have been busy, I am slowly getting the first six bins emptied back out, harvesting the available worm castings, dumping the rest of the compost into a new pile to dry out and be used for field ready compost, and cursing.....a lot.

When I make a mistake I do a terrific job. Fortunately the remedy is pretty straightforward. Once the bins are emptied out I'll drill some drainage holes in the bin and fill the bins 1/4 full of new cow manure, something I should have done in the first place but didn't since I already had a population of worms living in an old pile of compost and used it to fill the worm bins near the top and topped the bins off with manure.....or as I call it now, mistake number 1.

I will then be placing an order with Tripple G Worm Ranch (a great couple and good friends) for an additional 10 lbs of worms. I will divide the 10 lbs between the first six new bins and re-establish a worm population relatively quickly (I hope) The worms will only be fed what they can consume in a two week period and over the next 365 days I will slowly build each bin and population and start opening up new bins, this time next year with any luck we will have an enormous population of worms and a large harvest of castings. From now until then we should recieve another three loads of cow manure from the neighboring farm. Though this did put an additional dent in the soil fertility plan for this season it can be made up for by using the abundant source of thermophillic compost that we have on the farm at the moment.


Which brings me to the next part of the two most stressful days of winter so far.....harvesting what was in the bins and sifting compost.

Since the worm population in the bins was dismal and some of the bins were made up of old compost anyhow and I have to empty the bins of their compost to make the necessary adjustments to my set up I decided to harvest off what I could for for sifted castings for use in seed starting soil blocks this season, a job made all the more difficult due to the weight of the wet material and it's physical properties when run through the Homegrown Worm Harvester. I run each wheelbarrow of material through the harvester twice and the leftover material that has been digested then gets limed and put into a pile for use in the fields this comming spring, at the same time I am also sifting through the conventional compost piles using the harvester to glean usable potting material from those sources. Needless to say, this process and rebuilding will take a bit, a week or two anyhow, so from time to time updates may be slow.

At some point I also need to start cleaning out the chicken coop and composting that material and starting on the Humanure project, but that's a whole other blog right there!

That is one big pile of shit!

By:Alan Reed Bishop
Bishop's Homegrown/Homegrown Goodness/Hip-Gnosis Seed Development





Ok, fair enough, to some the title might have been inappropriate, but since I spend so much time making sure to cultivate the freedom of my mind in a completely unhindered way, anyone who might be offended would just have to forgive me, besides, it's just a quote from one of the greatest movies/books of all time, Jurassic Park (have I ever mentioned that this was one of our first warnings about the danger of GMO's, Cloning, and in general tampering with nature).



Anyhow, Paul brought the next two bins for "The Wyrm" on Saturday, I was very glad to get those in and set up and ready to go in the next month, but I was getting concerned about obtaining feed stocks for the worms that would also make terrific fertilizer, fortunately the neighbors arrived right behind Paul with a dump truck full of cow manure! Paul and I went over and helped finish cleaning out the barn for about an hour which resulted in a second dump truck load of manure. It's now laid out in a windrow where it will compost for about a month before being fed (in any large quantity) to the worm heard. I'll also be adding more green compostable material to the heap to help fortify the nutrients and keep it limed pretty well to balance the pH.




I was going to try to find that particular still from Jurassic Park and spoof the pic with myself but I couldn't find it anywhere, so instead Paul and I took some picks, I made the comment that we should make the pics look like they aren't conceited (my mind works in mysterious ways) so we grabbed a pitch fork and threw some manure around, as it turned out, those probably looked goofier than just standing there with a big grin on our face, I thought I'd post them anyhow. I sent Paul home with three big soy bean seed bags full of manure for his herd as well.

Composting as alchemy (thermophilic composting systems, the advantages, and how they apply to vermicomposting)

It's funny sometimes, the way that my career in agriculture mirrors what I learned about music. The very best ideas are not original but stolen, great artists steal while the mediocre only borrow! Of course just like in music everybody has their idea about what "works" and what doesn't "work", most of the time you've just got to develop your own unique modifications and apply them to well known theories and systems and then your on to something that sets you apart from others.

