Vermiculture - My New Worm Bin
Part 1 - The Background.
I am a chronic do-it-yourselfer. I am also in the middle of bootstrapping an internet startup that has required 70+ hours a week for the last two years. So even though I have been planning on building a vermiculture system to digest the food waste created by my house and the kitchen at work, it hasn't happened.
White the heavily wooded terrain surrounding my apartment has allowed me the option of 'freeform' composting any pile of vegetable scraps I didn't feel like putting in the trash can, I yearned for the refinement and efficiency of a proper worm bin (For the uninitiated, freeform composting = chuck it in the woods). Worm based composting, or vermiculture, is to regular composting as a Porsche is to a Honda Civic. That is to say it takes a whole lot more tuning and care, but will go a hell of a lot faster (and maybe it's cooler?).
Sick of seeing my kitchen scraps go to waste, in mid February I broke down and bought a commercial bin. Within a week I was vermiculturing.
What is Vermiculture? In its purest form vermiculture is worms in some type of vessel that eat food scraps and produce compost. Like most things it's a little more complicated in practice.
Although many have tried you can't just go out in your yard, dig up some worms, throw them in a bucket with some old broccoli and have a functioning system. The type of soil dwelling earthworms you would find in your yard or garden will be very upset if you rip them from their homes and drop them in a pile of trash. So upset that they will make a break for it and end up dead in your basement, garage, or patio. They will end up dead anywhere within a three foot radius of your bin. You have to use special worms for vermiculture.
The redworms or red wigglers (Lumbricus rubellus) used in vermiculture systems have adapted to living in decomposing organic material. In the wild you would find them in leaf litter or manure piles. They don't want to live in dirt. So, as long as everything in your bin is to their liking, they will hang around. But, if you put a bunch of moldy tomatoes in a box and dump some redworms on them, unfortunately that won't work either.
A healthy and productive bin needs bacteria and tiny organisms to break down the food scraps you add. When you start a new bin it is recommended that you add a few handfuls of decomposing organic matter from outdoors. The dark brown compost that you find if you dig around under a pile of leaves in your yard or in the woods contains everything you will need. Adding the already colonized wad of leaves from outside is very similar to adding yogurt (rotten milk) to your intestines. I highly recommend both.
You also need a medium to bury the food in. Worms hate light and won't sit on the top of a pile of food in broad daylight. The system I bought came with a block of shredded coconut as a primer material. You could also use coffee grounds or light topsoil to start off a new system. The worms climb through this medium and eat the food scraps once the bacteria starts breaking them down. At this point the food moves through their digestive system and is released as tiny black grains that coalesce into a rich compost. Contrary to popular belief it doesn't smell in the least, and it will supercharge your garden.
Finally you need to choose a container. There are two major types of worm bins; continuous, and non-continuous.
Non-continuous is the most basic type of system. It goes like this; put some worms and dirt in a bucket, throw some old food in there, wait until all the food disappears, dump out the contents of the bin, screen out the worms, put the compost in the garden, repeat. A non-continuous system is quick and easy and will break down food much faster than a standard compost pile. But, screening out all the worms at the end is a pain, and since you are starting and stopping all the time your system never really gets cranking along at full speed.
The other option is continuous vermiculture. This method uses a stick and carrot approach to move the worms around in the system by attracting them to new food. When the worms move to a new location you can remove all the finished compost from their previous spot without bothering them. The bin I bought is a continuous vertical system made up of stacking bins with screen bottoms. The idea with a vertical continuous system is you add food to a single bin (the active bin) until you run out of space. Then you put another bin on top of it and start putting new food in there. At that point it becomes the active bin. When the worms in the bottom bin run out of food, they start hunting around for more and crawl up through the screen into the bin above. Systems like this usually use 3 or more bins. When the top one is totally full you pull off the oldest bin from the bottom of the stack. Ideally it will have very few worms left in it since they have all moved up. You dump the finished compost out of that first bin into your garden and place it on top of the stack where it become the new active bin. This way is really ideal as the screening process which is extra work for you and disruptive to the worms is mostly eliminated.
In part 2 I will show you how the whole thing goes together.
