The Wondrous Red-Wiggler Worms

Will Allen of Growing Power

It was a treat to learn about Red Wiggler Worms
and vermi-composting from the master,
Will Allen, of Growing Power.
In Wisconsin they raise a million tons of compost every year and 100,000 pounds of vermi-compost. When they start seeds and shoots they
use vermi-compost mixed 50/50 with coir,
which is coconut fiber.
A natural product, coir holds moisture as peat moss and vermiculite do.

The event was a workshop at the Southern Sustainable Agricultural Working Group (SSAWG) conference in Little Rock, Arkansas.

We took a field trip to the Mabelvale Magnet Middle School,
part of the Delta Garden Study which addresses childhood obesity
in the central and delta regions of Arkansas.
Students grow vegetables both outside and in a greenhouse.
They compost the food from their cafeteria and use the compost,
plus the vermi-compost, in their gardens.
The school and the community are involved in the program.

Gardens in Greenhouse at the School

Students at Mabelvale Magnet Middle School

I learned some new tricks and interesting facts about vermi-compost.
It does not contain any e-coli.
The worms process any bad bacteria, leaving only good bacteria.
Wood chips help in the vermi-compost process
are beneficial, adding fungus to the finished product  and providing beneficial nutrients to the soil.
After four months,
the worms will have created beautiful compost
and there will be four times as many worms!

 

Nashville: of tornadoes, possums and all that jazz

 

Arrived in Nashville
to lead a retreat this week
and there were warnings
for tornadoes.
As we gathered
for Vespers and All That Jazz,
there came a thunderstorm,
with wind, lightning and rain.
Buds on trees are bulging.
People here tell me
it should be winter.
Feels like spring
in Oklahoma.
And it feels like home in Oklahoma,
in another way.
As I non-chalantly walked onto the beautiful campus
at Scarritt-Bennet,
now a conference and retreat center,
walking non-chalantly from the hedge alongside one Gothic building
to the hedge alongside another Gothic building,
a possum.

One thing that was not like Oklahoma—
and decidedly Nashville:
a great jazz trio
playing smooth and elegant jazz
during the meditation portions
of Sunday evening Vespers
at Wightman Chapel.

 

 

Sabbath Meditation

Wildflowers in Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains

When California was wild, it was one sweet bee garden throughout its entire length, north and south, and all the way across from the snowy Sierra to the ocean. Wherever a bee might fly within the bounds of this virgin wilderness—through the Redwood forests, along the banks of the rivers, along the bluffs and headlands fronting the sea, over valley and plain, park and grove, and deep, leafy glen, or far up the piny slopes of the mountains—throughout every belt and section of climate up to the timber-line, bee flowers bloomed in lavish abundance. Here they grew more or less apart in special sheets and patches of no great size, there in broad, flowing folds hundreds of miles in length—zones of polleny forests, zones of flowery chaparral, stream tangles of rubus and wild rose, sheets of golden compositae, beds of violets, beds of mint, beds of bryanthus and clover, and so on, certain species blooming somewhere all the year round…

The great yellow days circled by uncounted, while I drifted toward the north, observing the countless forms of life thronging about me, lying down almost anywhere on the approach of night. And what glorious botanical beds I had! Oftentimes on awaking I would find several new species leaning over me and looking me full in the face, so that my studies would begin before arising.

– John Muir
The Wilderness World of John Muir