Worm Bin

If somebody would have told me 5 years ago that I would be keeping bees and worms, I would have told them they were crazy. As it turns out, by most standards, I'm the crazy one. I have a box of worms, garbage and food scraps outside my back door. And I think they are the coolest things around(next to my box of bees in the back yard of course!) It all started with the above book, WORMS eat my garbage. I read it on the bus in the mornings on my way to work, and Alex read most of it over my shoulder. This book outlines the benefits of composting with worms, and also includes step by step instructions on building your own bin. We decided it was an easy enough way to recycle old food, while building awesome black gold for our garden.  Basically you give these guys a wormy habitat to live in, feed them your food scraps and they poop out gardening gold! The optimum wormy habitat means, yard debris, shredded news paper, Leaves, basically anything you would find in piles in your back yard. Make a nice bed for them layering debris and shredded paper, this layer keeps it nice and dry in your worm bin. We made the mistake of letting our bin get too wet and got an infestation of maggots, ewwwww. If it gets too dry the worms will literally dry up and die. When adding food scraps, you find a spot, dig a hole in the bedding and dump in your scraps. Cover all food scraps well, We also found out the hard way, that uncovered food scraps will attract local vermin.

 This is the worm bin we have that Alex built last summer. We started with a large Rubbermaid bin in the garage which worked well, but what you really want is 2 sides available. One side with active worms and plenty of bedding that you feed food scraps, and the other side mostly empty. When you decide the side with the worms is ready to harvest, you start adding bedding and fresh food scraps to the empty side. The worms will naturally be drawn to the fresh food, leaving the "ready to go" side to be used. You then sift out the big chunks with a screen and use the smaller stuff that falls through. The square thing sitting there is a wooden framed screen, for sifting out the big chunks from the usable worm compost. You can see the one side is mostly empty, Alex sifted it all out last weekend and Now I have this lovely wheel barrow of ready to use compost! The benefits of worm compost are numerous. You can also make what is called "worm tea", by taking a cloth bag full of fresh worm compost and Submerging it in water for a few days. You want to add an air stone to bubble the water while it steeps to keep the water from getting stagnant and funky. This can then be diluted and added to the water you water your plants with.

Not into worms? That's cool, you can still compost. The same basic thing can be done with out using worms, you just have to be a little more selective what you are putting in. Worm bins can handle dairy, meat scraps and bones, and cooking oil, where as you would not want to put these things in a wormless compost pile. If you are a gardener, and especially if you are an Organic gardener, Composting is a free or cheap way to reuse your scraps to make something awesome for your growing plants!