an introduction to vermicomposting

If you had told me even six months ago that I would be emotionally attached to a bucket full of worms sitting underneath my husband’s desk, I would have told you where to shove it. However, that doesn’t mean that today I still don’t croon over a literal bucket of worms.

Vermicompost is black gold – worm poop is one of the most delicious, nutritious things you can stick in your garden, and managing a worm bin takes little to no thought. It takes roughly ten minutes to make a worm bin, and you can order worms offline, or off kijiji or craigslist. I got mine off of kijiji. I showed up at a sketchy looking building, huddling outside in the wind, and went into a receptionist building where we covertly traded cash for a yogurt container full of red wiggler worms – the worms that work best for vermicomposting. It was the most badass deal that I ever participated in. Worms take very little maintance – once a week I throw a pound or so of food in there, add some fresh bedding, make sure the population is still very much wriggling, and stick them under the desk again. The great thing about worms is that they double their population every few months, so soon one worm bin is two worm bins is four worm bins, all of those worms wonderfully working towards making high-quality compost for your garden. Eventually I’ll add some worms direct to the garden beds in order to create a thriving soil food web, but in the meantime, they live in the living room.

How to Build a Worm Bin

Things you’ll need

• An opaque bin of any size
• Something to drill holes with
• Worm bedding (torn up black and white newspaper, egg cartons, ripped up phone books)
• Worm food (My favourites are lettuce leftovers, kale bits, eggshells, coffee grounds, apple cores, and melon peels)
• A bowl of lukeworn water
• The actual worms – the best ones that work are red wigglers.

Step One: Find a worm bin. This is relatively easy – I went to Walmart and got three 5 gallon sterilite containers, which are food-grade plastic. You want an opaque container – the darker the better so it doesn’t let in light. Worms need the dark to thrive.

Step Two: Break open a copy of any homesteading book, and turn to their page on building worm bins. The internet works too. Realize that the household drill is broken. Come up with a plan to drill the holes by hand. Realize that this drilling by hand is slowly turning your hand into an arthritic claw after the first twenty holes. Decide to work out your anger with a screwdriver. With the screwdriver and years of repressed rage, stab your container with ventilation holes on the top and bottom, as well as along the top and bottom of the sides.

Step Three: Once all of your rage is out, find worm bedding. I work in a breakfast restaurant that doesn’t recycle or compost – all summer I was stealing veggie scraps, all of the coffee grounds, and a bunch of eggs shells to compost. This project let me find a new worm bedding that the internet and worm forums heartily endorsed – the dozens of egg carton containers that get tossed out. Think back to an embarrassing time in your life and shred (10^th grade goth phase) the liners out of an embarrassed and indignant rage. Don’t be afraid to dig deep into those repressed memories and hulk out (WHY WOULD I EVER WEAR MESH?!) and tear them up small.

Step Four: Soak the bedding in warm water, and then squeeze out as much moisture as possible, since the worms need moist bedding. 

Step Five: Collect worm food. This was easy enough since I just asked my cooks to not throw out the leftover veggie bits and cantaloupe peel from the day’s work – Most of it went in my composter and was covered in dried leaves, but I set some aside for my friends. Don’t put acidic foods (such as citrus), cooked foods, or dairy or meat. Worms are vegetarians, and unless those foods have been bokashi’d beforehand (more on that later), they prefer raw food. You’ll also want to throw a handful of soil in there, or cook some eggshells and grind them up for the worms to use as grit.

Step Six: Put some of the worm food in the bin and cover it with more bedding. Prop the bin up on some discarded mason jar lids/bricks over top of another lid, which will act as a tray and collect any liquid or soil dropping out of the container. Voila, a worm bin, and in a few weeks you’ll see the food vanishing and small, black bits of rich smelling “soil”. After the bin is full, sift out the worms and put them in another bin and collect their rich, rich poop.

Keeping worms is fun, easy, and there is definitely something grossly fascinating about them wriggle around. Also, you get worm poop, and your plants love it.