How to get started with vermicomposting
Follow these easy instructions to get your home food recycling project off to a great start:
Buy and Prepare a Storage Container - or use an old one that you have on hand. While they come in an array of sizes, and I like the 18-gallon one for my worms. You can find them at Target, Walmart, Lowe's, etc. for $13 to $17. Make sure to buy a color; you don't want one you can see through. It should have a lid that fastens down well. Once you get it home, drill six 1/8" holes in the bottom. This will allow excess moisture to drain out. You also want to drill 1/16" holes through the lid, and around the top of the sides of the bin for air circulation. A dozen holes in each location will work just fine.
Location, Location, Location - decide where you are going to keep your bin. Some likely spots might be on a covered porch, an attached garage, or in the basement. A good location will protect the worms from the elements: wind, rain, and direct sunlight.
Recycle Paper for Bedding - Collect paper material to tear up. Newspaper works great, as well as office paper or plain cardboard. General rule of thumb is not to use any papers that are shiny. Fill your bin half full with shredded paper and then add a cup of water. Dig in with your hands and mix it all up. Repeat until the paper has absorbed all the water and feels as wet as a squeezed out sponge. Put the lid on your bin and let it sit for a few days. Stir it up again and check the moisture content.
Get Some Grit - Add two tablespoons of sand to your bin and mix it in. Your worms need fine grit for their gizzards!
Order a Pound of Red Wiggler Worms - When your worms arrive, empty them out of the bag into the home you have prepared for them. They will be in a big clump, but don't worry. They will spread out on their own. Put the lid on and leave the light on in the room. This will keep them from trying to crawl out instead of down.
Feeding the Farm Animals - After four or five days, your worms will have settled down and settled in a bit. It's time to introduce them to some food. Easy does it. A little goes a long way. Less is more. (Some helpful slogans to post by your worm bin!) Chop up 1-2 cups of raw fruit and vegetable waste. Dig a trough on one side of the bin. Lay the food in the trough and cover it with several inches of bedding. In a few days, dig down to the food. Is anyone there yet? If not, check back with them later. Eventually, you will uncover a beautiful sight: worms eating your garbage! You are on your way! When the food you gave them is mostly gone, feed them some more in a new location in the bin. Repeat this process, and you will avoid overwhelming the bin with too much food. Add more bedding from time to time, especially when you find that the bin has gotten too wet. (You don't need to moisten this bedding; You want it to absorb the extra water.) You add it on top, or you can gently mix it in.
Harvest Time - Anxious to get your hands on some of this magic compost your worms have been making? When will this happen? How soon will your compost be ready? In three months, your bedding will have decomposed substantially, and there will be black worm castings building up on the bottom and sides of your worm bin. This is great! Keep going! After six months or so, the tub will start to get heavy and when you open it up, it will look like there is more finished compost in there than there is bedding and worms. Time to clean out the contents of your worm bin. The goal here is to harvest the vermicast that your worms have created. But not everything will be vermicast. You are going to have not 1,000 but 2,000 worms in there. You are going to have bedding material and uneaten food scraps. These need to go back into the system to get composted. There are many methods to harvesting, but this is what I do: I hand-harvest my vermicast. To do this, I first cover a table with a plastic tablecloth and then carefully empty the worm bin. I do this under a strong light because that light causes the worms to head to the bottom of the pile. Time to dig in! I pick up some of the finished compost and check to see if there are worms in it. I pick them out and put them into a container, along with any uneaten food or bedding. I put the finished black vermicast into a separate container. It's that simple. It takes me about two hours to sort out a bin. The worms will have doubled in population, so this is when I create a second bin! I put half of the worms into the new bin, and half into the old bin.
That's how my hobby became my farm!
Here's your list of necessities for getting a worm bin going:
A bin for the worms
An adequate location for your bin
Some bedding material
Worms
Food scraps from your kitchen
A bin for the worms- Starting out, I purchased a sturdy black tub with a clip-on lid from a big box store. Any plastic container with a tight-fitting lid will do, and it should be at least a 10-gallon size. Feel free to use something you already have.
This container is going to need some holes drilled into it to let excess moisture seep out and air come in. I'd recommend drilling 1/8" holes in the bottom, about six or eight of them. On the lid and around the top rim of the tub, drill 1/16" holes, as many as your little heart desires.
To be honest, it was this first step that kept me from starting my first worm bin. I didn't know how to operate a power drill. So if you are like me, don't give up! Look online and order a worm bin that is all ready to go or ask someone you know to help you out. Believe me, if your friend owns and operates a hand-held power drill, she won't think drilling a few holes in a plastic tub is a big deal.
An adequate location for your bin- In my book, the best place for a worm bin is in a basement. It stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Another good place is in a garage or outbuilding. You basically need a spot that is out of direct sunlight, and away from the rain and wind. If you live where it gets below 32 degrees in the winter, you are going to need to keep your bin from freezing.
