Vermicompost: Making the worms do the hard work

Maybe I need to rethink my tagline statement.  Waste is needed, as long as it can be directed towards food for my worms!  I am simply amazed at the amount of things that the little squigglers eat up.

So it seems like a pretty simple system - build a box, put food scraps in, cover with something that is not attractive to flys, add worms, get awesome plant food!  I definitely like the rich dark look and feel of the worm castings that I have produced with my worm bin, and I think the garden beds that I am using them are doing better, though I did not do any side-by-side comparison or definitive tests.  But worm castings as a beneficial by-product aside, I get to take food scraps out of the garbage and make something out of them!

Of course it is not all a bed of roses, in fact it smells nothing like roses.  I have had all the classic problems that you can get from a worm bin:  too wet, too dry, too smelly(anaerobic), fly invasions, beetle invasions, slug invasions, centipede invasions, too much food, the wrong foods.  But it has been a fun experiment, and I see a definite, and free (minus my labor of course) benefit to the plants around the house!

I started my bins by collecting worms from around my property.  The hard part is finding red wigglers versus regular earthworms.  Luckily, I had several ages piles of leaves from a previous spring cleanup, and that provides a good supply of worms.  They tended to be on the small side, less than an inch in length, but have grown much larger in my bins.

I have two worm systems.  A larger system that I keep outside.  This is a 2 foot wide, 4 foot long, and 20 inch deep wooden box, made from scraps of plywood and 2x4s.  I have a divider board in the center to divide the box into two equal sections.  I fill up one half at a time with a mix of household scraps and dry leaves to cover the scraps.

My second garage system is a 5 gallon bucket.  This system is fed with shredded cardboard and coffee grounds only.  Over time, this system has produced an abundance of additional worms for my larger outdoor box.  The worms really thrive in the coffee grounds and cardboard!  I get the shredded cardboard from work and the coffee grounds from a local coffee shop that sets out bags of grounds for home gardeners.  I consider this my worm factory to produce more worms for my outdoor main processor.