Worms eat my garbage

One of my main passions is gardening, and with it, recycling/composting.  Composting with worms, or "Vermicomposting" is the best way of creating clean, fertile, organic soil for gardening, and it doesn't require any special equipment, chemicals, and really not that much work.  It's also the best way to fix soil, or to condition poor soil to make it suitable for gardening and farming.

If everyone would keep a small worm bin or worm farm to use to compost their kitchen waste and yard waste, and if they gave away or spread that compost in their yard or garden, we'd have a much greener country, and we'd be diverting thousands of tons of waste from our landfills.




I learned about composting with worms about 10 years ago and set up my very first worm bin.    It was a small rubber storage container I had drilled holes in and filled with bedding, and I kept it outside in the garden.  It was doing fine until the military decided to send me to Korea, and while I was gone it was neglected and all the worms were dead after I returned home.

After I came home from Korea my life became pretty unstable, and for the next 10 years I moved way too much to keep a garden.  After I returned home from Baghdad in 2009 I got out of the military and decided to start gardening in pots (we still move around alot, but now that I'm not in the military I don't have to worry about deploying anymore).  In December 2009 I decided to start another worm bin.

I decided to use the plastic containers again, but this time arranged in a stacking bin system.  The bottom bin catches the leachate and any traveling worms departing through the drain holes in the bottom, and the bins above it contain worms, castings (worm shit), bedding (shredded paper and cardboard), and food (organic material to be composted).  

The idea was to fill the top bin (bin #1) with food and bedding until completely full, and then start a bin on top of that one (I'll call that bin #2).  When the worms finished eating all the food in Bin #1 they would hopefully migrate into Bin #2 through the drain holes in the bottom of the bin.  When Bin #2 was full, the plan was to add a Bin #3 and continue.  Each bin would fill up with food, worms would migrate in from the bin below to consume the food, water would drain through it from above keeping everything moist, and the bin would eventually move down in the system until finally being removed and emptied.  At the right time, the bottom bin would be emptied of all it's contents and added to the top of the system.  I would continue adding bins until I reached the right number where my bins would constantly rotate through the system and when it was time to add a new bin to the top, I had a bin becoming empty that I could use.

After being given a week or so to dry out, the contents of a bin being emptied (I call it harvesting) would be sorted.  Any worms, worm eggs, and uncomposted material would be tossed back into the top bin, and the finished product would be ready to throw into my garden or into pots.

Another photo of my stacking bin system next to our plants and out grapefruit tree

For keeping worms, the bin worked great, but for making compost, it didn't work out very well at all.  My worms made lots of babies increasing the population, and they turned all my waste into compost, but they worked much slower for me than for other people, and after a while I discovered the bottom bins weren't finishing well because they were too wet.  Even though I had drain holes, the plastic caused the castings to retain way too much water, so instead of having nice castings, all I really had was a muddy mess.  And the anaerobic conditions in the lower bins were causing the worms to abandon those bins instead of finishing them off.

So in January 2011 I purchased a Worm Inn from The Worm Dude.

The Worm Inn is a breathable canvass bag that has a zippered screen covering the top, and a draw string on the bottom.  It's a flow through system that does the same thing I was trying to get out of my stacking bin system, only this will do it much better because I wont have any heavy bins to lift, no sorting is necessary, the casting will come out finished and dry, and the worm inn regulates moisture much better by allowing the outside material to dry while maintaining the right amount of moisture in the middle where the worms actually live and do their work.

Food waste (and other green waste + bedding) goes in the top, water will come out of the bottom, and as the worms work on eating the kitchen waste, their castings and finished compost move down toward the bottom of the bag.  In a few months, wonderful fertile soil will come out of the bottom and go right into our veggie pots to grow the food we'll be eating.