Composting with Worms

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What is Vermicomposting?

Vermicomposting is where you are using worms to compost materials.

I got back from a trip to Europe and it was pretty awesome to see how much recycling was going on even the trash cans in the hotel room were available for compostable materials to be collected for recycling into compost.

The weather was a lot warmer in Europe than back home in Maine so regular composting where food scraps were put into a compost bin in a garden or on an allotment but here in Maine, our compost bins are frozen solid.  We still collect food scraps for our bokashi composters and we have managed to keep a wormery going in a thrifted cooler for a couple of years now!

The indoor wormery has worm castings harvested when I am starting seeds indoors which will be starting in a little over a month for me!  We mostly use the wormery to compost things like tea leaves and tea bags, some coffee grinds, avocado, and newspaper.  These are things that chickens can’t have but can still be turned into nutrients for the soil in the garden.  Plus, the chickens are quite happy to get some worms as a treat occasionally, especially in winter when they are not out on the pasture.

Ideas for Worm Composters

One of the cool things about composting with worms is that you can compost indoors using a worm composter or worm factory that you can buy and they take up a small amount of space.  You can even make small footprint worm composters using things like coffee cans stacked up, buckets, a cooler like I’m using, plastic totes, PVC pipe with holes drilled into it and placed into a planter pot.

Worm composting outdoors can also take many forms such as a trench dug into the garden, a raised bed, worm composting tower planters, an old bathtub, a 55-gallon drum, small laundry basket buried in the ground.  The possibilities are neat, and a quick internet search can give you tons of ideas for things you can make or repurpose in your garden.

Worms move towards the food source and break it down into worm castings which provide lots of nutrients and good soil microorganisms into the surrounding area.  I harvest these worm castings and mix them with coconut coir.  You can also harvest the worm castings to spread handfuls around your plants that are growing in the ground, or in planters.

Dig in to learn about seed starting

Composting with worms in the ground such as using a trench, a basket buried in the ground,  a perforated PVC pipe, means that you can just leave the worm castings in the garden bed for your plants to use as they grow around where the worm composting is happening or was completed.

If you wanted to compost with worms using a trench or make a cylinder of hardware cloth for example, how can you do that?  If you are going with the basket or cylinder approach, you will need to make a cylinder and dig a hole so that it can be buried upright.  The middle of the cylinder is filled with compostable materials that the worms can break down. Don’t bury it all the way, you want to know where the cylinder is so you can add more scraps to feed the worms or dig it up and move it later.  Some gardeners put in some shredded paper or straw in the very bottom of the cylinder then the worm food then a mulch later to cover the materials.

With a trench, you will want to dig a trench about 1 to 3 feet wide and about 1 to 3 feet deep. Place some slower to decompose materials like shredded cardboard, newspaper, shredded and mulched leaves or small branch prunings so that it is about 1/3 deep.  Then layer in the food scraps for the worms. 

What can worms eat?

Worms will happily eat:

• Fruits and vegetable cores, peels etc
• Shredded paper
• Shredded cardboard
• Eggshells
• Coffee
• Tea and teabags
• Coffee filters
• Grains
• Hair and pet fur
• Bread
• Pasta (without sauce or oil)
• Old lawn clippings
• Dry leaves

Avoid feeding your worms:

• Acidic fruit and citrus peels
• Spicy foods
• Oils and high fat foods
• Foods with preservatives
• Salty foods
• Onion and garlic
• Meat
• Dairy
• Fish
• Plastic wrappers, envelopes with plastic windows
• Glossy paper

You will need to cover your worm composting trench to help keep the moisture in and regulate the temperature for your worms.  Burlap or jute works well, as does a thick layer of straw.

A worm composting trench needs about a week to settle down before adding your worms.  I add the worms to the trench under the mulch and recover the mulch and let them find their own way.

You might be thinking that the worm composting trench seems very similar to a lasagna garden or building a no-till garden bed and you are correct my friend!  You absolutely could put a vermicomposting trench into the ground then build sheet mulching layers on top to make a very productive garden bed that uses a lot of materials.  If you find yourself with a lot of compostable food scraps because you asked your neighbors or a local restaurant for their food scraps for example then a trench composter could be a great way to build a new garden and keep more carbon out of the atmosphere.  The plants that will grow through the no-till raised beds will have a lot of nutrients available and will grow incredibly well!

These in-ground methods are not going to be suitable for land that has a high water table or floods.  But they can be a good option for low water gardening as the composted materials will hold moisture.

Tips for indoor worm composting

What about if you are doing your vermicomposting indoors?  I don’t feed my worms every day, usually every 3 days or so.  1 lb of worms can eat about 1 lb of food scraps.  Smaller pieces of food are digested quicker by the worms.  I’ve found that it helps to mix in some shredded paper with the food scraps to absorb some of the moisture.  With an indoor worm composter, some sort of bedding is needed for the worms.  The bedding needs to be non-toxic, retains moisture, non-abrasive, a neutral pH, and allows oxygen to flow through the wormery.  Shredded cardboard is a great bedding material, shredded newspaper, dry leaves, coconut coir, straw, or woodchips.

A mix of bedding materials is better than just using one material but use what you have available, you don’t need to go out and buy more bedding materials.  Adding the bedding materials regularly to your worm composter can help your worms thrive by reducing compaction in the worm bin. 

Keep your worm bin somewhere that you will not forget about it so that you will remember to add the bedding and food scraps to your wormery.  We use a little plastic food container that no longer has a lid to collect tea bags and coffee grinds over a couple of days then we add that to the wormery with a handful of shredded paper.  We keep the wormery in the laundry room, next to the recycling bins.  It is somewhere we use every day and is on the north side of the house so it is one of the cooler rooms in our home.  If we were to put the wormery in the basement, it would be forgotten.  Our dogs don’t go for the composters but we have done a lot of training to stop them bin diving and we also keep them out of reach, just in case.  If you have pets or kids, you will want to think about the best place for your composter.

Additionally, the more food scraps you have in there, the more likely you are to attract rodents.  Avoid over-feeding your worms, choose a setup that is rodent-proof, and take precautions such as traps to reduce rats and mice from getting up home in or near your composter.

Do you compost with worms?  Let me know over in the Facebook group!

Dig In and Learn More

If this post has started ideas for your homestead, be sure to check out these related posts and helpful books that have inspired my homestead:

• Low Water Vegetable Gardening
• How To Homestead On Less Than An Acre
• How Do I Start Composting In A Small Garden?
• Shop
• Landrace Gardening: How To Adapt Your Garden Plants To Local Conditions

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