Surface space is key to this process, as the worms self-regulate their populations. You can start with only a thousand worms and end up with many thousands chomping away at your waste and creating black gold for you. Not only that, but if they have room to grow in, worms will breed. But what if your family grows and you start producing a lot more compostable waste? Ideally, you’ll want a composter that can expand with your needs, allowing your worm colony to breed and expand as well. If only one person is producing waste food for the worms, you probably don’t need a very big composter, nor a whole lot of worms.
We’ve got some great hints for harvesting worm castings, but in the end, a system that makes it even slightly easier will speed up your collection process!Ĭomposting Space. The less you disturb your colony, the quicker they will reproduce and make you great castings, so a built-in option that makes the process easy is ideal. Most commercial composters provide alternatives which don’t disturb your colony. You can make a composter out of a bucket with holes drilled in it for drainage… but you’ll have to pull out all of the worms, their remaining bedding/food, and their castings and manually separate them all. It can also be added to a hot compost pile, as the heat will kill any pathogens in the leachate.Įase of Harvesting Castings. If your vermicomposter has a spigot, you can drain off the leachate regularly, mix it at least 50/50 with water, and spread it on your lawn or on the soil in a flower garden. Incidentally, the leachate itself does contain some nutrients and can be used as a fertilizer source, but with one caveat: As it doesn’t go through the worm’s gut and get digested, it may have pathogens that haven’t been eradicated, so it’s not safe for use on edible plants. Your worms don’t want the extra moisture and can actually drown if there’s too much, so a spigot or other draining method for leachate is required. If you’re adding a lot of fruit or vegetable matter, especially stuff like watermelon rinds or other wet materials, it will produce a liquid that’s referred to as “worm tea” or leachate. While you can DIY a worm composter out of almost any box or bucket, there’s a few things which rudimentary types lack that are available in commercial vermicomposters.ĭrainage. Depending on the composter, this process will vary, so we’ll talk about that further on. And of course, never add inorganic materials like plastic or non-compostable materials like metal or glass, as the worms can’t eat those.Įventually, it will be time to harvest your castings for use. Adding large quantities of acidic foods all at once can actually irritate tender worm bodies and increase the pH of your bin, so go easy on acidic stuff. Avoid feeding them meats or oils that tend to go rancid and smell bad (not because they can’t handle them, but because they smell bad). The simplest explanation of worm composting is one sentence: “Worms eat my kitchen scraps.” In essence, you provide a home for the worms (the composter), some lightly-moistened bedding, and food, and they give you fantastic compost.Īny fruit or vegetable scraps, leftover pasta or bread, leaves, coffee grounds, eggshells, and even some manures are great food sources for worms. I’ve used it for a year now every day and it is hands down the most user-friendly and effective worm composter that I’ve ever used. This is my current go-to worm bin for daily composting. And best of all, I don’t have problems with moisture control, which has long been an issue with other types of bins. It can hold huge quantities of worms, allowing me to produce worm castings much faster.
The large surface space and good depth enables me to use all types of composting worms. I honestly cannot rave enough about the ease of this bag. It’s capable of holding up to 5 cubic feet of vermicompost, but most importantly has an easy-harvest zippered bottom that makes getting fresh castings out of the system an absolute breeze. This one, in particular, is made with 900 denier Oxford fabric, meaning it’s breathable but won’t allow in any flies, etc… a common problem in other systems. Flow-through systems are all the rage for those who aren’t a fan of stackable systems like the Worm Factory 360.
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