Angel's Farm Reflection 14

Angel Arias                             Silk Tree Farm                           5/7/13

This morning we started by doing something that perhaps I would not have expected. Cathy wanted to make some kind of natural fertilizer, but as her schedule is pretty busy she’d rather have something that was more all-purpose, as apparently a lot of fertilizers are plant-specific (I guess that has to do with what certain plants need/require and what would be best for them). She’d found a way to make an all-purpose fertilizer with worms, though I forget what the name for it was or whether or not it had a name at all, I do remember how the process was handled. There were three plastic containers, two of which had holes for drainage; the bottom one lacking these – but having a spigot attached on the front end of it. There is also a brick or other support centered in the lowest container so that the other buckets did not exert too much pressure on the spigot. You’d put worms in the second container, and food scraps in the uppermost container. As the worms eat, reproduce and whatever else it is they do, they defecate, and since their poop is liquid-like, it ideally drains and pools in the bottom container. You feed the worms for a while (The food gets turned to compost, since that is what worms do) and let their material build up. Now after you have a justifiable amount, that is where the spigot comes in again. Just turn it and collect their manure bounty, and use it on a plant, it’s an all purpose fertilizer. Oh yeah, but you have to actually get the worms to begin with. Digging through compost (Goat compost) looking for a bounty of worms to add to our buckets, which we dumped into the container afterwards. After that, we started doing some planting near the potatoes, which included digging some more trenches, planting (I think they were more greens) a few things, including the remainder of the potatoes that had not been planted (Because of the number and size of the “eyes” they had, eyes being the places where their roots grow). Digging their trenches, layering it with dirt and compost, and then digging little earth holes and tucking them into it, both wholly and halved. After this there was a break and we ate. There is a lot to do right now, and still a lot to be done, which is going to be fun. The last thing I did was wash eggs idly – and then my ride arrived, signaling the end of the day.