Frugal Friday

[ecosophia]

Welcome back to Frugal Friday!  This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which have changed as we've proceeded. (As things have settled down to a nice steady conversational pace, for example, I've deleted the rules about only one tip per person per week and about limiting the length of comments; I was worried early on about people flooding the forum with too much too fast, but I think we're past that risk.)

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc.  I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

With that said, have at it!

Comments

Transplanting Worms

[prayergardens]

So maybe this is a weird one because I've only ever seen one garden blogger mention it but I transplant worms in my garden.

There are a few places where they tend to congregate so I put down some old tree limbs there and every once in a while I turn the limb over and pick out a few worms and move them over to my exterior potted plants. At the end of the season, I have much better soil than I started with in the potted plants. My neighbor has an ick factor with worms so maybe other people do too but I love them and am grateful for their cooperation in the garden.

The one guy I saw talk about it on a blog staged a seasonal vermicomposter in a shady spot by taking a cardboard box and dumping all his old potting soil in the box in the spring and transplanting the worms into it. He said by the end of summer when the box had fallen apart he had a nice heap of refreshed potting soil. I guess I just skip the middle step and distribute the worms directly to the plants. At the end of the summer I'll drop the enhanced soil into the compost heap to give it a push or just dump it back in a garden bed.

And of course there are all sorts of formal vermicomposting systems but just transplanting them gets a lot of mileage. I hope I'm not disrupting worm families or making bad garden karma but maybe so far so good.

Re: Transplanting Worms

[methylethyl]

Yes! I have totally done this. Only with the really big pots, though. Less than 1 gallon size and I worry about the worms getting dried out between waterings. Have you tried it with any smaller pots, and if so what were the results?? Do you feed them? I bury the occasional apple core or banana peel in there for them. Generally they are still there when I get around to repotting things.

Joel Salatin likes to point out that worms are basically magic:

"What I find most amazing about earthworms, and indeed what still baffles scientists, is that the castings that come out of the worms’ alimentary canals contain five times the nitrogen (N), seven times the phosphorus (P) and 11 times the potash (K) of the soil environment in which the worms live. It’s almost like alchemy because no net loss occurs."

found here: https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/benefits-of-earthworms-zm0z16amzbre/

Additionally, I have a recurring problem with fire ants colonizing one or two of my larger pots. It keeps them out of the wet, during the rainy season. I finally gave up on trying to evict them (I do not like to poison or even use DE on them, as anything bad for the ants is also bad for the roly-polies, millipedes, worms, etc), and instead, I deliberately feed them meat scraps... on the theory that fire ants are flesh-eaters, and that they move along from one nesting site to another when they reach a critical buildup of wastes. So I figure if I "enrich" their food supply, they'll reach that point faster, and move house on their own. I don't have scientific data on whether this shortens their tenancy or not, but the last couple colonies-in-inconvenient-locations did in fact move out not long after I fed them two or three times with the fat trimmings from a ham, and some cheese that the kids had dropped on the floor. Plants seemed fine through all of it, and may even have benefitted from the nitrogen boost.

Re: Transplanting Worms

[prayergardens]

I'm glad I'm not the only one! :)

Thanks for the facts about earthworms. Reading more about them has been on the to-do list for years, I just saw with my eyes that it was a net benefit so I kept going.

I do put them in pots that are one gallon (mine are 1-3 gallons). However, I am in a cooler, wetter climate than you. I also keep them out of full sun and when I start a pot, I fill the bottom 25% with leaves and twigs to help with moisture retention. So far, I don't think I'm a worm serial killer! In fact, when I clean up the pots in the fall, I always do it next to the garden so I can dump the worm mix back into the ground for winter. At this point, I'm surprised when I have a pot without worms so I think my kill rate is pretty low.

I haven't given them food scraps - but I should! I figure they are there for a few months so they were just eating the leaves.

I started all this when I littlePG was a baby and I had gardening ambitions but no time.I popped some potatoes in a recycled plastic shopping bag from TJMaxx and forgot to poke holes in the bottom. There must have been some worms in the potting mix that I didn't see. Then I forgot about it for 4 months. In the fall I had a bunch of rotten new potatoes but the best compost/soil I have ever seen and a huge new worm colony. The worms thrived on total neglect so I didn't think to feed them going forward but I will now.

Re: Transplanting Worms

[baconrolypoly]

In the UK farmers will give worms to those whose land has flooded and the worms have died, which seems like good karma to me.

There's a Sheri S. Tepper novel, 'The Fresco', where in an alien culture it was common to give a gift of worms to people you visit. I was very taken with the idea and have given worms to people who've complained they don't have enough in their compost heaps. I'll dig into one of our heaps and get out a roiling mass, some of the compost and some fresh stuff for them to chew on and take it round in a tub and put them in their new home. It works well.

Re: Transplanting Worms

[prayergardens]

That is fantastic!

I never thought to just ask someone for worms. When I got to my current house 10 years ago, I couldn't find more than a few worms on the whole property. We are on just about 100% sand so I buried compost for years to give them a habitat. I am so proud to have built great soil but duh, I could have saved years of effort if I'd just asked someone for a few handfuls of worms! :)

Re: Transplanting Worms

[baconrolypoly]

Maybe you could start a new thing amongst the like-minded people in your area, a Gift of Worms. People might squint at the idea to begin with but there must be many gardens without enough worms and it could be really popular.