The Tale of the Vermi-Ghetto Compost

Today is a glorious day. Today is the day I get to write about worm poop! I have yet to kill off the thousand worms I purchased a couple of months back. This is one of my crowning garden glories, because I pulled this vermicompost system out of my ass and so far so good.

I started with the green waste bin that formerly belonged to my last apartment, half filled with soil. Why did I put soil in there? Because I needed to move it from one house to the next and was too lazy/not strong enough to dump it (maybe 300lbs) when I got there. And this turned out to be a VERY important part of my plan. If I had dumped it all out, I never would have been able to just reach in and grab the castings. But I'm getting ahead of myself - we don't even have worms yet in this story, let alone poop for the grabbin'.

I did some research into the pros and cons of different kinds of composting, as discussed in my previous post, and decided worms were for me. I bought my pound o' worms from Victory Seeds for $25 when I was purchasing some veggie seeds. Opening the box was exciting to say the least. I got a bag the size of a large grapefruit that appeared to be filled with soil. Until I looked more closely. The soil was wiggling! Yeah! This was great news because worms are a bit temp sensitive, and getting a bag of dead worms would be pretty depressing. So, Step 1: Acquire Red Wiggler Composting Worms, check!

I'd started saving our kitchen scraps (no meat, no dairy) in anticipation of the worms arrival. It is important to get them into their new home and feed them immediately after opening. How hungry would you be after two days in a tiny box, dealing with post office BS, smashed up against a thousand of your closest friends and family members? For reals yo. If you don't feed them they will try to escape, or at the very least will crawl up to the condensation on the lid of the container. You gotsta lure them in with a tasty treat.

After gently breaking up my ball o' worms into the compost bin, I added a nice layer of shredded paper bags from my local beer store and put the food scraps on top. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am, that's pretty much how we got started.

A few weeks later we drilled holes in the side of the bin beneath and above the soil line. Worms are needy like all other organisms, and require air of all things to live. The nerve. Anyway, probably should have done this part before getting the worms, but meh. There is no use crying over milk that could have feasibly been spilled, but is still sitting in a glass on the counter.

One of the first problems I encountered with the Vermi-Ghetto Compost was how to harvest the castings. I had worms wriggling all over the damn place, and it gets pretty old pretty quickly to have to pick all the worms out of the castings you want to use. one. by. one. Turns out the solution was pretty simple though! I've started feeding the lil dudes on just one side of the container, and keeping their bedding on the same side. After some weeks or months or however long it takes the worms to eat through most of what I've fed them, I just switch to feeding them on the other side and all the worms come a runnin' like peer pressured lemmings. I give them a few days to make the trip, and make sure to toss any unfinished bits of food to the new location. Then I'm free to dig about with reckless abandon, not worrying about committing worm genocide. I've been using the castings for about a month now :D

The last point I want to make briefly is about location. Worms don't like to be too hot or too cold (oh great, now this is playing on repeat in my head. shoot me in the face). We originally had the bin against the fence next to the veggie garden where it was getting a bit toastier than desired (4-6 hours of direct sun). Thankfully, Dude Life (as my male roommate will be referred to from now on) had a day off last weekend and I was able to get him to move my 300lbs of worm poop to a new, shadier location on the side of the house next to the Lazy Potatoes.