Vermiculture – Let Worms Eat Your Banana Peels and Newspapers

What do you think about 1000s of worms living in your house? Grossed out? Intrigued? I promise, you won’t even know they are there!

Spring fever was hitting us hard in March. The Territorial Seed Catalogue was bedside reading. We’d already ordered more fruit trees, seeds, and weird bucket list items like kolomikta kiwis. What else could be get ourselves into? Vermicomposting!

The whole process sounded like magic: you put food scraps and shredded paper in a bin and they EAT it and turn it into amazing fertilizer? I’m in.

For once, we didn’t try a do-it-yourself version of a worm bin, cobbled together with plastic storage containers and PVC pipe and drill bits. We bought the Worm Bin 360, which is just over $100. The design is really great. The unit sits on sturdy legs above the ground so it can drain any excess liquid into a container through a spigot. There is a space at the bottom so your worms are never sitting in liquid. There are several stackable bins with holes on the bottom, and you can use as many as you want. You can even purchase additional bins. The kit also comes with some goodies to get you going, including a book and DVD, coconut coir, supplemental minerals, and perlite for aeration. Is any of it necessary? Probably not, but it gets you into the habit of balancing your green and brown materials.

After soaking the coir you mix your materials together and add some shredded veggies. We gave them a salad to start out with. We bought 1/2 lb of worms of a marriageable age, if you know what I mean, so we didn’t want to overwhelm them before we built the population up. We released the unhappy worms from their styrofoam tub into their new home next to the garbage can in our kitchen. They had made quite the journey from North End Organic Nursery in Boise, with a quick stop at Crooked Fence Barrelhouse where they hung out in my purse while we dreamed up the name for the website.

We waited for the worms to escape.

They didn’t. We suspected they were all dead.

They weren’t. They’re still alive, churning our rich black compost. We’ve already harvested several trays that they reduced to a beautiful uniform material. It is the dream of turning trash into treasure, realized. The biggest surprise? You’d barely even know they were there. They don’t smell, they certainly don’t make any noise. They are incredibly convenient…Toby throws his coffee grounds on top in the morning, we throw veggie trimmings in at night. About every other day I spritz the top layer with water. The cat sits on top of them while we cook dinner. Occasionally we ask dinner guests if they would like to ‘meet the pet worms’. If they are gardeners, they are excited. We terrorize the worms by picking up a random tray as they cling to the bottom. They hate light, and I don’t think they like meeting new people.

Worms only have a few rules.

1. Keep them moist. Worms breath through their skin, so they are much happier if their home is evenly saturated with water.
2. No citrus, onions, or fats. They won’t break these items down (but they LOVE bananas!)
3. Regulate their temperature. Red wigglers, one of the best types of worms for composting, live under the leaf litter out in the real world. This means they can’t get away from temperature extremes by burrowing like big nightcrawlers you might find in your soil in McCall. They need to be kept between 40 and 80 degrees, around 70 if you want optimum breeding conditions.
4. Mix browns and greens. We use shredded paper, newspapers, cardboard, or junk mail for our brown materials, and coffee grounds, fruit and veggie waste, and eggshells for green. Our friend who has a juicer sometimes provides us with awesome worm-mouth-sized compost. Layering in enough brown material keeps the bin scent-free. Maintaining the correct moisture level keeps the bin from developing too many pests.