My favorite maggots

The adult soldier fly.  Photo credit: Rock Hill high School

Howdy neighbors!  How is your soil today!?

I need to tell you about my new favorite pet, the soldier fly larvae.  I'm being totally serious.  I worry about their health!  When I go to my compost tumbler to drop off a new gift, and see hundreds of them chewing on my food scraps, I get so relieved. Yay, they are still there!  Phew! Now that I have them, I don't know what I'll do without them.  Well, I do- I'll actually have to exert myself and turn my compost instead of just gawking at it lovingly.  Don't leave me, maggots!  I love how your efficiency enables my laziness!

 See them in their gross glory here (click play):

Look at the smiles on those happy Hermetia illucens.  That was once an avocado, by the way.

The best part about my maggots is that I pretty much do nothing to keep them around.  They are lower maintenance than chickens!!  My compost tumbler system is set up well to house them, because I can keep fresh kitchen scraps on the top of my pile, inside the tumbler, and attract the soldier flies without attracting rodents. 

Factoids about my new Friends

• Heterotrophes*, and detritivores*, these baby solider flies eat rotting things (like my kitchen scraps) like it is their mission in life.  They'll take big uncut (read: lazy compost style) chunks of whatever and turn it into homogenous poo so it can further decompose into awesome humus.  Ergo, they help me make compost faster.  A lot faster.  For example, before these guys, we called my tumbler "the preserver" since we wouldn't get but one binful of humus a year. Now I'm depositing pretty-smelling bug poo on my soil that was food just a few weeks prior.
• They are voracious and will likely  eat scraps before they have a chance to smell badly (even big compost no-nos like dairy, shhhh).
• Their poo is a nice smelling soil amendment. Mmmmm bug poo smells like actinomycetes.
• The adult soldier flies do not eat.  This means that unlike the maligned cockroach and house fly (yuk!), they don't come into your house looking for food! If they are in your house, they are lost; they don't want to be in there!  Unless you have rotting food in your house, but that is another discussion (you should clean your house *cough*).
• The flies inoculate the compost with beneficial bacteria.
• They are native.
• They don't bite or carry disease (source)!
• They outcompete houseflies for habitat, reducing your housefly population.  

Gratuitous macro lense house fly pic:  I am not a fan of this diptera (Diptera is the order that characterizes both flies).

Soldier flies have so many interesting positive attributes, that Dr. Watson and others are looking into utilizing them for large scale animal waste  management.  

Yay!!!  Tell me about the bugs in your soil that YOU are grateful for!

*Definiciones:
Autotroph: "The acquisition of metabolic energy from the fixation of inorganic carbon, for example, by photo- or chemosynthesis (source)."
Heterotroph: "An organism that depends on complex organic substances for nutrition (source)."
Detritivore: "An organism that feeds on dead organic debris (source)."

Those actinomycetes sure do smell good.

Here in ATX, it rained the other day.  And boy-oh-boy did it smell wonderfully refreshing.  It reminded me of a much-maligned kingdom (or domain, depending one what taxonomic ranking system you use): bacteria!  Although bacteria can get a bad rap, we can thank them (particularly the actinomycetes) for one reason behind that fresh rain smell.

Here are some potential causes of our odoriferous joy:  

• ozone from a thunderstorm,
• petrichor  (click here to read multitudinous gargantuan technical words), and
• geosmin, which is produced by the Streptomyces bacteria, a genus within the group actinomycetes!
• Factoid: It is a type of terpene (we've discussed terpenes before).
• Factoid: It can give fish an unpalatable flavor.  
• AWESOME factoid: Wild Bactrian camels may be able to smell water up to 50 miles away because they can smell geosmin.  Thank you soil bacteria for helping the thirsty camels!!

Do you learn by listening? Listen here for an easy to understand explanation, covering the same stuff mentioned above. 

Besides that wonderful smell, there are other reasons why actinomycetes are awesome.  I imagine you've heard that bacteria such as rhizobium help legumes obtain nitrogen from the air.  Well, the actinomycetes genus Frankia helps non-legumes fix nitrogen from the air.  This means that they can help plants colonize infertile and newly forming soils.  Also, many actinomycetes can digest what others can't.  Those hard to decompose substrates such as chitin and cellulose are prime picking for these guys.  That is great news for compost with sawdust and branches!

Want more actinomycetes?  They can tolerate arid and salt-affected soils.  They work best in soils with a pH between 6.0 - 7.5, but are more sensitive to acidic soils.  Don't worry too much about acidity though, since fungi can take over the decay where actinomycetes leave off (info also from reference #1).

Also, this great article says that daily turning of compost, while good for some purposes, can inhibit growth of actinomycetes.  Although actinomycetes can either be mesophilic* or thermophilic*, they are mostly known to work in the later, cooler stages of compost creation.  If you see something that looks like gray spider webs in the outer edges of your compost, it just might be actinomycetes.  Please remember to say, "thank you!"  

Please enjoy your "rain smell" responsibly.

*Definiciones:

Mesophilic: microbes that function at temperatures above 113 °F

Thermophilic: microbes that function at temperatures between 50-113 °F (10-45 °C) (ref)

Something we can all agree on...COMPOST

Yes we can, agree.

Great pontification, dear readers reader! Decomposable compost is great for the soil, beyond just  soil structure improvements.  It does more than provide food for the soil microorganisms that help aid in aggregating soil.  Let us draw our attention to the mother of all soil amendments (please think out loud in a bellowing voice),  Compost!

• It increases cation exchange capacity, 
• improves structure, 
• helps retain moisture, 
• and provides nutrients! 
• It can almost do no wrong!

As an aside, you can use manure to make your garden compost.  I am trying to help a friend learn about the nutrient profile of elephant and donkey poop manure for her bipartisan victory garden.  Ideas on where to find that info?

Here are some interesting links I found during my, so far unfruitful, search.

• Land application of Animal Manure  by Clemson University Extension; 
• Considerations in Using Livestock Manure as Fertilizer by Alabama Cooperative Extension System; and
• Using Dog & Cat Manure on Home Gardens (hint, probably not the best idea) by University of Minnesota Extension Service.