[Worm Composting] [How do you Start up a Worm Box?] [How do you Feed the Worms?]
The Joy of Compost
Composting is an important part of our vision of sustaining life. We put our food wastes back into the earth to nurture new gardens. FNB creates a considerable amount of good compose materials. All food that is too old to use-bad parts, onion/garlic skins, carrot tops, orange and banana peels, lettuce leaves, zucchini ends etc.-goes into plastic 5 gallon compost buckets as we prep the food.
These food scraps are then composted in a pile at the cooking house, a nearby garden or some other usable place. Here's a composting procedure for a hot composting system (the intense biological composting activity raises pile to 1/40-160 degrees Fahrenheit).
1) Gather all compost, preferably in 5-gallon compost
(but not "food only") buckets. (Sometimes waxed boxes work okay
for lettuce leaves or something not gooey).
2) Chop the compost. Easiest method is to use the straight shovel and,
with vigor and care, i.e. not to cut bucket, chop away. Good exercise.
Standing on a step helps.
3) Transport compost to a compost box. Your compost box should be able
to contain at least one cubic yard of compost so that there is room to
develop a hot compost culture.
4) Mix our "green" nitrogen-rich food waste with equal volume
of dry "brown" carbon source. This could be dry leaves, straw
or untreated wood shavings that are gathered from outside sources and
left near the pile. This is the most important step for successful compost.
The most common problem is when there is not enough "brown" material and the compost doesn't get the air it needs and anaerobic (without oxygen) conditions develop. This creates a really smelly (ammonia like) goo pile.
While indeed your pile will eventually break down like this, it loses important nitrogen. An ideal pile is well-aerated (turning helps!) and has the dampness of a wet sponge. A dry pile will break down slowly and it may be best to moisten a drying pile in the summer months.
5) Turn or "fluff" existing piles. The idea
is to mix air in, too.
6) Rinse out the buckets and return cart and buckets to storage area.
Finished compost can be achieved in 1-3 months after the last new waste is added.
Ways to speed the process include:
* chopping finer
* getting a hot pile
* turning more often.
You will recognize finished compost because it will look and smell like dark sweet earth. You may need to sift out big particles. It is excellent to add to garden and houseplants. It can be dug into the garden (adding humus and nutrients) or used as mulch. It nourishes the plants, helps retain water and creates a living soil, thus completing the cycle of birth, death, and life.
Worm composting, called vermicomposting, is another way to compost food waste. The redworm, known by ]ulius Caesar and friends as Esienia Foetida, can eat half it's weight in food scraps each day. It poops out a super-high quality organic fertilizer (called castings), and it breeds faster than any species that has ever existed. These three qualities together make the redworm the best composting critter in the known universe.
How do you start up a worm box?
To make a worm box you can use an old dresser drawer or you can build your own out of plywood. The important thing is that it has a lid, air holes in the side, and small drainage holes in the bottom. Keep it outdoors in a shaded area so the sun doesn't cook your worms. If it freezes in the winter where you live than you may want to move it indoors for a while, but then you have to worry about spooge leaking on your floor. If you get fancy you can buy an expensive worm box with a "leachate collection tub" on the bottom to catch the spooge (known as "worm tea") and use it to fertilize your plants. Or you could try building your own. The thing NOT to do is to try to worm compost in a box without drainage. You WILL drown your worms.
So start out by throwing some dirt in the bottom of the box, or you can use potting soil or peat moss from the local garden store. Next go out and buy a pound or two of Esienia Foetida at your local worm supply store, or steal some from your neighbor's box. It's OK if you don't know exactly how many pounds of worms you are starting out with, because eventually they will multiply and fill up the capacity of the box. (You will get between one and two pounds of worms per square foot of surface area of your box.) So you put the worms on top of the dirt in your box and then throw the food waste on top of them. Then you take newspaper and shred it up into long strips, wet it and throw it on top of the food. This shredded newspaper is the "bedding" and it keeps moisture in and has other mysterious but necessary benefits for your worms. You should add more bedding as you feed the worms only when the previous batch starts to disappear (it will degrade and the worms will eventually eat it).
Basically you take the food waste and chop it up as best as you can (the smaller the particles, the faster the worms can eat it). Using a square shovel in a five-gallon bucket with a determined up-and down motion is the easiest, most efficient way we've found to do this. It doesn't matter if there's sort of big hunks in the end. You don't have to make pudding out of it, but composting is just faster if you do. So then you just put this foodstuff on top of the worms and underneath the shredded paper (or on top of the shredded paper if the shredded paper looks all schwaggy and it's time to add more). Remember the worms eat about half their weight in food each day. So if you started out with a pound of worms, you should feed them on average a pound every two days. It doesn't matter whether you feed it every day, every other day, or three days per week, but don't feed it less often than that! If you save up food waste for a whole week and then try to feed a week's worth at once, they won't be able to eat it quick enough and it will become anaerobic, which means "stinky as all hell." This is bad for the worms. You can tell if you're overfeeding it because it will look like the worms aren't eating it, and it will smell like that too. You don't need to be scientific and weigh everything before you feed. Just keep an eye on what's going on and you will develop a "feel" for it.
