Cottage Industries: Simone Weil House Press & Wormery

For Dorothy and Peter, the founders of the Catholic Worker, working with our hands is an essential part of what it means to be human, to be made in the image of likeness of God, our Creator. As Dorothy writes, craft, or “working on God’s good things,” is a means of restoring “a sense of the sacramentality of life–the holiness, the symbolism of things.” It is an antidote to our increasingly mechanized, and now digitized, world that desensitizes us to words and images and draws us ever further from created reality and the path it offers to deeper intimacy with God.

We invite you to support this work in our community by purchasing beeswax candles or cards (Christmas and all-purpose) or vermicompost tea for your plants at the link below!

Handprinted Cards

Block prints designed and carved by Emma Fitzgerald (Catholic Worker at SWH), and hand printed by members of the Simone Weil House community.

Is there another saint you’d like to see? Email Emma at emcecoley@gmail.com to talk about print commissions.

Beeswax Advent Candles

100% beeswax taper candles, dyed and hand dipped by members of the community in our basement candlemaking studio.

Vermicompost Tea for Plants

After months of raising worms, Simone Weil House is pleased to announce our new cottage industry: vermicomposting. Our “tea” is a rich, natural alternative to liquid fertilizer for your plants, brewed from worm castings (aka poop). 

As the worms consume our scraps, their digestive systems transform the material into tiny granules of black gold, significantly denser in nutrients and humic acids than the soil itself. A worm’s gut is a microbial ecosystem: when a worm excretes castings, it deposits a diverse population of beneficial bacteria and fungi that continue to break down organic matter, resulting in a material that slowly releases nutrients in a highly concentrated, bioavailable form. We prepare the castings as packages of “tea” bags, whose millions of microbes become active when steeped in water, creating a brew that will continuously feed your soil and plants. The bags are even reusable! 

Caring for these worms, harvesting their castings, and returning their richness to the earth is a gentle way of expressing our participation in God’s creation, and, by sharing the product with friends and neighbors, we hope to better nurture the common ground that connects us all, while making the community more self-sustaining. We invite you to experience the quiet power of transformation as it blooms in the smallest creatures by trying our worm compost tea on your houseplants or garden, and see how waste becomes a source of new life.