Boulder Vermicomposting

Interview: Restaurant Scrap Composting With Worms

December 2nd, 2008

I had the pleasure of interviewing Forest, a classmate of mine. We talked widely about his experience with worms, including blue worms, his recent failure, the shelf life of compost tea, worms’ place in permaculture, and many other topics. It was a long interview, so I’ve broken it up into parts.

In part 1 he discusses his experiences vermicomposting restaurant scraps on a farm Hawaii.

Dan: I’m with Forest who was a classmate of mine and we’re going to talk about worms. Forest what’s your experience with worms and keeping worms.

Forest: My first experience with keeping worms? I went to Hawaii a couple years ago, I lived there for 6 months. And in the, in that term we were able to get a worm farm going on a small permaculture farm in Hawaii which ended up being the largest worm farm on Kauai. When I got there, they, the woman who was managing the farm there was operating had a small worm operation there and she wanted a larger one so I designed up a system to expand it and we had, I don’t know one the size of this room there.

D: That’s a good 30 feet

F: Yeah.

D: I would guess. How wide?

F: About 5 about 4 foot wide. What we did was we were collecting the compost from all the restaurants around us all the different restaurants. And then We would sell them our produce, if we had anything ripe we would bring it, see if they wanted to buy it or the compost, so that happened every single day. And so we collected enough compost from that to create a huge worm operation and it was awesome. It was really really cool.

D: So you did compost like vermicompost everything or just the vegetable scraps that they provided?

F: everything went into [the vermicomposting operation]. I mean it was huge you know, trash cans full of compost from all the restaurants and we threw everything in there every day. [We had] a long corridor so we started at one side and moved down and kept adding and move on so by the time we got partway down the line the first batches were ready to come off so that way, that way we could you know switch back, keep it up. We also had shade palms so it was completely shaded. But it also had a sprinkler system, a mister system on an automatic timer so that every so often it would just mist, keeping things misted all the time cause worms don’t like stuff to dry out. Plus when the sun was out even with the sun protection it would get a little hot there also.

D: And it was outside?

F: Yeah.

D: Did you have any issue with wild animals?

F: It was in our chicken bed, so we had to protect it from the chickens which was our biggest issue but that wasn’t that hard, because the way we designed it, it was closed off so the chickens couldn’t get at it.

D: Just chicken wire or something like that?

F: It was just a shade cloth. And we attached that to some long metal rods on either side and attached some PVC pipe and it [the PVC] half circled along it. So it looked a lot like a house.

D: And the chickens never figured it out? They weren’t smart enough to get through the shade cloth?

F: No [the cloth] was too thick.

D: Ok, gotcha.

F: They, occasionally, one would find its way in a little side pocket we forgot to close up but you know, a single chicken can’t hurt it so much. So we were extremely lucky. We tried other different types. We tried tires and boxes and a bunch of different ways but the amount of compost that we had, that’s what we’d use [the vermicomposting hoop houses]. I’m gonna change one thing I said. What we do is bring all the compost into the chicken pen and then let them pick through it for a day then we’d pick it up and we’d throw it into the worms. So the chickens got first pick. So we were able to feed our chickens [off the scraps].

D: You didn’t have to feed them anything else?

F: We did have to do a little bit of supplementing but I probably wouldn’t have if it was my chickens because I mean they eat all leftover pastries, bread, grain. If you [a restaurant] spilled some grain on the floor you just have to sweep it up and put it in the compost. They couldn’t cook with it so [the chickens] got stuff like that constantly. We had 60+ chickens there too so it was quite the large operation.

D: Were you involved in going to the restaurants and saying “hey, [can we get your scraps]?”. How’d you sell them on that?

F: We just said “we want your compost” and people were pretty excited about that actually.

D: They weren’t kind of pissed off that they would have to split their plastic waste from their food waste?

F: No.

D: Or did restaurants already do that?

F: No, restaurants didn’t do it but restaurants didn’t have a hard, tough time with it, I mean I think it’s partly the area we were living in was pretty liberal and pretty conscious and there wasn’t really any composting systems in place so you just start offering people the option and everybody jumped on it. The problem was just regular pickups because we had to do it every day, every two days we’d have to go and pick up every place and that doesn’t give you a lot of options for going backpacking for 3 days you know. So that was a management issue that ended up causing some problems but we had anywhere from 3 of us living on the farm to 20 of us living on the farm and it changed. It was just a huge invisible structure. Where we put most of our energy [was] trying to create an invisible structure. It’s managing people in flux, but the worms went well, you know, really well. And then after that I built a compost tea maker which is like a 55 gallon drum and then we’d take all the worm castings and separate the worms from the castings and then put that in the compost tea maker. And then we’d go spray down all of the plants with that.

D: Did you ever run any experiments on what compost tea was good for? I mean I mean how much it helped?

F: No, we just sprayed.

D: I mean I’ve wondered that because I’d like to. I mean Tracy was talking about selling that stuff, you know and it seems like that’s one way you could make a large body of stuff to sell.

F: Have you seen at the Saturday farmers market, Eco-cycle sells it there? So the problem with selling is it has to be in the ground within 12 hours of making it.

D: Oh really?

F: So that’s why they do the farmers market. Because they literally make it that morning and then they sell it.

D: Wow.

F: And so you’re buying it fresh and you have to go water your plants with it. There can’t be a delay.

D: Because all bacteria and all the good stuff will just…

F: It goes anaerobic. There’s a certain amount of oxygen in there and the microbes eat it. Once it’s done they kind of fall asleep

D: Sure.

F: So, you know you have to keep it while there’s oxygen in it. Now, if people could bring it home and put oxygen in it, you could use a little fish bubbler, it would last a little bit longer but even then not really [that long].

D: Ok that’s good to know; I didn’t know that

F: So we just spray everything with compost tea. I mean everything I’ve read and all the research I’ve done is it’s really incredible.

D: Really, ok.

F: So, yeah so I just want to explain the inputs to outputs of the worms. We had 3 acres we were taking care of so and then when I had this spring when we got worms…

D: Can I ask you a question about the farm? So how did you separate the worms?

F: Separate the worms? The woman who lived there, Crystal, she came up with a way to do it. You just take you take some old castings, flip them down into a wheelbarrow and then she took a tray that had like a screen on it that was big enough that the worms could crawl through, and we put the worms on the screen and then put that on top of the old castings and you just wheel it out into the hot sun, and the worms, once they reach a certain temperature, they’ll burrow down as quickly as they can to get away from the sun. You have to be careful if it’s a really hot day you have to put it in kind of half sun half shade you know. You don’t want to cook em but you want to frighten them that it is hot, then they’ll go down into the lower level. Then you just pull the top one out and it’s all cleaned out. It’s actually quite easy.

D: It sounds, again like a laborious process right, like you can’t do that with all your castings at once, you have to do repeated trips.

F: Yeah, exactly.

D: But like do that then you go work on the farm someplace else and then you come back?

F: And then this was invisible structures. There was the patterns of behavior. We’d wake up, go make our run [to the restaurants], feed our chickens, rake up yesterday’s [scraps and throw it in worm pits], then we go and take some castings, we put it in [the wheelbarrow separator], then let it sit all day, and then the next day, we’d take those castings and make compost tea with it and then be spraying. It’s just a lot.

D: Sure, lots and lots.

F: Plus 20 other things.

D: Sure yeah, this is a long[?] cycle you’re talking about.

To be continued…

(Thanks to Pam for her transcription skillz.)

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