Hey all! Noob here, but I've been hounding forums here and elsewhere for around 2 years, picking up all sorts of pearls from you all. It's been illuminating to say the least. I grew 2 successful girls last year using hydro-nuts in coco. This time I'm planning on running the same setup alongside organics. I live in Pakistan where it's kinda hard to source most of the organics i see mentioned here often (meals, guanos etc.), largely because i don't know their street names in Urdu, and less so because they aren't available at all... Stuff i've managed to get so far: Blood/Bone meal, Kelp meal, Azomite, Epsom salt, oyster shells, Humic/Fulvic acid, Bat guano (had a friend fly it in from the US), Superthrive (again, flown in by friend) and Great White mycorrhiza (quite a friend eh?). So, as a first post goes, only fitting it should be a problem: EWC is impossible to get here since no one's quite caught up to the tide, as far as organics go, so I've started my own bin a few weeks ago with red wigglers. Should have some goodies in a couple of months, but i'd like to get started sooner. Is it possible to inoculate with a tea made of EWC instead of adding castings? There's a gent here who supplies the worm tea, but is for some really really strange reason refuses to sell even a pound of castings (I'm still on his case). So can tea be good enough? Can't for the life of me find any potting soil listed here. All i have is some local brands of compost and a peat free "organic" potting soil by a Brit company called Vitax. Don't trust em since everything else by them has more chems than a big bag of Molly. So what do i do?! Have access to dirt cheap Coco (unbagged), Perlite, vermiculite and not so cheap Peat Moss. Should i get to making my own base or invest in a local manufacturer's compost (really basic stuff)? That's about all the possible issues i can think of right now. PS. The hydro grow i mentioned at the onset were sourced locally but made in Thailand. They weren't anything great, but did the job. Getting the Canna line a+b (with their additional nuts) flown in from England this time around. Quite excited to see what magic transpires.
Compost works very well in lieu and/or in concert with vermicompost (EWC), provided its finished heating up and cured out a bit. An ACT will help expand the amount of microlife obtained from the EWC/compost but more likely than not what he has to offer is worm leachate, which is not that useful of an item for gardening. It's basically just the water soluble compounds, some microlife and any particles that washed through the bin when excess water was applied. It will not be enough to replace the humus content of a healthy, living soil. I'd source some coco, compost and perlite for a quick mix, though I highly recommend searching locally for neem seeds (hopefully pressed) for usage in the soil as a nutritional boost and preventative amendment. Always look for local herbs to use as nutrition and/or IPM (integrated pest management) material, and if possible (since youre flying in nutrition lines) source some ascophyllum nodosum, also known as kelp meal.
Appreciate the input @GiMiK. The guy has one of those industrial aerators, ones where you can get a 100 gallon of tea going at a time, so i don't think it's leachate.. Besides why else would he be doing with worm farms if he isn't selling the castings either. Think it'll do me good if i get a tea as a starting inoculant? I can source cow poo very easily, but it's got all sorts of weeds growing since I'm assuming it isn't 'cooked' properly and hasn't composted (If the weeds survive, I'm sure pathogens did too) . Another compost that's considered really good here is made from cow and goat tripe (from slaughter houses) cooked inside pits in the ground over a period of a year or two. Neem seeds are not a problem. I have ample trees growing all around my house. Im assuming when you say pressed, you don't mean simply whack them flat with a steak hammer? Luckily i live in a region where herbs and their uses are plentiful (India/Pakistan). It'll be harder finding the local name for it, than the item itself.
Got my vermi bin started about a month ago... go ahead and ignore that 'not having EWC' in the thread's heading At 30 days. Feeding blended kitchen scraps: egg shells, cantaloup/mango skins, teabags and coco-bedding (At first used paper which you see there). I'd aggravated the bin before taking the pic - bringing some of the bedding up top - so you can't see all the castings. Most of the food stuff is well broken down. I'll give it another month before harvesting some of the good stuff.