Worms will eat your garbage too!

Setting up a worm bin in your home is a great way to keep organic waste out of the landfill and turn it into something useful. Worms will eat almost anything organic including paper, cardboard, kitchen scraps, and leaves. Their requirements are simple; air, moisture, food and darkness. You can make a bin out of buckets, totes, trash cans. We used a tote because we had one. You can get plastic buckets from a local restaurant or donut shop. We recommend reusing a container rather than going to a store and buying something new. The main requirement is that it is opaque because worms do not like light.
To provide air for the worms you need to drill 1/8" holes in the sides and top of the container. I put 2 rows on the sides about 3 inches apart. One row near the top and one row near the bottom. I drilled about 20 holes in the top. The bin also needs some 1/4" holes in the bottom for drainage to keep any liquid from building up which will rot the bedding. I placed a layer of landscape fabric over the holes in the bottom to keep anything other than liquid from coming out the holes.
Next you need to add about 3" of moist bedding. You can use shredded paper or shredded leaves. Soak the bedding in water and wring it out so only a few drops continue to drip out. It should feel like a damp sponge. Put the bedding in the bin and fluff it up so there is plenty of air. Next add some soil, from the ground not potting soil. About a quart will do. The soil contains microorganisms that break down the food into tiny particles the worms can ingest. They have really tiny mouths! They also get some grit from the soil which helps them to grind up the food.
Next add worms. You will need a pound of worms. We get ours from Bear Creek Worm Farm. Their number is (678) 794 6664. They will come with a pound of bedding. Dump them gently into the bin and spread them evenly over the surface of the bedding.
Next add some food. We keep a rot bucket under the sink into which we put our kitchen scraps, paper towels, napkins, coffee grounds and tea leaves. It takes us about a week to fill it up. During that time mocroorganisms are starting to break down the stuff on the bottom so that when it goes into the bin some of it is ready for the worms to eat. When you first start your bin put only a few handfuls in so that the worms are not overwhelmed while they are getting adjusted to their new home.
Cover the food and worms with another layer of moist bedding. Keeping the food covered will discourage fruit flies. When you add additional food it is a good idea to bury it in the bedding to keep fruit flies from finding it. In a week you can start to add more food. The important thing is not to add so much wet goopy stuff that air is prevented from getting down to the worms. They are voracious eaters so the food will disappear pretty quickly.
We recently got 10 pounds of worms for the members of our workshop to start their own bins. We put them into the tote and put the top on and went to bed. The next morning Robin came screaming into the bedroom. All the worms escaped she said! I went out to the screen porch and there were thousands of worms crawling in every direction. It took me 3 hours to pick all those suckers up and return them to the bin.
To prevent this, for the first couple of nights, keep a light on. Worms do not like light and will burrow down into the bedding to get away from it. As an additional precaution spread a 2" wide band of dish washing liquid (organic of course) around the inside top of the bin. The worms will not crawl over it. Once they get over the trauma of traveling and settle into their new home they will not try to escape.
What not to feed them: Animal fat, meat scraps, cheese. You can put citrus but not a whole lot at a time. Same with onions. They both have compounds that are toxic to worms in large amounts. You can put egg shells in but crush them up finely. They really like fruit like banana peels, mango skins, anything sweet and mushy. One of my students said she cuts her banana peels into tiny pieces and the worms devour them. They like coffee grounds too but again not too much because they are very acidic.
Once the bin is filled up almost to the top you can harvest the worms and move them to a new bin. The remaining worm castings are great for feeding your vegetable garden or house plants. I will explain how to get the worms out of the bin in another post.
Become a worm wrangler. You'll love it.

The Funny Farm in the Snow

Yesterday we got our yearly snow storm. Everyone gets really excited here in the south whenever there is even a hint of snow to come. When it actually snows people go crazy. The bars fill up with celebrants who get drunk and drive in it. ( yes we've done it in the past). People who don't know how to drive are out and about being menaces to everybody else. We had an organic gardening class scheduled yesterday. We had gotten 10 pounds of worms for our students a few days earlier. We needed for everyone to pick them up so we would not have to care for them for another 2 weeks. Most of our students braved crazy drivers, falling trees, and downed power lines to come out and get their worms. Several were transplants from the north who were eager to get their worms and get back home to avoid the locals who don't know how to drive in even a little snow.
We lost power for a few hours so we built a fire in the fireplace. We sipped some hooch. We roasted potatoes, garlic and onions and had a nice feast. It was a lovely day.
We got 2". Wow what a storm :)

Worms are Livestock Too!

I love raising worms. It is the easy way to break down organic waste into fantastically nutritious food for plants. I built 12 bins in the barn in which i'll raise my herd. Yesterday is got in the mail 10 pounds of red wigglers. They are consumers of partially decomposed organic matter and live in the forest duff not down in the soil like earthworms. I filled 2 bins half way with material that has been composting since 4 pm on March 22 according to those meticulous records i referred to in the last post. I put 5 lbs. of worms in each bin and filled them the rest of the way with the partially decomposed organic matter. I mounded each bin up above the sides. During the process of decomposition by the worms the mass will be reduced by about 50% as co2 and other gasses are given off during the process. Over the top i put a wet burlap bag. I sometimes use wet cardboard. Worms need to be kept moist and they need air. The organic material should be coarse to allow for good drainage and thus aeration to keep the worms happy and reproducing. There 2 rewards from worm composting. One is the worm castings (yea it is worm poop) the other is more worms. After 60-90 days the worms will have consumed all of the organic matter and will have had many orgies producing many eggs that hatch into many more worms. When the process is complete i will separate the worms from the poop (i'll describe that process when we do it) and start 4 more bins. After the next cycle i'll be able to start 8 bins, then 16, etc. But since i only have 12 bins , i,ll either have to build more bins or sell worms or both. Probably both.
My bins are 3' x 2' x 16" deep. Why are they that size? because that is the size that fit under the benches in our former greenhouse and could be easily be moved around by 1 person. (the first 6 are on castors so they could be rolled around.) They hold about 2 wheelbarrows of organic matter. After the worms finish their work i can harvest about 150 lbs. of worm castings and 10 lbs. of worms from each bin.
You may be wondering if i bury my kitchen scraps directly in the bins. No I don't. I put them in a pile with weeds, and other green matter from the garden. Worms have tiny mouths and can't bite into fresh greenery. As worm expert Will Allen at Growing Power in Milwaukee said " What's a worm going to do with a potato?" The detritivores (sow bugs, pill bugs, springtails and such) and the microorganisms need the break stuff down into small enough pieces for the worms to ingest them. When the pile gets big enough i start a compost pile. I'll talk about how i spice my compost in a future post. I will start the next compost pile a month before the bins are ready to harvest so i will have fresh partially decomposed material to fill the new bins. Then the process starts all over again.

Oh wait, I almost forgot, what i plan to do with the excess worms is feed them to the future chickens and the way in the future fish livestock.
All part of my cunning permaculture plan.