Not too long ago I had shunned the idea of creating a thermophilic composting system here on the farm, it just sounded like to much work and it seemed like every time I read an in depth article on composting I needed to have a masters degree in chemistry to understand the what's and how to's of composting. I often find that is indeed the problem in the Organic Gardening, Plant Breeding, and Sustainable Agriculture world of the Internet, people over speak and the reader misses a lot or is led to believe that a simple issue is impossibly difficult to master. I myself never pursued a college education, I'm sure at times that probably reflects in my writing or dictation skill, perhaps even in my farming skills, but I cam to the realization as a teenager that my view of the world and mainstream societies view of the world were two separate entities, I found myself saying a lot that 90% of the skills I needed to know in life I had already learned from my grandparents and that indeed when put to use in a practical system that they could and would create a career for me, so far that's worked out pretty well, even if the occasional snob would look down on me.

Anyhow, back to the composting. I have been vermicomposting now for three years and the results have been terrific, we have had a few late blight outbreaks here and there, most particularly from not being nearly careful enough about what we add to the worm bins, but for the most part all has gone well, of course with the exception of the 8,000 vegetable seeds that seem to sprout every time I use my compost in the garden or the greenhouse. Are you aware just how invasive tomato plants are? I am fully aware of this myself now, thanks in part to my cold composting vermiculture operation.

With late blight and unwanted seed germination problems in mind I set out to research systems of thermophilic (hot) composting that could at least kill a large percentage of plant and animal pathogens as well as active living seeds in my compost bins in order to yield a much better quality organic material. What I found out is that in more than one way, composting is much like Alchemy. Your changing one, presumably worthless material into another high value material, but that the process is very little understood and even less well explained to potential explorers of self sufficient gardening.

I basically set out to find a number of wooden pallets in order to make some compost corals, living in a rural area with a ton of hardware as well as feed and seed stores this was no problem whatsoever, each of my new composting corrals had to have three walls, a gate, and a floor, of course they were to be connected together (using wood screws) in series of threes so I didn't need one pallet for each and every wall since once the middle box was done, you had the inside wall for each of the outside two boxes already in place. I choose pallets because they were free and because they allow the necessary airflow needed for aerobic composting will also allowing material to be held into a confined space with minimum spillage. We also place a pallet on the ground for a floor in order to raise the compost off of the ground (these are outside where rain can absorb so they are also covered with pieces of sheet metal weighted down with rebar to deflect rain) and to also allow the necessary airflow.

Thus far the system has worked out well for us, we really haven't formulated a real "compost recipe" if you will as we are still experimenting with materials, mixing, layering, and with the amount of water needed without making the pile "wet", if you will. Among the success that we have had so far is composting the bedding/manure from the chicken coop and yards along with waste produce, plant trimmings, and table scraps. We also use worm castings to inoculate the pile with the necessary bacteria and thermites to break the material down (though you can use soil, whatever you do, don't pay for compost incubator, all you need is in good garden soil, about a hand full of it will more than do. I also managed to come across another infinitely valuable resource for creating compost, a friend who runs a convenience store has been buying day old bread as a special item for his store, of course he can't sell it all until it is no longer acceptable for consumption, as such I pick up the bread from him and use it to feed the chickens and what I term The Compost Monster (the compost corrals that were aforementioned). This week alone we have composted close to five hundred (yes, that is 500) loaves of bread.

Currently our basic composting program consists of mixing Green (nitrogen based) materials with Brown (carbon base materials) at a one to two/three ratio, adding enough water to make moist (like a rung out sponge), in the middle of the pile we add our inoculate (worm castings, soil), we then allow the compost to set for two weeks (it will be up to temperature in a day or so, we check with a soil thermometer and often find the temp at 120 degrees Fahrenheit) after two weeks we flip the compost from one bin to the next using a pitch fork, add a bit more water (if needed, if material is wet we mix in more brown and dry material) and allow the material to once again heat, after two weeks we flip one more time into another bin (usually back to the original) allow to set for two more weeks and then we feed it to the red wiggler worms.

When I first started raising worms I was often told not to use chicken manure for feed or bedding because of the acidity/pH issue, however after composting and with a liberal spreading of dolomite lime, this does not appear to be an issue whatsoever.

