Worm update!

Remember back when I was still pregnant last summer and completing some projects I'd always wanted to do. My worm bin was one of them and I wanted to share my results. My hubby is giving me the hardest time because I'm happy that these worms made dirt but I am! I wish I had three times as much compost as I do but now I think I've got twice as many worms than I started with so they should be able to eat way more of our food scraps faster now.

Seriously the bin started out feather light just with a pound of worms and dampened shredded newspaper. By winter it was quite heavy and when I took it outside to "harvest" the compost a couple weeks ago it was almost too heavy for me to carry by myself - partly because it was a bit too damp and I probably should have done it way sooner than I did. But all seems to be going well and the worms seem happy enough! I'm happy to have to buy one less bag of compost for my planters and garden so it seems to be a win win situation.

Since nothing around here is complete without pictures here are a couple to show you how we separated the worms from the compost. It's been a preschool boys dream science class around here lately! Wroms, digging, planting, watering, it's great to have a little helper.

First we separated the contents of my bin into piles out on an old shower curtain (since I had one that just ripped through one too many ring holes.) you can use anything - even just the driveway. The worms don't like the sun so the scurry down in the piles. Every so often (20 minutes or whenever we'd remember) we'd remove the top layer of compost until we exposed more worms. Then we'd wait for them to move further in again.

Pretty soon we were left with a bunch of compost and a ball of wriggling worms. We weren't too concerned with letting a few worms stay in the compost that we used for pots and to amend the soil. The mass majority though will be going back into the bin to do it all over again. You can see ground egg shell pieces as well as squash seeds, small pieced of newspaper and other scraps that didn't get fully composted and none of it bothered me as it will all continue to decompose and or give me some random volunteer plants neither of which I mind very much.

Yup, I've Started Composting With Worms

I've wanted to start doing this for three years and finally got brave enough. I always thought it would be easier with a professionally purchased bin made especially for it. Something like this one but I decided I'm too cheap to buy one. There are many different ways to make one and I chose just to use a big blue plastic bin since we have quite a few of them.

My hubby helped me by drilling two small holes in the bottom and some one inch holes across the top of one side and the bottom of the other. I've read that plastic bins tend to stay very moist so I wanted it to be pretty well ventilated. Then I glued some screening to the outside of the bin to cover the holes, mostly to keep away flies, apparently they worms don't try to escape as long as conditions are not toxic!

With the bin all ready, I shredded a bunch of newspaper by hand until it was in 1-2 inch wide strips then I threw in a couple of handfuls of dirt (worms don't have teeth and need some grit to eat.) I then dampened the newspaper bedding with water using enough so that all the paper was wet but not too much so that it was dripping. After adding the moist bedding to the bin I added the worms which is what yesterday's picture showed. After about 30 minutes they were all underneath the newspaper bedding and now when I open the bin I barely ever see any worms on top. I buried some food scraps in the bedding, put on the lid and let them be.

In just a week that first pile of scraps I put in are almost gone, but I think I did overload the system with too much fruit and veggies a couple days later. Apparently if I just let it sit now the worms will catch up with the scraps and eventually they'll multiply to an ample population to handle our amount of food waste. In a few months we'll have wonderful vermicompost to feed our garden and plants.

Oh, and did I mention that this entire composting system is currently sitting in our downstairs bath tub. It only smells when you overload it with food (even though mine is over loaded at the moment it doesn't really smell unless you go digging in the bedding). You can find more info and order your own red wriggler worms at Mary Applehof's web site and I also purchased her book Worms Eat My Garbage as a reference.

I'll probably be posting periodically with updates on how it's going - but this is how I got it all set up!

I'm updating this post because I forgot to mention yesterday that Jamie who blogs at all things avery just introduced her new business. Her custom photo card site is amazing, it's called Wee Little Designs (cute name huh?!!) and I can't believe the number of designs she has, nor how amazing they all are! Comment and link to her blog by tomorrow and you could win 25 free cards! She's really got talent!