This post is by guest writer, Bel. Bel's blog is here.

Through time and across cultures, the menstrual cycle has been sacred and taboo, celebration and woe. In our society, menstruation is generally treated as an inconvenient condition. ‘The curse’ sentiment lingers while our negativity toward our monthly bleeding shapes our daughters’ expectations. In order to feel good about our bodies and their natural processes we need to accept and love ourselves as we are. If it weren’t for menstruation, there would be no human life.

Modern advertising for disposable menstrual items focuses on the products, not the physical, spiritual and emotional process that is our cycle. Females are bombarded with many sterile, slim, paper products that invariably announce that periods are things you should not feel, see, smell or tell others about. But are the disposables as convenient and hygienic as we’re led to believe? With disposable options there are the issues of cost, dioxins and other chemical nasties, landfill and the environmental costs of production of all those individually wrapped, perfectly white sanitary items.

There is a myriad of alternative menstrual products. Cloth pads and liners are more comfy, cool and clean than the feminine hygiene items that the supermarkets stock. They are readily available in many health food stores, some markets, by mail order and online. A comprehensive list of online cloth pad sellers can be found here. I recommend that you try a sample pad or pack before purchasing all of your pads from the one seller. There are so many types of pads available, and only you will know which suits your size, shape and cycle.

Fabric pads are quite easy to sew at home, which is a special menarche or moontime ritual in itself. Bright and funky fabrics (or whatever your preference is) make this project lots of fun. And if we’re going to bleed, why not make it fun? If you browse the free printable pad patterns here, you will see that there are many designs to choose from. I have tried and prefer this one and this one. Or you can do what our mothers and grandmothers and those before them did. Pads can be as simple as a few strips of old towel, held together and to your pants with a safety pin. Or face washers folded into quarters lengthwise. But I do think the slim, snap-on version is more comfortable! Pads can be made from recycled materials – towels, bunny rugs, old clothing, buttons etc. The fabrics need to be absorbent and easy to wash and dry. On the underside of the pad, polyester fabrics can be used and help create a leak-proof barrier. Fabrics can be purchased specifically for that leak-proof barrier if you prefer – taslon, PUL, polar fleece etc.

Cloth pads are not a hassle to store or clean. Used pads can be placed in a small bag such as a cosmetic bag for when you are home to rinse and soak them. The ones with wings fold up onto themselves and snap shut so only the outer layer is showing – this is great for transporting used pads. There are many different methods for washing pads, as you can read here.

If you prefer internal methods of protection, menstrual cups are a reusable option. The most common brands available are The Keeper, Diva Cup and Mooncup. The former is latex rubber, the other two are silicon. The Keeper is available in Australia from http://www.menstruation.com.au/ and http://www.moonpads.com.au/. The others can be ordered from overseas, postage is fairly cheap because the item is lightweight and delivery is usually only a week or so. If you type any of the brands into a search engine, it is easy to find local suppliers or mail order services worldwide.

As well as reusable pads and cups, sea sponges and organic disposable tampons and pads should be considered. The sustainability of most commercially available disposable menstrual products is a valid concern. We are making greener choices in our food, clothing, cleaning and health care. We use cloth nappies on our babies, so why not cloth pads for ourselves and our daughters? If you’re initially turned off by the ‘ewww’ factor (I was), please still try cloth at least once. The environment, your budget and your body will rejoice!

May knowing and celebrating your natural cycles encourage wellness and empower your spirits and those of your daughters.

* Photo - these pads I made for my firstborn daughter's menarche. I tried to create different shapes, sizes, absorbency, textures and colours. Some are for daytime use, some for night, some for going out (with matching storage bag) and some are liners for in-between days. She loves them and has hardly used a disposable item since her periods began.

It doesn't look the best, but these little creatures will help you grow good organic food. They will recycle your kitchen waste and help fill your fruit and vegetables with all the nutrients and trace elements they need for good healthy growth. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, today it's worms on parade.

When I first got my compost worms, I kept them in a couple of polystyrene boxes. They were happy enough but then they started reproducing and I realised they needed more room. We bought an old bathtub from the local recycle shop for $20 and Worm Hilton was born.

The worms need bedding to live in. They also eat this bedding and over time is must be replaced. The worms will turn the bedding into worm castings, which is the best complete fertiliser for the garden.

Just a word on the worms. You need compost worms in a worm farm - reds, tigers or blues, not earth worms. Earth worms do not like living in worm farm conditions, compost worms will not burrow through soil.