Currently we have harvested four corrals full of material and added them to the worms to finish off the composting and fortification of the material, as I write all 9 of our corrals are empty, waiting for Monday of next week when they will be re-filled with a fresh mix of organic cow manure (from our neighbor) and bedding straw (12-14 tons of manure/straw), hopefully this compost will be the first batch to be fed to the worms in the soon to come, previously described, and much larger wormery.

I will be updating this blog from time to time with more Composting as Alchemy blogs.

Better, Faster, More Worms!

I've been giving some thought recently to expanding upon the Vermiculture operation here on the farm, really
the basic premise is that I need a larger area and a much larger volume of red worms to produce the amount of compost that I need to provide the soil fertility I desire for a bio-intensive farming regime here at Bishop's Homegrown. I have been throwing the idea around for a couple of months now and have decided to continue towards this work.

I will have to give up one greenhouse in order to create this worm haven, but that is a small sacrifice when you consider the amount of fertility I can create for the farm as well as consider the amount of incoming money from the sales of local fishing worms and also excess compost sales. This will also free up the former worm house to be made into a full time chicken laying house, accompanying another 100 or so chickens and allowing me to use the old chicken coop for some new Turkeys. All good things!


Over the weekend I was privileged to have met a new friend by the name of Paul Schellenburger of New Albany Indiana. Paul has been featured on the local radio gardening program "HomeGrown" with hosts Jeanine Wishie and Bob Hill on Lousiville KY's NPR station WFPL. Paul has been raising red worms for 18 years and has worked with the Louisville KY not for profit organization, Tuning New Grounds, a project based on sustainable organic soil creation using recycled waste coffee grounds and and other organic products from around Louisville by way of vermicomposting.

Paul and I had a meeting of minds on Sunday, exchanging ideas and taking a tour of Bishop's Homegrown, we also traded compostable materials (sounds strange, but then 90% of Eco-Logical/Organic farming is talking about manure and what we can use to make good manure). I ran my worm house idea past Paul who was all for it and is hard at work helping me scrounge materials to put the new house into motion. All in all it's a very easy conversion of the greenhouse, basically just sliding a heavy duty black tarp over the frame and under the plastic, we will have to set up the inside for constant harvesting and moving of raw materials and worm castings, which is no big deal, and I also have to find containers for the worms

Raw material for worm feed and bedding is no problem at all to come across considering the amount of produce and other organic matter that has to be pulled from the local stores when it doesn't sell, composted chicken manure/bedding, composted cow manure from the neighboring cattle operation, and a friend with well over 5 acres of rotten sawdust he is more than willing to deliver by the dump truck load for $20.

The nice thing about converting the greenhouse to a wormery is that it is already climate controlled, heated with a wood stove and cooled with fans, I plan to experiment with optimum temperatures of worm growth, reproduction, and consumption of compostable materials to find what works the best, I anticipate the heat of summer may provide some challenges but nothing that I can't in time work out to work in my favor.

I believe the benefits of this will outweigh having to give up growing room in one greenhouse and I will never have to look at purchasing any form of fertilizer again in the future. I have slowly come to the realization that I am about to accomplish having a hand in all of the multitude of my agriculture interest that I wanted to work with (honey bees, organic gardening, plant breeding, worm ranching, seed saving, wild crafting, raising chickens ext.) I just need to find a balance between all of my systems, this expansion will allow me to further balance my systems of agriculture here on this farm, bringing Bishop's Homegrown even more into the line with our "Eco-Logically" grown philosophy. Given that I have scaled down plant sales for 2009 sacrificing one greenhouse of plant space for one greenhouse full of farm fertility seems the way to go.

Right now the set up will be based on a couple of bulk worm bins or breeding bins if you will (concrete block bins, three teirs high as pictured above as well as some 48" X 48" x 48" wooden bins and a plethora of 55 gallon plastic barrel bins cut in half longways and used to process smaller amounts of material quicker, my home made worm harvester will have casters added to it in order to maneuver it around the wormery and over top of the beds in order to harvest with ease, the back wood yard area of the greenhouse will be expanded to accommodate finished material to be moved with the front end loader into the used manure spreader I recently bought. The front yard is flat enough and large enough to accommodate several tons of fresh compostable material to be hauled in with a wheelbarrow and fed a few inches at a time to each bed once a week.