By KATHLEEN T. OKUBO
www.nordis.net

Living with migraine is not easy especially one that has for four decades bugged me for days on end. So, one bad-migraine-day, I decided to fix my earthworm-home-composting to get my mind off the migraine discomfort.

A little more than two weeks ago, I started this in the office with a batch of about a kilo of ordinary earthworms my cousin Judy shared. I had put together some dampened wasted office paper, into a used rice sack topped it with dining table and kitchen vegetable cleanings (organic, of course) that I collected a week earlier, while waiting for Judy to pass on the earthworms.

When the earthworms finally arrived, I was too busy with presswork already to do anything else but simply open the sack and dump the bunch of worms in then covered them with some more used and torn up paper then tied up the mouth of the sack to secure them (because my imagination of seeing them crawling on the floor scared me).

A few days ago I decided to bring home the sack of worms and divide it into different sacks for use in the office kitchen and mine.

By the way, by the force of circumstances, I live in a city farmhouse, (just the house because there is no more “farm” as we used to know it) with my big kids, and next door are my brothers who frequent my kitchen, some house pets who believe they are members of human household: two adult male cats, two female dogs and some forty red hens.

Knowing very well I would react, when I told them the load was a sack of earthworms, my brothers and kids suggested with a hehehe, and a twinkle in the corner of their eye to: “put them outside!”, “just spread them on the flower patch or under the rosemary”, “ya?, the chickens will love them!”

Anyway, I prepared four other sacks with damp newspapers as bed on the bottom of the sack, and piled on chopped up grass overgrowth from the yard, collected used coffee granules, to fill 1/3rd of each sack. After mentally overcoming the idea of queeziness handling the squirmy little things, I then opened up the sack where the earthworms were. Lo, it was all black humus a bit damp but not wet and so fluffy. I separated all that black humus from a whole sapad (bunch) of darkened bananas and did not see any worms. Just the same I was glad for the two eight inch flower pot full of clean compost which I thought was not bad for two weeks.

Turning to the sapad of bananas, I found all the earthworms inside each peeling making it look like full bananas, and the peeling was so thin that it practically tore open by the sheer weight of the worms when I lifted it. Besides the natural earthy whaff, the whole package did not smell or stink. And, I now have in process five sacks of earthworm-composting for the two kitchens to supply with organic waste everyday at home and at work.

If a kilo of worms can process half a kilo of organic waste a day, that means the more they are, the much lesser organic garbage a day for the city dump to care for. That makes me believe a mass movement of vermin raisers is far more practical and economically viable than peoples’ money invested in a P64M ERS machinery that hardly works.

If the city decides to and really implements the ordinance on the ban of plastic bag use in Baguio, and that cement factory that promised to get all the plastic waste to recycle will just do it – keep its word; many of us citizens will not sneer behind and build a dark cloud of doubt every time City hall makes a report on Ugnayan about solid waste management. # nordis.net