Be prepared to move your worm bin. I have kept worms in an outbuilding here on the farm and moved them into our basement for the winter. Worms are just like us, as far as what temperatures they like. They can hack it in the 90's if they aren't sitting in the sun. They tolerate the 40's as long as they aren't hit by 20 mph. winds and rain.
One more thing worth mentioning here is fruit flies. My winter worms got them this year, and now that the bins are moved back outside, the fruit flies have disappeared. This has happened before. So, if you know ahead of time that these visitors come and go, you can make better decisions on where to locate your bin. It's kind of relative to you and your family's tolerance level.
Some bedding material-Look around you. This is one of the cool parts of vermicomposting. You can shred or tear up paper and cardboard and make bedding. You can use dried leaves from the yard. Any kind of paper is safe, with the exception of glossy magazine pages or greeting cards with glitter. Office paper is mostly bleached with oxygen, and the ink is plant-based now. The government stepped in and changed the regulations, so fears of toxic white paper and heavy-metal laced ink can be relieved.
I like to use a mixture of different kinds of bedding materials: leaves, sawdust, shredded newspaper or office paper, and paper egg cartons. You can find some good materials in the shipping boxes you get delivered to your front door. Use your imagination. It feels good to be able to recycle these materials at home. Imagine if everyone was doing it!
I'd recommend about three inches of bedding at the bottom of your new worm bin, and it needs to be moist enough to keep your worms happy. Get this going a few days before your worms arrive.
All the bedding needs to be uniformly wet. It should feel like a sponge after you've squeezed the excess water out. If water is pooling at the bottom of the bin, or water drips from the bedding when you pick it up, add some more dry bedding until it absorbs the extra water.
At the beginning, you'll want to monitor the moisture level in your bin to make sure the worms don't get too dry. You can use a spray bottle, or just sprinkle water from your fingers and mix it in. Remember, your worms breathe through their skin, and their environment needs to be damp to keep them safe. Don't pour water into the worm bin. You run the risk of overwatering.
Worms-I'd start with a pound of worms, or about 1,000 worms per bin, which is a pretty standard quantity from suppliers. It's just Pat and me here, but one bin and 1,000 worms aren't big enough to handle the amount of food waste our kitchen produces. That being said, your 1,000 worms could be 2,000 worms in about three months, so you will have the opportunity to raise your own worm population and expand the number of bins you need to handle your organic waste material.
That being said, it is good to start small if you are vermicomposting for just your own kitchen. When things go wrong, as they might, it's more manageable if you're only dealing with one worm bin. Experience definitely builds confidence, and it won't take you long to feel like you know what you are doing.
Food for your worms-When your worm order arrives, they will be a bit dehydrated. I recommend opening up the bag and spritzing or dripping water from your fingertips on the coconut coir to moisten it. Leave them in this rehydrated environment for several hours, but don't forget to tie the bag shut! You don't want them to escape!
Because you prepared the bedding days ago, you can now add the worms to your worm bin. Just dump the contents of the bag on the top of the bedding. It's normal for the worms to be all clumped together. They have been through alot! Put the lid on the bin and let them get acclimated to their new home. Hopefully in a few hours they will have migrated into the fluffy, moist bed you made just for them.
At the beginning, a little food goes a long way. Think about feeding them one banana, or one cut-up apple. When you put food into their bin, cover it with some new hydrated bedding material. Any food you add needs to be buried under the bedding. This keeps the fruit flies away.
As a newbie, you'll probably overfeed your worms because of your excitement to see the system work. Putting too much food in the bin causes several things to happen. First, because fruits and vegetables are about 90% water, the bin gets soggy. Second, when there is too much food, it heats up as it decomposes. This could cause your worms to head to the lid of the bin, trying to get away from the heat. Third, if there is too much food added at once, it will turn anaerobic and that means it will smell rotten.
Three scenarios, one solution: Add dry bedding and mix it in gently. Wait a day and see how much better things are in the worm bin. My experience is that it is a pretty quick fix. This will happen. You're prepared. You can handle it.
Lastly, many sources recommend adding a handful of grit to your worm bin. Like poultry, worms have a gizzard which holds tiny pieces of minerals and grinds up their food. If you don't have any sand available, it's not the end of the world. Just keep your eyes open for a supply. It's kind of everywhere when you start looking for it. It won't hurt anything if it takes you a couple of weeks to find.
Last thing to note about feeding has to do with frequency. I always check the bin and see if the food from the last feeding is mostly eaten up. If it is, I add food in another location in the bin, and cover it with bedding material. If the worms haven't eaten much of it, I have to wait until they finish what they already have.
You are raising animals here, and animal husbandry takes patience, a willingness to learn from your mistakes, and a caring heart. Check in on your bin once a week, and get to know this community of critters. No two worm bins are alike, and it's fun to discover what they like to eat.