Vermicomposters, put yourself on the map–literally!
Oakland’s Steven Chow recently found out about
vermiculture, or composting with worms, and set up a worm bin at his home. Steven launched the site to see who else was worm binning. Based on the site, plenty of people–156 as of this posting.
The site also features a forum for user tips, photos and videos. But I appreciate the running tally of total pounds of food waste diverted from the landfill by site members vermicomposting. Currently, they’re composting half of a ton per week.
For those not in the know, worm binning is a great way to compost and creates an organic soil amendment. Worms tend to eat just about anything, including bones, paper and cardboard.
You can buy a wide variety of worm bins
For urbanites without a yard, vermiculture enables indoor composting, provided you have a basement or somewhere you don’t mind keeping a box of worms. Then again, why not display your worm bin like a fish tank? OK, maybe an ant farm is a better comparison…
5 Comments
My worms were recently evicted from the basement after about 2 years. It has been a bit chilly outside at night – it must be quite a surprise for them.
Did they complain?
I LOVE my worm bin – they are so wonderful and eat all our table scraps! No meat or dairy, please, though. We used that make your own page for ours and it works great.
Is there any odor involved with vermiculture? I currently compost my table scraps with EM (an essential microorganism concoction made with rice polish and such) and the smell of the fermented compost is so attractive to foxes, crows and stray dogs that I can’t keep them from digging up my garden. Would switching to vermiculture solve that problem?
There is no odor involved with vermicomposting if done correctly. The bin should smell like fresh dirt.
You may want to try to feed the fermented compost to the worms to break it down even more. I have never tried the microorganism concoction prior to feeding, but it might be worth a shot if you still want to use this method.
Seems to me that the microorganisms are not breaking the waste down as much as it could be. Using red worms as a composting method gives you the most nutrient dense compost you can get naturally. It ends up to be peat like in weight with a coffee ground consistency.