This Saturday, the Andes Sprouts Society and Catskill Mountain Artisans Guild present resident artist Sam Hammer who will give a workshop describing his scientific and artistic studies on the humble but fascinating composting worm. The presentation will be held in the community room at the Catskill Mountain Artisans Guild store in the Commons Building in Margaretville.
Hammer, an associate professor of biology at Boston University, is on sabbatical this year and was selected by the Roxbury-based Andes Sprouts Society to be a resident artist at its mobile artist studio which is located in Stamford, NY this year. “My project has two segments: I am studying worm ecology with composting earthworms and then I am making art based on worm ecology.”
The worm has profound impacts in the world of agriculture. “They live in a complex community of other organisms. They ingest soil, along with many bacteria and other microbes, and excrete digested soil, bacteria, and released nutrients. I have compared the chemical constitutents of compost tea with that of a commercially made fertilizer and found that the compost consists of a significantly greater diversity of micronutrients,” said Hammer .
He continued, “I think we can implicate the complexity of organic compost in the response of the plants fertilized with it. The beauty of it is that any kid could start a worm composter using coffee grounds, egg crates and of course worms. The worm composter is surprisingly clean and doesn’t produce any odor.”
Hammer’s presentation will include video and still images derived from his work, information on composting with worms, and provide attendees at the workshop with starter worm composters.
Andes Sprouts Society is a cooperative non-profit that actively engages artists, technologists and farmers at farms and orchards in development projects that creatively address issues and applications of emergent technologies and organic farming.
For the 2012 season, the Sprouts residency cottage will be situated at the Goldenheart Unidiversity Farm and directly adjacent to Michael Kudish Natural History Preserve in Stamford, NY. The farm is a diversified small farm with livestock, bees and vegetable and flower gardens which will sponsor three specific projects in which Sprouts Society resident artists may collaborate. Those projects include honey bee workshops, animal husbandry, and botanical identification of specimens in the Preserve with Dr. Michael Kudish.
The workshop will be held in the Community Resource Room at the Catskill Mountain Artisans Guild in the Commons Building on Main Street in Margaretville at 3:00 PM on Saturday September 15th. For more information about the Andes sprouts Society as well as links to the Artisans Guild and the Michael Kudish Natural History Preserve, visit the Sprouts website at http://andessproutsresidency.wordpress.com/ .
