Composting with Worms

In December last year, I attended the Composting with Worms workshop held by Clayton County Extension. We learned about worm physiology and everyone got to assemble and take home a worm bin. 

I have done plenty of composting myself, but always in an outdoor bin or pile. I assumed worm composting would be pretty similar, but it is a whole different system. For one, they have to stay inside your home- they are comfortable at the same temperatures as us. Luckily, if you follow the instructions, worms are pretty easy to maintain without being smelly or messy. They will break down the food scraps you give them much faster than in a traditional compost pile, and that speed will increase exponentially as the worms mate and you remove the castings to add to your garden. Eventually, you can even start new worm bins when you have reached a certain population. 

All you need to start a worm bin is a large plastic container with 1/4 inch holes drilled in the top (one hole every 1-2 inches), shredded paper, food scraps, and worms! The key is to wet your paper shreds so they are saturated but not soaked. When you squeeze a handful, only a couple drops of water should come out. Worms like a damp, but not wet environment. You want to fill your container up with the paper bedding about 1/3 of the way. Next, you’ll add a couple of cups of food scraps to your container. The smaller the pieces of food the better- think about how tiny a worm is! They can’t eat very big chunks. With food scraps, you want to follow the basic rule of compost and avoid adding any dairy or meat. Additionally, citrus, onions, and garlic are too strong for our tiny friends. Other veggie scraps and clean eggshells are perfect. Spread these evenly across the top of the wet paper bedding. The last thing you need to add is a small amount of grit, this can be sand or native soil, but it is a necessary part of a worm’s function. They use this grit to churn and break down the food in their body, they don’t have any teeth! 

Once you’ve added all your ingredients for a happy worm environment, you can add your worms! We used red wigglers. Cover them up with your wet paper and place a couple of full sheets of newspaper over the top. These will be a good indicator of how wet your habitat is. If these sheets dry out then you know you need to add more water. 

 After a month or so you may start to see tiny baby worms in the mix. They initially break down food pretty slowly, don’t add more until they’ve eaten all the food you started with. If you have too much, it may start to rot and smell bad before the worms can eat it all. They can be fed every 3 to 10 days if they’ve eaten everything. 

Eventually, you will start to see castings aka worm excrement. Look out for a dark brown material that resembles soil, this is what you want. To separate your worms out of the mix, push everything in your container to one side and then add new paper bedding and new food to the other side of the container, and the worms will follow. Then you can easily remove the nutrient-rich organic matter to store or use right away.

This is a great winter project to do inside that provides you with a great source of organic matter for your garden in the spring. When compost piles slow down in the winter, worm composting is a great way to use up food scraps. 

Personally, I have loved to watch the scraps break down and see more and more worms as time goes on. I have been impressed by how much of a clean and self-contained project this actually is. I keep my bin on a shelf in my laundry room and you’d never know that all those worms were wriggling around in there. 

Is this something you’d like to try? Should DeKalb County offer this class too?