Vermiculture: A Worms Story

So its another farming day and our spirits were definitely lifted when we saw that our first hedge have shown a positive sign of life! YES! The KANGKUNG that we planted last week has germinated! Cute little leaves protruding from the ground kept us smiling for quite some time. I guess everyone feels that our effort have paid off. Here's a picture of the little helion:

A new life spawn, a spirit lifted, thou are all the helpers. :)

So I read a blog the other day about vermiculture, and this guy turned trash into gold by just using vermiculture. Impressive! Plus the fact that he started from what he described as "room-scale" instead of "garden-scale" made it all that special. SO this week, we decided to work on that vermiculture plot that we have earlier mentioned in the previous blog. What we have to do is simple. Just dig up the soil, collect the worms, put them into a bottle(preferably 5L size bottle) and culture by keeping the soil moist. Not that complicated I guess. 

Boy oh boy was that the easy part. The hard part was yet to come. Due to the dry conditions, the soil is really hard, and this made it hard for us to dig deeper in for worms! It took us hours and we did come up with some big healthy looking worms, but some are just plain skinny and malnourished. 

Trust me, this critters are really evasive! Go into the bottle you WORM! :)

Soil are added along the way, providing the worms with their new niche.

Looking for worms. Trust me, IT'S NOT EASY! 

You gotta take those hard soil, break it into pieces by hand and see if they are inside those soil. Why don't we break it with a hoe? Simple, you might hit the jackpot and kill the worm instead. 

Anddddd they will come out something like these, safe, sound and ready to be moved, well, literally.

The girls having a light moment with the camera. :) Notice one of them is holding a watering can. We had to soften the soil by watering it before digging in. The weather is really giving us a hard time I must say.

So we got our first HALF bottle of soil and worm done, after hours of work. We are going to put more effort to it tomorrow, all in the effort of learning and spreading the knowledge. Never try, never know. By the way, from what I read, the worms will feed on food leftovers, papers and whatever you throw in(degradebles only please), so, is this a new way to keep the environment clean? Lets do find out together. Thats all for this post, gotta head out to water the plants again soon. Happy Farming and see you soon!

Bye!!! :)