One Dog's Poo

Is a worm's breakfast.

Over the last couple of years we've developed a game plan in suburban Sydney that simply stated is, "if it comes on to the property, or grows here, it stays here if possible. We have a rainwater system with 7,000 litres of storage and the grey water goes on the plants

Newspapers get shredded and composted or used as mulch, fallen and trimmed branches go through the mulcher, food scraps (I'm a vego by marriage) all hit the compost as well; then there are the dogs.

Being good dog owners we always scoop the poop as we tour the streets and parks and pick up the canine land mines from the back yard. We used to bin it, but now we worm farm it. We've beeing dumping the dumps for a while now, using the liquid runoff as fertiliser and the residue has been going into the regular compost because it is too rich just to drop a plant in.

But today I got to empty the top level, where all the worms do their thing. Scooped the top layer of work in progress to one side and dug out the processed poop. Holy mackeral, that's a lot of worms. And, aside from a few spiders and the occasional slater, no vermin, no smell, just high powered goodness.

There's almost more worm per cc of compost than there is recycled crap. Then I got to thinking, outside of the blog, there's a fair bit of human poop generated around here; and there's about 3 feet of airspace under the house. I wonder how much a human waste worm farm would cost, and could we get it in under the house?

 

BTW, we don't pick up other people's dogs poo for one very good reason; you never know if the dogs have been wormed recently, dropping a wormer-laced dropping in the farm would kill off the producers.

Comments

[kat]

i'm intrigued by your blog here: about a year ago i got all enthusiastic about worms disposing of our dog poo, and bought the tumbleweed container and worms from bunnings, and went about plopping our dog's dung in there. But lo and behold, all the worms died!

have you any suggestions as to why this might happen?

and, ps, i like your idea for worms dealing with the human waste, too!

[Earl Mardle]

being a total amateur I don't really know, although our worms also seem to fluctuate. Keeping good moisture levels seems to be important and they definitely slow down in the cooler weather so keeping them in a warm place in winter probably makes a difference.

Once when I thought ours were dead I took the main container off and the lower one was full of them trying vainly to get back up to the food.

I just emptied them back in the top and they went berserk.

As for the human waste, when we move to NZ in a couple of months, item 3 after buying the house and getting broadband, will be composting toilets.

let me know if you come up with anything important about the little critters though.

[Ebony]

How long after you worm your dog can you start putting their dog poo back into the worm farm???

[Ebony]

How long after you worm your dog can you start putting their dog poo back into the worm farm???