Vermicomposting - Overview

Our normally warm inviting earth is now covered with a thick layer of snow, so gardeners all over the metroplex are curled up by the fire. Is there a better time to learn about vermicomposting? We can start now and once we get it all figured out, the snow will have melted and we will be ready for our new project.

Vermicomposting involves keeping worms at the house to eat your kitchen scraps. After the worms eat the organic material you feed them, they poop - creating a potent organic fertilizer. Your family’s uneaten spaghetti and cucumber scrapings go through the worm and what the worm excretes is referred to as castings – or worm poo. This worm poo is great for your plants, both indoor and outdoor.

Most of the gooey things that you are now throwing into the trash are perfect feed for your worms. This week we have fed our worms a wide variety of stuff from our kitchen: scrapings of veggies after salads were made, an old wrinkly apple, ½ a loaf of stale bread, moldy spaghetti sauce, stale crackers, spaghetti, egg shells, and coffee grounds. The only things we try not to feed our worms are diary, meat and anything too greasy.

But where do these voratious, slimy little critters live? In a bin, of course! Bins are made of all kinds of containers, plastic storage bins, wooden bins, really anything solid, empty, lidded and not chemically contaminated will do.

The best worms for garbage eating are red wrigglers. Red wriggler worms don’t live in the dirt as much as in the litter on top of the dirt. This means you can create a great place for your worms to live that doesn’t involve a bucket of dirt. What you will need is a damp sub straight (worms can dry out) like straw, shredded paper or torn strips of newspaper.

Since we have just recently set up our new worm bin, I am going to follow our new bin step by step, but remember this is just a guideline. Part of the fun is being creative about making your worm habitat!

To recap; worms live at your house in a bin, among dampened paper and you feed them kitchen scraps and they poop plant fertilizer. COOL!