cheap worm farms reduce landfill from rubbish

THIS simple design for a homemade worm farm is rat-proof and fits a small shady space. It suits a family of four, as the worms eat the kitchen scraps so fast!
All you need are two empty plaster or paint cans, often thrown out from building sites, and two cheap plastic garden sieves. Builders and plasterers at a building site will usually be happy to give you the used cans rather than throw them in a rubbish skip.
Place one can in a depression in a shady space on damp ground. Put a sieve on top. Cut the bottom from the second can. Place the can on the sieve. Top it with the second sieve (if there are very clever rats around, weight this sieve with half a brick, so vermin can’t lift it).
The sieves stop rats, mice and blowflies getting in, but allow worms perfect freedom to come and go. A few fruit flies do not matter.
Start off the worm farm with some damp earth with a few worms in it. They will multiply quickly, so there is no need to buy worms.
Then all you do is add your kitchen scraps (except bones) to the top can. Worms don’t like citrus, eggshells or tea leaves much, so put those in your compost bin instead. After a few weeks, you’ll have made rich fertiliser for the garden. Just lift the top can off and take out the fertiliser (full of worms) from the bottom of it. You can also take rich worm tea (from the worm poo) from the bottom can.
Shift the worm farm around the garden if you like, but keep it in a well-shaded spot—a cooked worm farm is a sad and smelly thing.
Apart from the fantastic fertiliser, having a worm farm reduces your waste: only bones and packaging need go out in your rubbish or recycling bins. Your compost bin (or heap) will
a All you need is a couple of old buckets and two garden sieves.
also have less food scraps in it and so will be less likely to attract rats. As an added bonus, the worm farm also stops the used plaster cans from going to landfill; these plastic cans are useful as gardening buckets, too, and for making liquid manure.
It’s amazing how quickly the worms reduce the scraps to earth, so the worm farm is hardly ever full. And with a well-run worm farm there’s no smell.
Friendly neighbours in flats could share a worm farm or you could even keep this farm on a balcony in a flat.
Perhaps councils could promote or sell these very cheap worm farm kits, as well as the more expensive commercial worm farms that many sell already. Everyone could afford one! S

Nature Strips and Climate Change

Nature Strips and Climate Change

Monash Council, Melbourne, is about to allow other planting on nature strips instead of grass. This is a small contribution to reducing emissions through reducing power mowing (since people do not use manual mowing with mowers like my Flymo H33, shops sell only poor quality manual mowers, and CHOICE sees power-mowers as the only choice).

‘Sensible’ planting is of tough ground covers and small shrubs which require minimum care and no watering, and whose seeds do not spread across verges.
Cars can be parked on them; they do not mind.
They can be transplants of tough plants which are already established in your garden.
I have several varieties of gazanias and small daisies. ‘Strawberry creepers’ are also hardy.
Whether Monash will approve my two groups of agapanthus I don’t know yet, since these need trimming to avoid obscuring neighbours’ vision of roads, and their flowers must be cut before they seed.

At present many nature strips are simply dust that is power-mowed. Others bcome mud-patterns when cars and motor-bikes park on them. The tracks of a single car remain for months. People can hold off mowing their strip while all the weeds of the neighborhood flourish on them.

Once people enjoy the savings of time, trouble and petrol of their ‘Nature’ nature strip, they may turn their attention to the rest of their garden, to make it a useful place of beauty, flowers, vegetables, timber, play, relaxation, water-saving, clothes-drying and bird and animal life (except possums!) instead of just another area to keep under control. They can do this too without power-mowers.

Everyone with a pocket-handkerchief of a lawn thinks they need their own several-hundred-dollar noise-making polluting neighbor-annoying petrol-mower. Encourage them to think outside the strip.

Shops full of food

Shops full of food
The food Shops at our shopping centre are full of food. They have far more on display than we can hope to buy. Fresh food must be thrown out; food past its use- by- date must be thrown out.
The shops have to have this display because otherwise we shoppers think the shop has had it, and we will not buy from a shop that does not look full of goods.
But it means we pay more for what we buy, because we must pay for what gets thrown out.
SUGGESTION. Since shoppers will not learn to shop at shops that do not look full of goods, shops could have ‘pretend goods’ apart from what they have a good idea they would sell.
Made of plastic, they will look just like more of the fresh goods that are on sale. They are already on sale by the makers of artificial products for various purposes. They will just make more of them – artificial fruit, vegetables, meats, bread and cake.
When people in the world are starving, we should not insist that our shops carry more than they can sell or even put out for dumpster scavengers.