Waste, Worms, Humus
Red Wigglers as Garbage Disposals
Hello and welcome to wormgineer.com, where a Mechanical Engineer is trying to make a difference by helping to re-invigorate
the business of
Vermiculture
and
Vermicomposting.
In fact, I call it
Vermipractice
and what I'm focused
on can be more precisely defined as
Vermicycling
- using worms to dispose of Food waste.
This website has two missions: The upper menu outlines my effort to spur explosive growth in Vermicycling in
the Portland Area, and the lower menu is my effort to provide a reference site for anyone anywhere interested in
Vermipractice. If you're thinking about doing it but need a little more information, my job is to get you over
the hump and started at worm-keeping.
I see a way to grow the cottage industry of worm-keeping into a Green Powerhouse. Certainly the raw resource
(waste food)
exists, Red Wigglers (= eisenia foetida) can do the job, and the by-product - vermicompost - is
hugely beneficial. Once I realized those three facts, I became very interested in answering the question
why aren't worm beds more popular?
It's still a mystery to me, but for now I'm guessing it's actually simple: most people go "Oooh, icky-poo and
yuck, please
make the slimy worms go away!" and lots of others say "That's a hippy thing, not for me. I want to throw my
garbage away and be done with it."
Surely both of those perspectives are subject to change, and certainly a good start down that road is educating
people about not only any fallacies they may have in their impressions, but the happy and
tremendous win-win situation
we're looking at with the employment of worms on a large scale. So I started this website as a vehicle
to help do that.
I think big. The use of worm bins will increase with my help or without it. What I want to do is instigate a
dramatic increase in the actual food waste being converted and
"superquestered".
(I hope you don't mind if
I make up some new words - it seems necessary and it sure is fun. Definitions are provided.)
Putting Red Wigglers to work for Metro, Portland Oregon's regional government
So I came up with a plan. I'm a big fan of the concept of distributed power generation and I am a people-power
kind of person. I'm also a big fan of President Obama, and my efforts here are a direct result of
his call to service.
I don't want to overshare, but to be honest with you right up front here on my home page (I decline to do an "about
me" page), I need to tell you that
I'm not much of a networking guy. I'm a bit of a hermit, actually. I'm not "connected" and often go "off the grid" - hey,
I'm a classic social-skills challenged engineer, what can I say? I am who I am. :-) The good news is that
I have experience in online organizing, so we'll see how this goes. I'm old-school, new-school and
future-school all at the same time, so I do have that going for me. But I need the help of power networkers for
this effort to work.
I call it a plan, and it has gotten a lot further along than a mere "idea", but hoo-boy
there's a lot of
work to do to get my so-called plan ready to execute.
Once this site is up I'll be contacting Metro and finding out what's what on the status quo in the Food
Waste business around these here parts. ;-) The Vision page talks about this a bit, and
I'll be updating these pages
as I learn things and the plan is revised or refined.
(I plan to make previous releases of these pages available in archives, so you can track progress at any point
in time. I need to look into CMS software these days.)
Worms on the Web via the Wormgineer
By the way, yes I am doing this website myself. I know html/CSS/DOM/AJAX/cpanel/javascript/php, etc. and
in fact I have a little
web hosting company,
www.yourmodern.com.
I'll only mention this once on this site, here comes the plug:
if you're html savvy and you need a reliable host that won't
hassle you with hustles, I offer excellent reliability and response time (witness this site).
The actual server is mere paces from being literally right on top of the internet backbone.
The server owner is a dear friend and computer guru, the server itself is tended by robots and people.
I'm told that it is Digg-effect ready.
I would LOVE to host your worm-related website - or whatever kind of site
you might need. If you can commit to managing and maintaining the html/CSS files, I'll show you the rest.
We find a nice template and I'll work it over to get you launched. Cheap and easy. Especially for worm-keepers.
One more note before I let you go to explore the rest of the site. OK, two notes. One, yes I know some of
the sections are long. No apologies, I like to write and the idea with this site is to dig deeper than other
sites. (Metaphor or Pun? You decide). Engineering writing is supposed to be Clear, Concise and Complete. For
this site, I'm favoring Complete over Concise. I can only hope it's Clear.
Science Education and Composting Worms
My most fervent hope with this website is to inspire not just hordes of adults, but to provide a resource
for kids and young adults. I'll mention it often: There is a stunning lack of scientific experimentation
with Red Wigglers in the area of Vermipractice: what could also be called Worm Husbandry. I'm telling you
that there are 4-H, Science Fair, Science Class, etc. subjects galore for those willing to dig in on the subject.
I'm talking about real science here! Kids would LOVE that, right? A high school class could publish a paper
and it would be actual never-before-done science and valuable knowledge for the home worm keeper! I'm telling you
that there are even many entire Science Careers to be found in Vermipractice! Please check out the Forums here
and let's see what we can do to raise awareness on this.
As a result of having this ambition, you can be confident that I will keep this site and the forums kid-friendly and
of course G-rated.
Be advised however that there might be pictures of naked worms on any page. For worm lovers, doncha know.
