The Potential for Worms!
It’s always refreshing to see people excited about the potential applications for using worms to solve real world problems! A college student/customer, and genuinely nice guy(Nathan), came to me for advice on a college project he was working on. Here is a transcript of our emails:
As I was talking about over the phone I have an Environmental Energy assignment where I have to analyze a conservation measurement used in my household. I am going to measure petroleum energy saved by reducing my trash poundage through worm composting, but in order to do that I need to measure the worms’ food supply poundage to their castings poundage. In other words the “x” amount of raw table scraps given to the “y” number of worms to produce “z” amount of worm dung. I would normally count the worms in my bin, weigh the initial bedding material, weigh the food input, and finally weigh the castings output over a period, but I only have a week+ to do this project.
Thanks for bringing up the water usage issue. It didn’t even register that I would have to weigh that consumption against my overall conservation in petro. I will note my water usage this next week.
The pictures above are actually from an Earth Day Demonstration that Nathan had put together!
Nathan, if you are reading this, please share your findings and your professors comments on your project.
I would also love to hear about any additional “Wormy” projects you are working on.
Some of the solutions to our environmental problems may indeed be….just under our feet!
Tags: Environment, red wigglers, vermiculture, worms
December 27th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Stay tuned for any findings on my part… I ended up changing my project to something that could be done in the time alloted. However, I am still very interested, and will start calculating all the above a little later this spring (once we can start eating out of the garden again). I think it will be much easier to weigh the castings in relation to a fixed amount of scraps. Therefore I will be producing all the fruits and veggies for a single vegetarian on exactly 100 sq ft (French Intensive or ‘Grow Bio-Intensive’ method). This way I can more accurately weight wormbin input and output over a six month growing season, and then relate that to energy conservation and garbage removal for a single individual. What can I say– ‘I dig worms.’ Any concerns or problems anyone might see? Any oversight on my part? Advice? Thanks.