Worms need a dark environment so you'll need to cover the bedding with moist bagging or newspaper, and a hard cover to keep rain out, like a corrugated roofing sheet. Of course, I'm telling you my experience with my worm farm. I live in a fairly dry and sometimes hot environment but when it rains, we get torrential rain. If you live in a moderate climate, you'll be able to keep your covered worm farm under a tree. If you're in a cold place, it will have to be somewhere protected from the cold. If it's really hot where you live, your worm farm will need to be in the coolest place. The idea is to provide a fairly stable temperature, with moist conditions. If the temperature is too hot or too cold, the worms will either die or they'll escape to find a better home. When you start your worm farm, monitor it to make sure the worms are ok and like where you've put them.

Get a wheelbarrow and place the dry materials like the shredded paper and straw in it to soak. All your materials need to be moist.
Using an angle grinder, cut slits in the bath tub about 5cm from the base. This allows air in. Although the worms will be living in the bedding, it needs to have air in it or they will die. When you've added the slits, place the bath tub where it will sit permanently. Mine is in my bushhouse under a bench. When it's in place, add the gravel. The gravel provides good drainage so that the bottom of the bathtub doesn't fill with water and drown some of the worms. Notice the slits cut in the side of the tub, there are some under the gravel as well.

The gravel has been placed on the base of the tub, now cover it with the filter sheet or weedmat to prevent the worm castings mixing into the gravel.

Now you're ready to start placing the bedding. Wring out the paper/straw/hay and put it into the tub, top that with lots of compost and manure and mix it all together. You need to make a nice organic bed for your worms. One that they'll happily eat, reproduce and live in. The better the conditions you give them, the faster they'll reproduce and the more castings you'll have for your garden. This photo shows the first of the bedding - the shredded paper.

Now add the compost or garden soil and mixed well, water it to make it nice and moist - not wet.

The bedding should be about 40% water. A good test is to wring out a handful of bedding material, if you can only get a couple of drops of water, that's great. If water drips out, that's way too much and you'll need to drain the bedding to remove some of the water before placing the worms in there.

Place a container under the outlet to catch the worm juice. This is valuable fertiliser. Make sure you dilute it before using it. It should look like weak black tea - maybe 100 mls per 1 litre. To start your farm off well, it’s a good idea to run some worm juice and molasses through the farm. The molasses will feed the beneficial bacteria that will help the worms establish themselves in the new bedding. Get an old one litre container and fill it with worm juice, mix in two tablespoons of ordinary pure molasses, mix and pour over the farm.

When you've got the bedding in place and it's all mixed well with just enough water, place some food on the bedding and mix it in. Now put the worms on top of the bedding. Just put them on the top, they'll burrow in themselves. Now cover the bed with moist hessian or cardboard/paper.

This is what the worm bed looked like about an hour after I placed the worms into the new home.

When I feed the worms I usually chop the food up so it's in small pieces. It takes them a while to eat big pieces of food. Remember, the faster they feed, the bigger they grow, the more they reproduce and the more worms and castings you'll have. When you've got them in their new home, don't forget to place a rain proof cover over the worm farm.

MAINTENANCE OF THE WORM FARM
You should keep the covering on the top moist. I sprinkle mine with rainwater every second day for 10 seconds. During summer I'll do this every day. With a fork or a little claw rake, fluff up the bedding once a week to make sure there's enough air in the bedding. Apart from that and feeding them, leave them alone to do their thing. Worms hate to be disturbed all the time and they don't like light. If the worm farm starts to smell a little, you're feeding them too much. Cut back the food and sprinkle a little lime over the worm farm. That should sweeten it up again.

This is my worm farm today. I have no hessian bags at the moment so it's covered with wads of moist newspaper.

As you can see the farm is teaming with worms. I feed the worms about every second day. Usually I chop up their food but you can see some celery stalks here that I just threw in after removing them from the aquaponics system. The worms will eat all the food you give them, but the bigger it is, the longer it takes them to eat it. They love high protein food too, and thrive on it, so if you have a spare egg or two, they'll eagerly devour it.

I have just harvested about three buckets full of worm castings for my organic garden. To harvest the castings, about two weeks prior to harvesting, start feeding the worms on one side of the farm. They will all move to that side to feed. After a couple of weeks, harvest the non-feeding side and refill it will bedding. When the worms have settled down again, start feeding on the new bedding side and harvest the remaining castings.

Our harvested castings were mixed in with the rest of the organic materials we added to the garden beds when we changed from our winter plantings to our summer ones. Remember, worm castings need to be covered when you put them in a garden bed. Don't let them dry out and cover with either soil, compost or mulch.

Feed the worms every day or two. Watch how much they eat, and feed accordingly. You don't want the feed sitting in the worm farm too long. Worms will eat anything that was once alive, so give them your kitchen scraps, old dishcloths, hair, worn out cotton or wool, tea leaves or tea bags, coffee grounds, old bread, eggs, shredded paper, wet cardboard or garden waste. DO NOT GIVE then too many citrus peels or onions, although they can take a small amount. Give them a variety of food, then you'll get the best possible worm castings.

