The Time Capsule | Roy Marshall

Wife wanted some worm castings for her potted plants, so I called Rick Fenneman. He has about 60,000 crawlers in his basement.

“Started six or eight years ago as a hobby,” Rick said. “I don’t try to make a living with it, but they keep multiplying, so I sell castings by the gallon and worms by the pound.” He cares less, though, about selling worms than he does about teaching others, especially youngsters, to appreciate the transformation that takes place when food waste and shredded newspapers are converted into fertilizing compost richer than any bag of Miracle Grow.

“Black gold,” the vermi-composters call it, and Micky Fenneman has used the treasure to build her flower beds into the sort we see pictured in magazines. Rick plants a bit with each garden seedling and sells the excess. Employees at his squirm firm have three jobs; eat, poo and make more worms. He feeds garbage, plays soft music, keeps them in the dark and encourages promiscuity. On pleasant weekends he rewards a chosen few by taking them for a boat ride, usually to Little River Lake near Leon for bass and deep-water bluegills.

Rick, a machinist and entrepreneur who lives in the central Iowa town of Cambridge, is as much into raising vegetables as his wife is flowers. Neither are enthused about ingesting herbicides and insecticides and chose compost as a way of improving their soil. Conventional compost, though, usually takes a year or more. Rick explains that worms are faster and produce a better end result, but not just any worm will work in a confined space. The Fennemans raise both red wigglers and European night crawlers; species that thrive and multiply in containers the size of a dishpan.

Charles Darwin, best known for his study of evolution, had a deep admiration for worms. He worked with them for years, gave them IQ tests, suggested few animals were as important to the history of the world.

I’m not sure, though, about living under the same roof. Do the bins smell bad? No noticeable odor, Rick said. Don’t they attract flies? Not if they’re properly taken care of. Escapees? Hardly ever; they don’t like light and as long as they’re happy won’t go anywhere.

Worms can eat about half their weight a day. For Fenneman that converts to nearly 200 pounds each week. About half of that is shredded paper and cardboard. The rest, though, needs to be fruit, vegetables or grain. “Not a problem,” he said. He picks up spent coffee grounds by the bucketful (worms eat the filters as well), a nearby orchard gives him apples they can’t sell and last fall he got three pickup loads of pumpkins that would have rotted in the field. If he ever runs short, he can ask about what goes out the back door of grocery stores or the mountains of food thrown away by school cafeterias.

The process is one that recyclers—and anyone who feels uneasy about waste—should find attractive. According to government sources, enough food to fill a stadium the size of Kinnick goes to landfills each day, with the cost of disposal in the billions of dollars. Fenneman’s worms convert some of what otherwise would have been dumpster refuse into castings he sells for $13 a gallon.

I don’t know if they’re worth it, but wife loves what the stuff does for her plants.

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.