Worm Invasion: My Introduction to Kitchen Vermiculture

There's a lot of buzz about composting these days, from turning your own leaves and lawn clippings into compost for your garden, to municipal compost - heck, the ski resort I work for composts all of its food scraps. In college, our house would fill a 5 gallon bucket with scraps and send it off to the compost center - the trash company would pick it up on the curb along with our trash and recycling.

We never gave much thought to processing it ourselves, however, until we were living in Colorado. Unlike Vermont, which is covered in farms that accept household scraps for compost or forward thinking cities like Burlington that collect it, southwest Colorado is high, dry desert with ranches instead of farms and an environment that doesn't produce the hot humidity that works best for composting.


I learned exactly how difficult it is to find composting centers in SW CO when my job at the ski resort there tasked me to explore options for composting its organic waste. The only commercial size compost facility at the time was at a prison 3 hours away. So, we decided to do it on our own, and compost on site. Doing so means we had to go small scale, and we settled on using worms, or vermiculture, as our method.

Unlike other forms of composting, many of which require high heat, frequent turning and maintenance, space, and time, worm bins are a self contained system. As long as the temperature is comfortable (if you're not shivering or sweating, they're not either!), there isn't too much moisture, and they have just enough food, you're going to get compost - pretty fast, too.

Towards the end of the winter, we (Eco Adventures) hosted an event with the The New Community Coalition (you're going to want to click that link and check them out - they're awesome!) that was a 1 hour build your own compost workshop. For $20, we got a Rubbermaid bin, worms, bedding, and hands on instruction. I ate an apple and threw in the core to get them started. Sure, you can spend moolah on fancy-ass bins like these,  but you can just spend $7 on a bin, drill the holes yourself, use wet shredded newspaper for bedding, and order a pound of worms for $21 a pound, and go.

As you can see, we threw in pumpkin seeds and old beets - and now it's become a little alien ecosystem!

That's in. Worms eat, they reproduce - their numbers were up after about a month, and we haven't thrown away a worm-compostable food scrap since. We even drove our big back east, across the country, wrapped in a blanket to keep them warm - that's how awesome they are.

I'll add more later with how we built it, our trial and error process, and more - but for now, go ahead and surf the web and learn more about why there is no good reason why you can't rock a kitchen vermiculture system.


vermiculture.net - the best guide to building your own bin I've seen yet, outside of going to a workshop.