Grinding up food before it goes in the compost has two key benefits:

1. It helps the worms to eat the scraps more quickly, because there’s more surface area they can attack it from, this means the composting time is drastically reduced, so there is less compost being made at any one time.
2. The waste can be more easily mixed-in with the existing worm tailings (soil), so flies can’t get at it so easily. If they do lay eggs near it, they’re less likely to become viable maggots if the food source is buried.

The Kitch’n'Komposter therefore seems like a great idea, so:

1. Has anybody seen one?
2. Does anybody own one?
3. Does it work as we might imagine and is it effective?
4. Why can I not buy it anywhere?

A Garden Party (or maybe it’s a tea party, or a coffee morning); I can’t say I’m sure of the precise definition, but there’s definitely sunshine, drinks, cake and several of the “old ladies” that I remember living in Wimmerfield Crescent when I was young (and I was born several years after this footage was ‘in the can’).

I’m assuming for now that this was filmed in the late 1960′s but it might be a bit earlier than that, maybe early 60′s, if so, the kids playing in the garden are probably in their mid 40′s by now (though probably not looking a day over 21 due to the forgiving seaside air). I’m sure mum will be able to identify things that put a fairly exact date on it.

View the location in Google Maps or Google Earth

If you recognize anyone, drop us a line!

Home Working

The problem thus arises that any poor sod who works from home (who also needs to have the windows open to keep cool) becomes the involuntary recipient of <insert the name of an artist you consider awful here> and (throughout the day) every other dire musician who should have been banned from selling their dirge many years ago.

Music Wars

Obviously not everyone has the same taste in music, so it’s common round here for other neighbours to mask the incoming noise with their own music preference – highly repetitive beats and wailing crooners are especially popular. This is great for the retaliator, but it makes the problem worse for every other neighbour who has to suffer the dischordant interweaving of tracks from multiple “artists”.

As the current background song almost says: “Near, far, wherever you are; if you’re within earshot you will not be able to think straight whilst I’m howling.”

Perhaps this is one of the reasons I work so well at night!

St. David’s Day, which is sometimes known as International Talk Like a Boyo Day is an annual event, though you might be forgiven for missing it if you don’t happen to (a) live in Wales or (b) live with or near an expatriate Welsh boyo or (c) be and expatriate boyo.

Traditional Welsh Costume

On Dydd Dewi Sant, traditional Welsh attire is worn by all schoolchildren in Wales.

There is a traditional Welsh costume for boys, but I never saw any male under the age of 15 wearing it because of the poor cost-to-usage ratio: i.e. outfits that can be worn once, that are outgrown before the next St. Davids Day, are not particularly popular among Welsh mums, go figure. In my junior school this meant that all the mums pinned a small leek or a daffodil to their boy’s school uniform (which we only wore on special occasions).

Girls however, especially schoolgirls, ladies who work in tourist centres, and local television presenters, always seem to turn up in the full outfit of red skirt, cardigan, shawl, and, most importantly: an upended vase for headgear. It’s true.

Daffodils

Our daffs, incidentally, are looking marvellous and they’ve given the garden it’s first wash of colour for the year. They brighten up the street too.

I’ve taken a photo of them, not to show how lovely they are, but more as a kind of record that they really do/did exist. The local shops are beginning their merciless wind-up to Mothers Day, so (based on previous form) the local bookies are giving pretty poor odds on any of our daffs completing the month in the garden. The smart money, in fact, is going on the side bet of wether or not we’ll catch the little misappropriating rascals on webcam.

Fingers crossed, eh?

Vermicomposting is remarkably effective, and because we recycle everything else, our weekly rubbish mass for the household usually amounts to a single half-full refuse sack. The added bonus is that the refuse sack is rarely slimey or smelley, because it never has food remains mixed in with it, so if you do throw something away by mistake, it doesn’t come out covered in the remains of what you ate yesterday.

The worm bin we use is an Australian design called a [goog]Can-o-worms[/goog]. We find it particularly effective because it’s designed as a stack of trays. When you first add waste to the can you start just one tray, and when that tray fills up, you can place a second tray onto the top – the worms can then move up to tray two tray when they fancy a change of scene, and over time, as more worms breed, both trays become well populated.

After a while, the second tray also fills up, so the third and final tray is added. The theory is that by the time the third tray reaches capacity, the first tray should be ready for rotation. The tray in the picture above is a perfect example of a tray that’s finished composting. The rotation process typically involves a little sieving in order to separate the rich vermicompost from the worms. Then, once emptied, the tray, and the worms from it, move to the top of the stack and the process continues.

That’s how it’s supposed to happen anyway.

When the worm bin first arrived, it came complete with several hundred worms, but we very quickly realised that there weren’t enough worms and they weren’t eating fast enough. We could have waited for the worms to breed, but impatience can be a virtue too, and we were surprised to find that there are plenty of places on the internet where you can [goog]buy composting worms[/goog] and have them delivered by the regular postman! We immediately added another few hundred nemetodes to the bin and the composting rate increased to a level that balanced with our output.

Recently, we’ve installed a new kitchen, and ramped up the amount of real cooking we’ve been doing. Traditional foods made with fresh locally produced ingredients are healthier, and cheaper than ready meals and take-aways, but they also have a side effect that we should have planned for.

We’re now generating more compostable waste than ever before. Every meal that’s not from a plastic sachet; everything that doesn’t come in a box; everything we now eat, is made of real ingreditents that have to be extracted from natures bio-degradable packaging, and that packaging has to be composted.

The result is the worm bin is full to brimming, and we’re going to have to start throwing compostable food into the waste bin, which we dont’ want to do. We need to somehow turbocharge our vermicomposting efforts, or introduce a longer pipeline so that the worm population can grow and thus, increase it’s throughput.

The most obvious solution that I can see is that we could buy a couple of extra trays for the can-o-worms, but I’ve not seen anywhere that sells individual trays in the UK.

My search will continue, but in the mean time there may be alternative solutions to this minor glitch, so if you’re in posession of any nuggets of turbo-vermicomposting wizdom, please leave them in the little box below and receive the our eternal gratitude (and when I say “our eternal gratitude”, that’s the gratitude of me, Em, and about ten thousand overworked worms).

This is one such thing, the Eglu, by Omlet. Some call it the iMac for chickens.

Some call it really rather expensive (at a shade under £400 for the whole thing, including 2 live animals, but without hard disk). Some, however, factor in the cost of 6 free range eggs and quickly realize that it’s not such a bad deal after all. With the added bonus that chickens aren’t chicken, and will stand up to the local cat population, they make a rather interesting guardian of the garden.

Granted the more practically minded among us could build a chicken coop, but could we build one that looked like an iMac? (At this point I’ve seriously started to consider looking on [goog]ebay for a second hand iMac[/goog] that I could strip the innards out of, but anything I could make wouldn’t have the handy litter tray.)

I want one. I’m not going to get one until I’ve had a good read about chickens to see if I’d actually be a suitable owner; but these seem way more sensible than a puppy because they don’t need walking and their waste makes good compost, oh, and they lay eggs.