Last month at a San Antonio Dollar Store (no such thing on Oahu!) I paid with a $20 and got three $5 bills in change... or so I thought. As I was stuffing the bills in my wallet I dropped one without realizing it and thus discovered that I only had two $5s.
So I reversed course to the cashier and politely but firmly informed him that I was short $5. He seemed a little surprised at his mistake but obligingly ponied up another $5, and I left happy.
My spouse hadn't seen any of that incident, but she had followed me back from the exit and she was happy too. When we got out to the parking lot she handed me my "missing" $5 and said "Honey, you'll never believe what happened near the registers. Some doofus must have dropped this $5 bill and didn't even realize it!"
I returned the $5 to the cashier and apologized profusely.
Khan said:
Tell me of your worms.
I am interested in vermiposting.
Mindy Jaffe runs what I think may be the only vermiposting business on Oahu. The foreign pest rules here are pretty strict, so she has to find/breed her worms locally. There's no such thing as a big-box vermipost competitor here, so she gets to set her own pricing and they retail at about $10/ounce. We're in on the ground floor!
We went to a worm workshop at the end of 2006. There are two broad classes of worms-- endogenic, the underground kind that usually volunteer as bait, and epigeic, the surface dwellers eating decaying matter (and dodging early birds). Mindy started with worms from the Big Island's Parker Ranch & Waimanalo pig farms, so you can imagine what wild epigeics dine on. Considering their low dietary standards, a couple ounces of epigeic worms (~100 worms/ounce) will happily live in a one-gallon plant pot (with drainage holes) feasting on shredded wet newspaper & food waste. (We use mainly advertising inserts, banana peels, & apple cores.) The moist, warm conditions bring quick decay and the worms produce nutrient-rich vermicast. An ounce of worms with a square foot of surface area can snorkel through an ounce of waste per day. (Why, yes, I do know how much a banana peel weighs-- about 2-3 ounces.) If the waste is chopped into tiny pieces then it decomposes faster, the worms will eat more quickly, and they'll start breeding.
In small, dark spaces, well-fed epigeics will trade sperm with their neighbor worms and slough off egg sacs every 10-30 days. The geometric progression doubles the population every 60-90 days. We started with one ounce so at the end of this month we'll "harvest" the worms by splitting the pot's contents between
two one-gallon pots.
By the end of 2007 we'll have worked our way up to a pound of worms and we'll be ready to step up to the "Can o' Worms"-- a four-tier stack of containers (imported from Australia) that keeps the worms close together (more breeding opportunities) while simplifying the waste-disposal process.
Our pot sits on our kitchen nook table and our Can o' Worms will sit on the floor next to it. There's no smell or flies or visiting bugs (if the food waste is properly covered with shredded newspaper) and already I'm only hauling about two-thirds as much compost down the hill as I used to. By 2008 all of our food waste will stay in the kitchen for vermiposting (up to a pound a day). I've heard that some Australian towns vermipost tons of food waste a day and are contemplating a "no landfill" policy.
Some substances can't easily be vermiposted-- oils, fats, carnivore poop, and some proteins. Coffee grounds, tea bags, and rotten rice/pasta, however, are yummy. Herbivore poop is fine (our bunny produces four ounces a day). Lots of citrus can be lethal to worms (limonine may be the cause) and papaya seeds can cause sterility. However it takes a lot of citrus & papaya to stop a pound of worms.
It's a fun hobby with a purpose. We only fill part of a 13-gallon trash bag a week (mostly with junk mail & scrap paper) and I don't have to run a big compost pile (unless I want to). Does this mean I'm eligible to sell carbon credits to Al Gore?
