A lot of you have asked where you can get red worms for composting. In an April article, we told you that Buffalo Reuse was planning to sell worms for composting. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they’ll have a stock available anytime soon, so your best bet is to go to a bait shop. I went to Big Catch Bait and Tackle, 2287 Niagara St., Buffalo. Greg Becker, an employee there, said the red worms used for composting are easily…...
by Connie Oswald Stofko I saw some amazingly beautiful compost a couple weeks ago in an Earth Day demonstration at Buffalo ReUse. The compost was dark brown and crumbly and pure, with almost no soil mixed in. The secret to this compost is red wriggler worms. They eat garbage and turn it into compost. “They eat their weight in garbage every day,” explained Kevin Hayes, executive director at Buffalo ReUse. “They’re voracious.” The earth worms that you find in your…...
by Connie Oswald Stofko If you don’t have a compost bin going yet, now is the time to start. The temperatures should be in the 50s later this week, and you may get a touch of spring fever. Starting a compost bin will give you a garden-related chore during this brief warm spell. Your goal for the next few weeks is to start accumulating plant materials in your compost bin. Nothing much will actually happen to the materials for awhile,…...
by Connie Oswald Stofko Sharon M. Webber, CNLP was once called to a home with a problem. It had a fairly new landscape, installed just two years before, but the plants weren’t thriving. In fact, normally tough and sturdy varieties of plant, such as forsythia, spirea, day lilies and even black-eyed Susans, were declining, big time. When you want to know why, she said, “Always go to the soil.” It turned out the initial installation had used soil pulled from…...
by Connie Oswald Stofko If you’re not using your leaves for compost, you’re throwing away a perfectly good supply of nutrients for your soil. When you compost, you allow plant materials to decompose, which produces a dark material that is great for your garden soil. Granted, some municipalities pick up the leaves and do the composting for you. But as a gardener, you may want to try composting. It’s nice to have your own supply of compost on hand when…...
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