This week in The Worm Course Community we are doing a Precompost Project.
This project is a great way for everyone to learn how to make high quality worm bedding for our worm composts.
This morning, those of us taking part in the project put together a particular mix of ingredients – carbon aka browns, and nitrogen aka greens, along with some molasses and yeast.
We’ve measured our precompost starting temperatures and now we’re watching for the temperatures to start rising.
“Precompost” is not really a thing. It’s not that we compost before we compost!
However what we are doing in this project is creating microbial super rich compost via a fast heating process. Once the process is finished in a few days and this precompost has cooled off, it is mixed with more carbon material and used for worm bedding.
This precomposting process starts the decomposition of the ingredients before the worms get in there, and makes it very inviting and homely for the worms due to all the microbes that the heating creates in this compost.
Here’s a little bundle of photos from the community this morning of some of the precomposts mixed and now starting the heating process.
It’s not commonly known that compost worms eat microbes and not our kitchen scraps.
So making this high quality worm bedding sets up the environment right from the start to be loaded with the microbes that will eat our kitchen scraps.
And then the worms get to move in to a 5 star hotel with a 24/7 buffet of all kinds of delicious microbes for them to eat.
This makes for very high quality worm castings at the end of the composting process.
And it tends to speed up the composting process, meaning we get better castings sooner.
It’s going to be super interesting to see each person’s final results.
We’ve all used similar ingredients, but not the same. Everyone has a unique mix according to what each of us could easily get hold of.
And we’re all in different environments and locations in Australia, which means different indigenous microbial environments for our precomposts to process in.
We’ve even had quite a wide range of starting temperatures.
What we each want to see is peak temperatures near or even beyond 40 degrees celsius and we want to see these kind of temps start within roughly 24 hours.
This is how we’ll know the microbes are flourishing and the process is working.
Lucky worms! As we chuckled about earlier this week, worm lives matter 🙂 WLM!
Everyone is uploading videos and photos into the community so we’re all learning from not only our own precomposts but from each other’s too.
In a few weeks we’ll do a compost worm breeding project.
That’ll be fun!
These are the kinds of things we do inside The Worm Course Community. Not just the course itself. It’s a lot of fun, it’s all very easy, and it’s pretty dang interesting.
And it means we all have not only earths best fertiliser and soil builder – being worm castings – but we have the best quality of the good stuff.
Black gold.
Truly gold.
Our private community group on Telegram has really become a hugely valuable resource.
As people decide to take The Worm Course and arrive in the community, you can glean so much extra information and tips and insights just by going back over all the photos and videos.
Most people start The Worm Course not really realising just how much this learning experience is going to impact them.
By the time they finish the course and have maybe joined in some of the other activities we get up to, our members are quite blown away by not only the level of knowledge and skill they now have, but also how differently they see and understand the worms.
Just this week one of our members reported that she’d completely rearranged her garden shed to centralise the worms in there so she could do a better job of keeping the worms healthy.
Which means she’s going to be able to pump out as much worm castings as she needs in her garden.
This learning experience is changing peoples lives.
And it regularly makes my eyes leak!
It’s also changing our environment.
We can’t see it with our eyes, but when we are no longer using commercial fertilisers and store bought composts, and instead are loading our soils with microbes and worm castings, there comes a point where our neighbours yards naturally begin to receive the benefits too.
This is why I am adamant and not budging on the fact that we, with our little worm composts, can have a dramatic positive impact on all soils.
We dont need to wait for the massive crop and animal farms to switch to regenerative operations. We can start the impact now.
We HAVE started the impact already.
Worm composting is a real key to cleaning up our soils and ensuring future generations have plenty of living soil to grow their food in.
It starts at home. In our simple little worm compost.
Be the change we want to see in the world.
