Boulder Vermicomposting

What to do with the worms?

October 24th, 2008

A few weekends ago, I gave a few quarts of worms to classmates that had asked for them.  Since I have plenty of worms in the bin, I was happy to hand them out. I didn’t bother separating the worms from vermicompost, I just dug around in the bin and found a bunch of worms chowing down.  I took a couple of clusters and tossed them in yogurt quart plastic containers for easy transport.

One of my classmates was a bit surprised–I think he thought I would take longer to get him the worms.  He asked me a question that put me back on my heels for a second: “What do you do with all the worms?  What about the castings they produce?”

As far as I am concerned, there are four outputs of worms for the home worm keeper (as opposed to an industrial worm farmer):

• more worms
• vermicompost (the intermediate product of worm digestion)
• worm castings (the end product of worm digestion)
• garbage reduction

Each output has good properties, but it may be hard to achieve all of these outputs at the same time.  For example, when I want to make worm castings, an easy way to do so is to put extra worms into a small bin with some food and wait.  The worms all die, but I’ll have pure castings in the end.  Worms may reproduce better when fed special worm food, which limits the garbage reduction, and they’ll certainly reproduce more if you replace bedding more often (not too often, but as the bedding turns into castings, the worms have to exert more effort finding food, and thus less making new worms).  Vermicompost and worm castings are somewhat exclusive, since vermicompost eventually turns into worm castings.

Luckily, you can have more than one worm bin, and each can be set up to produce one or more of the outputs. However, I think it helps every worm keeper should think about what they want to optimize, as that affects box location, required amount of work, and size of box.

My worm experience has been focused on reducing my garbage production.  That’s why I originally started keeping worms, and easily reducing organic waste has been what keeps me excited about worms.  (That’s not to say that I don’t use the other outputs: I’ve put worm castings as top dressing on plants, gave worms to other people (obviously), and put vermicompost under transplants.  But for me, the magic of worms is their ability to take smelly waste and turn it into dirt.

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