Nicole Faires

I have 2000 worms arriving by mail this afternoon so my task in this blustery snowstorm is to prepare their home.  Eventually I want to have 15 or more of these bins in the barn, doing all of my compost work for me.  No more turning piles and measuring temperature! Not only does this mean less work for me, worms do it at least twice as fast.

This is our first bin.  To build up a bigger population I’ll need to keep my worms very happy, so they are in the house right now instead of the barn.  It looks very nice, doesn’t it?  You need three bins.  For my 2 pounds of worms, I need two 20 gallon bins and a slightly larger one that they can fit inside.

Drill holes in the sides of the two 20 gallon bins.  I drilled 1/8” holes in only the long sides and I put a lot of them.  Some people only put 10 holes in each side but my bin is kind of big and I felt like better ventilation is better.  Drill maybe 10 holes in the lid as well.  You only need one lid.

You only need a few holes in the bottom. These should be about 1/4 inch.

This is your big bin.  Tape or glue in aluminum cans or cardboard milk cartons that will act as a pedestal.  You have to keep the smaller bin off the floor for drainage and air circulation.

Put one of the small bins in the big bin on top of your pedestal.  

This is actually the most difficult part.  You now have to tear up lots and lots of little pieces of cardboard and newspaper, unless you have a big bag of leaves handy.  Even then you may want to add cardboard and newspaper just to have a mixture.  It takes a long time to fill up a bin this size.  Make sure there’s no tape or staples in there.  You then have to moisten the whole thing so it’s as wet as a damp sponge.  For my bin this took at least a gallon of water.  

You only need two more things before the worms arrive.  Some food waste, and a scoop of dirt.  Worms need some grit in their system and adding a little dirt will do that.  Food waste can be a few days old, sort of broken down already.  Just push aside a hole in the bedding, dump it in and cover it up.  The rules for worms are a little bit different than your regular compost.  It’s better to chop things up a bit for the worms, and you can’t add very much bread or citrus.  Bread heats up the bin to an uncomfortable level for the worms, and they just can’t handle much citrus and peels.  Other rules are the same - no meat, no dairy, no oily stuff.  You’ll need to add at least 1/2 pound of waste per day per pound of worms, and more if you want them to reproduce.

The genius part of the way this particular worm bin works is the harvesting of the castings.  Most worm bins require that the whole thing be dumped upside down on a tarp, and then you wait until the worms move away from the light towards the bottom of the pile.  You scoop off the castings, then dump the worms back into their bin with some new bedding.  

Supposedly with this worm bin design, I can take that third 20 gallon bin and stick it inside my full bin.  I will be able to put new bedding in it and start adding compost to the new bin.  Within a couple of weeks the worms will have crawled through the bottom drainage holes into the top bin to get the food, and I can simply lift it off and take the old one out to use the castings.  

One more thing… don’t throw out the water dripping into the big bin.  It is super scrumptious compost tea that needs to be put in the garden!