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Updated: May 11, 2025
Uncle Mano suggested that I relax the next day, which I did, watching T.V., looking at photo albums and generally chatting with them about my sabbatical so far and about my plans in Chennai. Early the following morning Uncle Mano and I set off for New College where Dr Sultan Ismail's Earthworm Institute is located and where I would spend the next fortnight studying earthworms and vermiculture.
My stint with vermiculture over, I had another fortnight of study with Dr K. Vijayalakshmi, whom my dad calls India's `Spider Woman'. Dr Vijayalakshmi has been doing research on rearing spiders as a biological weapon for controlling cockroaches and her workplace is full of spiders of various types, all in bottles, and bred under her supervision.
Vermiculture because they could practise this at home to process the garbage into compost and snakes because people have so many fears about them.
5th December: Went to New College to collect my vermiculture report. 6th December: Did feeding of baby spiders first. Then caught flies. A female spider's eggs had just hatched so Selvan and I did the separation of the babies into individual containers. 7th December: Did writing of my report first today. Then I gave it to Madam to correct. After she finished with it, I started writing it in fair.
I immediately got down to carefully removing each brick without damaging it as the bricks were to be re-used. Guru, the expert mason, then came over to construct the tank, and I helped. In fact, we built two tanks that day: one large and one medium. We also started vermiculture in a wooden crate.
These are the ideal conditions that must be kept in mind when using them for vermiculture. Since earthworms breathe through the skin, they perish if their skin becomes dry or the quantity of mucus diminishes. Hence to keep earthworms alive in the vermicompost containers, care should be taken to ensure that the vermibed remains moist. Earthworms however do not prefer waterlogged soils.
The most suitable earthworms recommended for vermiculture are the epigeic and anecic earthworms. Perionyx excavatus is purplish red and rough. Near the two ends the Perionyx excavatus is almost black in colour. They also breed faster than Lampito mauritii. Earthworms prefer cool temperatures, moist soil, humidity, relatively less sunlight and neither too coarse nor too fine sand.
When I talked about vermiculture, particularly about mixing cowdung with soil, sometimes the girls and boys would find it distasteful and would make jokes about it or laugh at the idea and I would think that these are city kids and they don't know anything about cowdung. But still I would continue to explain how a vermipit can be set up in their homes.
It was my dad's idea that I should put into practice immediately the vermiculture that I had learnt, since managing garbage is becoming a problem in almost all households.
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