Ask Wormboy

• 1 10 gallon bin or 1 20 gallon bin
• 1 lb or 2 lbs of worms
• Peat moss
• Cardboard egg cartons
• Newspaper
• Nylon screening (to cover the bottom of the bin)
• Garden Fork (optional)
• PH meter (optional)
• Kitchen waste

Where to Obtain the Items
OSH Hardware sells two storage bins that work very well for vermicomposting.  The smaller bin is a 10 gallon container by Rubbermaid called Roughneck Storage Bin #2214-08

.  It’s dimensions are 9” x  21” x 15” , comes with a lid and is available in various colors.  This size works well for a family of two.  It retails for $5.99 and can be purchased on-line at the Rubbermaid Website  for $4.99 plus shipping.  Itemized Costs for the entire project..

Worm Bin Construction
Usually, bins are made of plastic or wood.  Plastic tends to be a better material for this than wood because wood absorbs the water from the bedding and then rots.  The bin can be made out of wood or purchased. One bin that is 2 feet x 3 feet x 1 foot is large enough to compost the kitchen waste produced by a family of four. A lid is necessary to help maintain the proper temperature and humidity for your worms. 

Setting up a worm bin requires that you have a screen, a bin, some bedding and worms. First, to make sure that the bin won’t smell, drill twelve, ½ inch holes in the bottom of the bin to insure that the bin will have proper ventilation.  By having plenty of oxygen present throughout the bin, microorganisms and worms can break down wastes aerobically much more rapidly and the worms will not suffocate. 

The bedding can be made of hay, manure, newspapers, egg cartons and peatmoss.  The bedding must be soaked in water for a few minutes and then squeezed to remove most of the water before layering it in the bin. A fine-meshed screen cut exactly to fit the bottom of the bin must be placed in the bottom so that worms cannot escape and vermicompost doesn’t leak out.

Once all of the materials are obtained, assemble the bin environment by  thoroughly washing the bin container before adding bedding or worms to prevent any toxins from harming the worms.   Drill ventilation holes and place the screen in the bottom of the bin.  Add moist bedding. Place worms on top of bedding and close lid.  The worms will quickly burrow down into the bedding.  Add kitchen scraps in section one of the bin. Do not disturb the worms for a day so that they can more easily become adjusted to their new environment. 

Feeding the Worms
Red wigglers will reprocess kitchen waste such as: vegetables, fruits, eggshells, teabags, paper coffee filters, shredded paper towels, and coffee grounds.  They particularly like pumpkin, watermelon and cantaloupe.  Citrus fruits are too acidic for them and should not be fed to them.  If food scraps are cut into small pieces, the worms can digest them easier and more quickly.  It is best not to include meat, fish, fat and oily foods so that pests will not be attracted to your bin.  Food scraps must be completely covered with bedding in the bin so there will be no odor, fruit flies, or molds. 

The worms should be fed twice a week depending upon how quickly the worms are eating.  The speed with which they eat will depend upon how close to optimum conditions their bin is kept.  Optimum conditions include a pH of 7, temperature of 50 to 84 degrees Fahrenheit, a moist environment and adequate food.  The worm bin should be checked regularly to determine whether the food last put in the bin is gone.  If it is, add more.

When burying the food waste, divide the bin into nine imaginary sections. (See Illustration No. 1)  Every time food waste is buried, place it in the section adjacent to the section in which the last food was buried.  By the time food has been buried in all of the nine sections, bury the next scraps in the very first section (Section no. 1) that food was buried in because the first food buried will have been composted by then.

Obtaining Worms
Worms can be obtained from mail order companies, fishing bait dealers, the internet or friends who have compost bins that are not kept hot.  Redworms cannot tolerate the heat of a hot compost bin.  If a friend is already vermicomposting, he may have an excess of worms that might be donated to your bin.
When deciding what the correct amount of worms to obtain is, the ratio of 2:1 or two pounds of worms for every pound of kitchen waste produced per day by the household is generally used.  There are about one thousand breeder redworms in a pound.

Harvesting Compost
The vermicomposting process takes two to four months.  After about six weeks of the worms eating scraps in your bin, you will begin to see worm castings.  Worm castings are material that has been processed through the worms’ digestive system.  They will have an appearance of dark granules.  Along with the castings are partially decomposed food scraps and bedding.

Harvesting the vermicompost can be done several ways, but the most popular two are dumping/ hand sorting  and side harvesting.  Dumping/hand sorting is done by first preparing new bedding.  Then, the old bin material is turned onto a large sheet of plastic and a bright light focused on the top of this pile.  Since the worms are photosensitive, they burrow away from the light. The top of the pile can be scraped away.   The worms uncovered will then burrow away from the light so the top can again be scraped away.  Repeat this process until most of the vermicompost has been harvested.  Place the worms on the newly-made bedding and the system is ready to work again.

Side harvesting is accomplished by only feeding the worms on one side of the bin for a few weeks.  The worms will all migrate to that side.  Then harvest the vermicompost from the unoccupied side of the bin.  Put new bedding in the harvested side and feed the worms only on that side for a few weeks.  The worms will then migrate to the new side so the remaining vermicompost in the old side can be retrieved.