January 2022

The New Year is a great time to reflect on the prior year and set goals for the upcoming year. Back2TheDirt started less than a year ago and over the course of 2021, we have grown from an idea to a functional worm farm that just reached 1 ton of food composted! Over the course of 2022, our goal is to grow our services, tests out our castings, and connect with the community. This will include working a couple of farmers markets and giving talks about vermicomposting through different local organizations (more to come on that).

In January, we composted 195 lbs of food and paper waste. This month, I finished the harvesting trommel! I harvested 8 5-gallon buckets of castings, much quicker than hand-sieving. I'm excited to use it more this upcoming spring as orders pick up. I was also able to meet some cool, compost-caring people in the Cincinnati area. I met with Steve Rock, who is also a Waste Innovation Grant recipient and has a Master's degree in composting, to check out his worm bins. He builds smaller, continuous-flow-through bins approximately 3'x2'X2'. He also constructed a clever, mini harvest trommel with a bucket and hardware mesh. I met with Elise Erhart, the Outreach Specialist for Hamilton County R3source, she came to tour the beds and offered to help if I ever needed to put together an educational event. Finally, I met with Greg Potter and Erin LeFever of the Civic Garden Center. They invited me to help teach a Master Compost class on vermicomposting this summer and had a lot of great questions about my worm bed. All in all, I learned social networking really is all that.

Also, I got an avocado pits that sprouted in my worm bin to grow leaves! I've tried in the past to sprout avocado pits and it never has worked before. Maybe in 10 years I'll have homegrown avocados.

Fun Fact: There are approximately 2,700 different kinds of earthworms.