{"id":4673,"date":"2015-12-14T19:45:08","date_gmt":"2015-12-14T19:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/?p=4673"},"modified":"2016-04-06T11:57:20","modified_gmt":"2016-04-06T11:57:20","slug":"farm-focus-vermicompost-update-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/farm-focus-vermicompost-update-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Farm Focus: Vermicompost Update Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"As you may have learned, compost is a big deal at the farm. It is the foundation of our soil fertility program; helps with water retention; and is part of our\u00a0pest management strategy. By the close of 2015 we will have produced between 3,000-4,000 tons of our thermophilic compost. We apply our thermophilic compost with a mechanical spreader that broadcasts a thin layer of compost under the trees, between the trees and in the wheel rows of the orchard.\n\nOur thermophilic compost is a win for the farm because it allows us to transform large amounts of organic matter that would otherwise be waste into a\u00a0vital product for the orchards soil health. Every year we turn tens of thousands\u00a0of pounds of fruit too damaged or ripe for the kitchen and lots and lots of\u00a0woody material from pruning and thinning our 30,000 trees into compost.\n\nIn addition to our thermophilic compost system, we have been steadily developing our vermicompost program. Christophe, our compost master, initiated a fledgling worm compost experiment in 2012. The first system was very\u00a0primitive - a few plastic storage tubs in Becky and Al\u2019s yard. We soon discovered that Brentwood was too hot for the worms to be outdoors in these small\u00a0plastic containers. We purchased a wigwam, a heavy grade 1\u20442 ton capacity\u00a0plastic bin made especially for vermicompost and placed it inside a shed. Our\u00a0worms were happy in the wigwam but the amount of compost we could create\u00a0was limited to about one ton of vermicompost a year.\n\nIn 2013 we wanted to increase our vermicompost production capacity so we\u00a0created two outdoor worm beds and two \u201ccrocodile pits\u201d , worm beds lined by\u00a0concrete blocks under cover of another shed. To populate these compost areas\u00a0we purchased 25,000 worms from Sonoma Valley Farm.\n\nFor the last two years, there has been a lot of trial and error in learning how\u00a0to best manage these systems to keep our worms producing offspring and\u00a0decomposing organic matter. Temperature is key to production. The ideal\u00a0temperature for the worms is between 65-75F. In the summertime when temperatures in Brentwood break 100F, Christophe has made many an emergency\u00a0run to buy bags of ice to poor over the worm bins and beds to keep the worms\u00a0cool and prevent mass die off. He\u2019s since learned he doesn\u2019t need to do that.\n\nThe worms will just borrow deeper into the soil and reproduction and decomposition will come to a halt until temperatures cool.\u00a0We are also learning how valuable vermicompost is on our farm. Stay tuned\u00a0for more on our vermicompost in January!","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As you may have learned, compost is a big deal at the farm. It is the foundation of our soil fertility program; helps with water retention; and is part of our\u00a0pest management strategy. By the close of 2015 we will have produced between 3,000-4,000 tons of our thermophilic compost. We apply our thermophilic compost with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-farm-focus"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5HwAU-1dn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4673"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4852,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4673\/revisions\/4852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happychildcsa.com\/froghollowCSA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}