Back in June, I wrote a rather breathless diary on my brand-new indoor vermiculture experiment. I'd bought 500 Red Wiggler worms and set them up with plenty of moist shredded-newspaper bedding, in a bin made from a 15" X 20" vinyl cat litter tray. I planned on feeding them my kitchen scraps and shredded junk mail. Eventually, I planned to harvest "vermicompost" to use on my houseplants or sell.
I loved the ideal of self-reliant disposal of personal waste. In broader terms, I loved living to reflect the notion that I'm not at the center of the universe, and my species isn't.
That was almost three months ago. I still have my worm bin. The ideals that guided me to set it up still guide me. But I'm feeling less breathless. For a full update on how my experiment is going, follow me below.
I keep the worm bin in my kitchen drawer these days, and dump food scraps in as I prepare food. Nothing nitrogenous accumulates. I keep the drawer that holds the bin half-open, because if I shut the drawer, I develop intolerable mold and other issues. (Yes, I got to learn all that the hard way.)
So, virtually 100% of my household food waste goes to the worms, who seem to thrive on it, and they also consume 30-40% of my considerable waste-paper-and-cardboard output.
What's not to love?
To start to answer that question, if you aren't already very familiar with the concept of "permaculture"—which encompasses "sustainable" agriculture, landscaping, construction, and community-building, emphasizing interdependence—please check out these links.
I will paste the "permaculture core tenets" below, courtesy Wikipedia:
Care of the earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply. This is the first principle, because without a healthy earth, humans cannot flourish.
Care of the people: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence.
Return of Surplus: Reinvesting surpluses back into the system to provide for the first two ethics. This includes returning waste back into the system to recycle into usefulness.
They're ageless ideals for civilization or any one of its inhabitants. But they trouble me for what they don't contain.
Convenience and Control
What do you not see in the permaculture guiding tenets? Well, I don't see the word "convenience" once; I also don't see the word "control." These days, both are watch-words for the functioning of our western post-industrial culture, or for any product of it. Including yours truly.
Convenience
Unless we aspire to live on a 17th-Century farmstead—and few of us do—the need for convenience, the ability to do something in the quickest way possible, isn't going to go away. It'll always factor in moderners' decisions about how best to "green" our lifestyles, to the degree that our personal circumstances even permit us to question "how we want to live." Can we sacrifice the convenience of fast food, to eat "better" at home? If we must drive, can we at least car-share?
It's so, so relative.
In maintaining my worm bin, I've found I had to sacrifice a hundred little "shortcuts," which costs in time, physical energy, and mental planning, relative to when I disposed of waste conventionally. I've had to talk myself out of believing that these minimal sacrifices, for the goal of waste self-sufficiency, count as "bad."
A perfect example: I have to shred paper-and-cardboard waste, by hand or with scissors, before I put it in the worm bin. This little chore takes me 10-20 minutes, a few times a week. In a busy week, indeed, this could add up. It would be faster if I just dumped it, like in the old days. But I'm on a new path now. In terms of my habitat, broadly considered, the "convenience" I enjoyed back then was illusory, anyway.
Control
We modern people stake our sense of well-being on the notion that we absolutely control our environment. Think for a moment about what a big flap we make about "things growing where they aren't supposed to." Such uninvited species are somehow always invaders, up to no good. Control of "infectious disease" is ever-more a cornerstone of Western medicine, since the
invention of Penicillin. That modern preoccupation has accelerated into recent decades, with the current proliferation, for whatever reasons, of lethal microbes, and ever-harsher medicines to combat them. The "pest-control" industry, from weed killer, to rodent traps, to bug spray of all kinds, takes up an awful lot of bandwidth, both in terms of advertising and in the public psyche.
I contrast this with the permaculture notion of the "guild," a collection of organisms with interdependent life-functions in a system, e.g., microbes in gardening soil that nourish it for growing plants, being nourished by rotting plants. This is a very simple example. A more complex example is my worm bin, which exists to decompose my household waste into fertilizer for plants. Worms do this job, abetted by a veritable zoo of fungi and bacteria, and vice-versa.
To acclimate to living with a worm bin, and all the things growing in it I didn't put there, I'm having to learn to coexist with life-forms I'd been programmed to eradicate. But in this case, I'm not here to vanquish anything; I am stewarding a "universe" I created.
The mold from the bin coats the outside of the bin, too, and makes it a garden of sorts. I realize this when I have to hoist the bin out of the drawer, to rotate it, so the other side is exposed to daylight, and to sponge out the drawer periodically (I said the drawer it sits in was half-closed). This job is nasty. The bin smells when your face is next to it. It's filthy, and, because my kitchen is small, I have to set the bin temporarily on the stove burners:
(You can see one of my crop of Red Wigglers in this photo, nearest my pinkie.) Part of the maintenance I perform, then, is contending with organic glop from the worm bin that ends up in the food area.
I'm not trying to make anybody sick. I'm merely making an example of my own discomfort to suggest that we modern people could stand to re-learn tolerance for uninvited organisms sharing our living spaces—within reasonable limits, of course.
Mindless consumption, when I was disposing of waste conventionally, supposedly had "left me time for important things." But what the right hand giveth, the left hand taketh away, and I'd been applying the "savings" of my wasteful lifestyle, in terms of convenience and the illusion of control, towards more running to keep up with the pace of modern life. But now I want off the treadmill. Let me instead accept responsibility and learn to rest in it.