FAQ for Vermicompost, Vermiculture & Vermicast Products

Find answers to your questions about vermicompost, vermiculture, composting worms, and vermicast products at Annie’s Home Farm.

Why do people choose to compost with worms?

  • Worms create a soil amendment superior to compost

  • It keeps food and paper waste from landfills

  • It can be done by folks living in apartments

  • It saves money on buying fertilizer for your plants or garden

  • Kids love it and it is a fun activity for families

  • It creates soil amendment three times faster than hot composting

  • People who cannot physically manage an outdoor pile can do it

  • You can help others learn to compost their food waste at home

  • It's amazing to watch the Red Wigglers do their thing

What type of bin do I need for worm composting?

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.

What should I feed my compost worms?

Basically all fruits and vegetables, raw or cooked. It's fine to feed them the strawberries that you put sugar on, but do not feed them any vegetables to which you added salt or butter. Salt and fat=Bad.

  • Bananas

  • Apples

  • Grapes

  • Pineapple

  • Melons of all kinds

  • Cucumbers

  • Carrots

  • Potatoes

  • Lettuce

In addition, your worms will eat:

  • Coffee

  • Coffee filters

  • Tea bags

  • Egg shell (rinse them out first)

  • Bread

  • Pancakes (no butter)


Add these sparingly:

  • Onions

  • Oranges

  • Lemons

  • Grapefruit

  • Limes

Do not feed these to your worms:

  • Meat

  • Oil

  • Butter

  • Salted foods

  • Dairy product

  • Bones

  • Hot peppers

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. Before feeding 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.

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.

What’s the best paper to shred up for worm bedding?

Not all papers are created equal. Never use paper that is shiny or glossy. No glitter, no envelopes with plastic windows, no cardboard with tape or shipping labels. No junk mail. No cereal boxes. No printed receipts.

Newspapers and plain old office paper are good. Toilet paper rolls and paper towel rolls are a yes, as well as egg cartons. Coffee filters are great. Worms love cardboard. If your shredder won’t handle it, you can tear it up by hand. The bulkier materials create spots for your worms to inhabit. They love variety.

I don’t think that you can have too much bedding in your worm bin, unless it prohibits you from being able to shut the lid. Lots of bedding enables you to cover up the food you put in there, and that keeps the fruit flies from invading your bins.

Keep checking the bedding to make sure it isn’t dry. Worms would much rather be in a soggy bin than a dehydrated bin. If it’s too wet, and is smelly, you need to add more bedding, and that can be dry stuff. It will soak up the extra moisture. If it’s soggy and does not smell, well you’ve probably got some pretty plumb and happy worms.

What's the difference between compost and vermicast?

Heat creates compost. The temperature of a well-controlled compost pile must reach 106 degrees or more, and be monitored and maintained over several weeks. Think of compost as a cake. You mix grass clippings and wood chips with feedlot animal manures and bake them. The ingredients and ratios must be carefully calibrated. To manage the heat, gigantic machines blend and turn the compost cake, and expensive equipment checks on the moisture content and carbon dioxide levels.

Worms create vermicast. These animals work 24/7 and never take a break. They eat. They poop. They reproduce. The body of an earthworm transforms the food scraps, shredded newspaper, and sawdust into vermicast. Working right alongside the worms, we have a whole team of microbes. (They break down the organic material so the worms can eat it). Just the opposite of compost piles, worm beds need to be managed so that they do not heat up and kill the diverse workforce.

How should I apply soil amendments like vermicast and compost?

Vermicast is a stable material, meaning that the microbes and worms have completely broken down the organic material into organic matter. Unlike fertilizer, it cannot "burn" your plants. Vermicast may be worked directly into the garden soil before planting, added to each hole as bedding plants are put in, or sprinkled around established plants throughout the growing season. Because it is stable, nitrogen and other nutrients feed the plants slowly and continually over time.

Compost is not a stable material, and the organic material still needs to be broken down by bacteria, bugs, and worms. It should not be worked into the soil, because these very same composters require energy too! They will actually be in direct competition with the growing garden plants for food and will be stealing these nutrients from the plant roots.

Bottom line: only stable soil amendments should be blended into garden soil. Peat moss, compost, and the like should be used as a top dressing, allowing nature's workforce to consume, transform and deliver nutrients to the plant roots.

Click here for step-by-step instructions!

How does vermicast improve soil quality?

Vermicast is a stable organic material, and studies show that it increases soil structure by causing minerals in the soil to clump up. The worms add a kind of mucus that binds diverse particles together. This improves the soil's ability to absorb and hold on to moisture, which helps gardeners reduce the need for watering plants. Vermicast is also well-known for containing a host of microbes, plant growth hormones, and beneficial acids that supply minerals to growing plants. All of these factors combine to increase the amount of oxygen and moisture in the soil, and to increase the amount of nutrients available to the plants.

What’s the truth about our trash?

The Problem

People want to align their lifestyles with environmentally sustainable practices, but what can they do? Many people recycle, but do not know that the US lacks recycling infrastructure. Very little of what people rinse, flatten and stack gets recycled. Yet big business puts recycling emblems on everything, fooling consumers into thinking that the consumption patterns they create aren't having much negative effect on the environment.

Consumption patterns drive solid waste management. Big money drives consumption. The numbers are staggering. Every ounce of plastic that has ever been created, or ever will be created, will be with us forever. Over the centuries, it will ever so slowly degrade, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, entering the soil, the water and the air, invading the bodies of every living animal on Earth.

As living animals on Earth, humans eat. They eat plants and animals, and an industry has grown to supply food to the billions of people who grow hungry each day. Statistically, 40% of this food is never consumed. Some rots in the field. Some rots in the store. Some rots in the refrigerator, or "expires" on the shelf. Roughly 24% of landfill waste is food. 

Burying organic material in a landfill is a bad idea. Think yard waste bans and buying big brown sacks to stuff with leaves and grass. Just like yard waste, food does not fare well in this environment. It requires oxygen to decompose, and after being dumped and compresses, and topped with more compressed garbage, that carton of moldy strawberries is breathless. 

Bacteria that does not need oxygen to live works night and day in these landfills, and it takes over the decomposition of the strawberries. Problem is, this bacteria releases a gas called methane, and methane is extremely damaging to the atmosphere. Food waste is a key element in our changing climate.

So we are burying a gigantic amount of food each year, each and every one of us. That's the problem. That's also the opportunity. Offering an alternative to throwing food away, vermicomposting can become the feel-good recycling bin of the future, but a genuine one.

The Solution

For the naturalist, the animal-lover, the science buff, creating a home-based food recycling system feels like an adventure, not a nasty chore. Opening a food recycling bin, and catching the quick retreat of a hundred worms as they recoil from the light, quickens the heart. It's science. It's nature. It's organic.

Food recycling is not for everyone. Sometimes the bin gets too wet and requires additional dry bedding to balance out. Sometimes fruit flies move in, and require additional dry bedding to be added to the top of the bin to keep them away from the food. Eventually, the bin gets full of worm castings, and worms need to be moved to a fresh home, the vermicastings added to the garden, and flower pots and lawn. 

Food recycling is not for everyone, but it is for many. Annie's Home Farm offers Red Wiggler worms to stock household food recycling bins. We offer expertise in bin management. We raise, sort, and ship our own worms by hand, and we feel good about the impact our business is having on the future. 

What charges will I pay for shipping?

Annie’s Home Farm offers free shipping throughout the entire USA!