Home Sweet Worm Bin

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Or at least, my hope is that my new tenants, a pound of red worms (who knew they’re sold by the pound?), will come to view their bin as sweet home.

I have been itching to compost for years, and now I have the space to do it. Although I’m aware that clever, resourceful people have disguised their bins as coffee tables and window seats, I just wanted to stick it in the corner of the kitchen or out of sight.

Not that it is out of mind—I think about my worms frequently during the day. While preparing food, or course, but also out cutting the last of the zinnias, I wonder: will the worms enjoy some stems? Taking dead leaves off the geranium, I pause: perhaps the worms could snack on these? My work colleagues have already predicted that soon I’ll be making shopping lists with the worms in mind. (Blog readers take note: if start talking about “cooking” for the worms, it will be time for an intervention.)

For those not yet vermicomposting, here’s a quick summary: Go to wormwoman.com, order a kit (there are two sizes), and the UPS person delivers it. The kit includes the bin (recycled plastic), the worms, a sort of fork/rake, and the book Worms Eat My Garbage by the late mother of vermicomposting, Mary Appelhof. (You can also just order worms and book in which there are instructions for DIY bin-maing.) In about 90 minutes—most of it spent sorting out the colored newspaper from the strictly b/w and shredding it—the bedding ("bedding," that’s homey) was prepared, and I was ready to let the worms move in.

They clumped a bit at first, and at that moment came a big decision: to touch the worms or use the fork thingy. When I was a kid, I had no trouble handling worms for fishing; we also went “hunting” for night crawlers so we could store them in a Pringles can. Ok then, just dive in with the hands. Alas, I found that for good or bad, in my evolution as a person, some things fell off the bus, including comfort in touching naked worm bodies. The fork implement is really quite dull, so I gently separated the big clumps and distributed the worms across the top of their bedding. The instructions said to leave the lid off for an hour or until the worms had burrowed into the bin. Here’s a photo after an hour:

That was 4 days ago. It’s meant to take a few months to break everything down, so I’ll keep everyone apprised of the progress. My goal is to have a big heap of vermicompost for spring planting.