When they're mating, worms will produce about 12 babies per adult per week. You'll know that they're mating when you see little worm capsules in the bedding. Each capsule contains around four babies. The babies hatch after about 30 days and are ready to breed about two months later.

WORM JUICE AND WORM TEA

Both must be diluted as they could burn your plants. To use the worm juice that filters down through your worm farm, just dilute in water to the colour of weak black tea, and apply to your plants.

To make worm tea from castings, scrape about ¼ bucket of castings from the top of the farm and soak them in water for a few hours. Then dilute this with water to the colour of weak black tea. The microbes in the tea will stay active for about 15 hours, so apply it within that time.

We found this little fellow in a bucket near our tank. It's nice and moist there and it looks like there are tiny tadpoles forming. 

In our grandmother's day, everything in the home was valued and cared for. When something was past its prime, it was sent down a chain where it kept giving value at every stage of its descent. For instance, a hand knitted wash cloth might have been used washing dishes for a year of two, when it started showing signs of age, it would be sent to the laundry to do service as a cleaning rag in the home, then a cleaning rag outside and finally it would end up in the garden, either dug into the garden for worms to feed on or in a compost heap.

That hierarchy of thorough usage for all items is still being used in my home, and every day I use that hierarchy to deal with our household waste. I want to get the most value from everything at every stage of its life. We've been hoodwinked into thinking lately that products only have one life. Wrong! When something is past its made-for or bought-for use, it can be used in other ways.

We get the most value from our food waste if it is eaten by the chooks. They will turn it into lovely eggs for us to eat - our kitchen waste becomes part of an egg laying cycle. Chooks need high protein food to lay good sized eggs, so we make sure that all our high protein waste goes to the chooks. They are on top of our hierarchy. In the past week they're been given a bowl of left over vegetable soup, some milk that soured before its use by date - chooks LOVE sour milk, some stale cake and finely crushed up egg shells, as well as a lot of greens from the garden and their daily ration of pellets and grain. The chooks will also eat and turn over all the grass clippings, fruit and vegetable peelings, so they're all put into a fenced area in the chook pen and the ladies spend a lot of time in there eating, scratching, pooing on and generally making the best fast compost possible. In our climate, that compost is ready to use in 3 - 4 weeks. The chooks also get most of our shredded paper for their nests.

The next level down in the hierarchy are the dogs. They have absolutely no food value at all but we love them, they give us a lot of joy and they keep us and our home safe and free of snakes and cats. So the dogs get a few small bits of the high protein waste that the chooks get. They get things like uneaten toast with butter on it, or little bits of cheese in a leftover sandwich, bits of egg or cracked eggs etc. If the complete truth be told, they also get their own toast and Vegemite for breakfast. ; )

Next down on the hierarchy is the worm farm. The worms will eat almost anything organic - anything that was once alive. I give them some shredded paper, cellophane, wet and cut up cardboard packets, old cotton, linen or woolen items that have completely exhausted their use, the contents of the vacuum cleaner - checked first for plastic pieces, hair from my hair brush, any overflow of kitchen waste that hasn't gone to the chooks or dogs, garden waste like old plants and leaves and some crushed up egg shells, tea bags, tea leaves, coffee grounds and a small amount of onion peels and citrus skins. All the worm food needs to be very small as it's consumed faster then, so I always chop up every thing that goes in the worm farm.

The next level down is my cold compost heap. This is just an area in the corner of our vegetable garden that is about one metre square and consists of garden waste that doesn't go to the chooks, onion skins and citrus peel, as well as a couple of containers of lawn clippings to help with decomposition and any other organic item that doesn't go to the higher levels of the hierarchy. We turn this heap when we think of it and after a few months we get the most beautiful, dark, moist compost. Following is a photo of that heap. You can see the top layers are still recognisable as lawn clippings and shredded paper, but underneath it's a black gold mine. We have been using this and the compost from the chook pen to build up our garden beds as we change from one season to the next. Compost is the best fertiliser you can use on your garden.

We never throw out any organic waste, it's all recycled either into food, dog energy, eggs or compost. Not only does it give our chooks and dogs treats they look forward to, it also cuts down a lot on the waste we put into our rubbish and recycling bins.

Tomato relish and ginger beer.

I make chutney, relish, sauces, jams, marmalade, butters and cordials during the year. My aim is to make and preserve as many of these things as I can so I'm not buying inferior products at the market. My preserving season will start soon. I'll fire up the old Fowlers water bath and start stacking my shelves with home grown and home preserved goodies.