Especially during the winter, food scraps can be a big problem. My redworms are not inside, so I can’t just walk to another room in my bathrobe. Food scraps accumulate at different rates (if I make a fruit salad, quite rapidly; chili, not so much). If I leave the scraps for too long, they produce fruit flies and smells. And since the weather can be bad 6 months of the year here in Boulder, Colorado, I can’t always put the scraps in my bin immediately, as I tend to do during the summer.
I’ve tried a variety of solutions for keeping my food scraps inside until I can move it out to my external worm bin, including:
- having my worm bin inside
- a 5 gallon bucket full of leaves and some vermicompost
- zip lock baggies
Things that I have not tried that I’ve read or heard about include
I don’t like the idea of freezing the scraps because
Below, I outline the system that works for me. I have two or three 1 gallon coffee containers, like this one:
coffee container
I fill one (container A) up with food scraps. Since it is airtight, the smells don’t escape, and you have no flies. It does get pretty funky and moldy in there, depending on what scraps I’m putting in. I’ll put everything in there, including liquids.
When it is full, I take it out and dig a hole in my bin. I empty the container into the bin. If it is really funky, sometimes I’ll fill the container with water and dump that in. I refill the hole with some of the bedding.
Then, I add a bunch of leaves (every fall I grab them from the curb and store them on my patio) for additional carbon content.
As for the container, I’ll leave it outside, and take another one in (container B). I find that leaving them outside on my patio serves a number of purposes:
- dries out any food scraps that stuck to the side of the container
- dissipates any smell
- dries out mold (I don’t know if it kills the mold, though)
I have not had any trouble with animals investigating the containers, though I live in a pretty urban environment. After container B fills and I empty it into the bin, I knock whatever dried scaps remain in container A out into the bin or onto the beds, and take it in with me.
What methods do you use to deal with your food scraps?
April 26th, 2009
I just returned from the third annual Rocky Mountain Compost School, four days of classes about compost in Fort Collins. It was quite interesting, though definitely not aimed at home vermicomposters, home composters, or vermicomposters in general (I think the North Carolina Vermiculture conference would be a better be for vermis). The focus was on industrial composting, and all the intricacies therein.
I’m not complaining–there was a ton to learn and the conference was never billed as a home vermicomposting conference. Most of the attendees (there were about 20) were from Colorado and Wyoming municipalities that were composting or were thinking of composting. There was an attendee from the EPA, some environmental consulting companies, someone from Waste Not Recycling, two farmers, and me.
Among other things, I realized that instead of sending my worm castings to a soil lab to find out their chemical content, I should have sent it to a compost lab. One of the speakers, Will Brinton, runs Woods End, which does compost testing among other things. He mentioned that there were only seven labs capable of analyzing compost in the United States. (Europe has ~200, and compost running out of their ears, apparently.)
Large scale vermicomposting of biosolids, municipal waste, and yard waste doesn’t appear to be happening locally. If you are composting more than 100 cubic yards of waste yearly, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment regulates you, heavily . Wyoming doesn’t have any such regulations, and Illinois has some of them. Apparently, the EPA 503 rules, which deal with biosolids (humanure), are the starting point for many regulators, but each state then layers on their own regulations.
The class spent some time talking about compost tea. Again, this was specific to compost, and not to vermicompost, but I was amazed to learn that the main research focus of compost tea has been on increasing plant resistance to pathogens, *not* on increasing nutrient delivery to plants. Also, the common practice of adding sugars to compost tea during the brewing process actually increases the viability of E. coli (if any E. coli is present in the compost). And the bubblers that are often sold are overkill–simply stirring the compost tea three times a day with an oar is enough aeration.
Some of the other interesting talks including what it took to make compost that was certified as organic, experiences with composting dead animals, how applying compost to Colorado soil affected pH and organic matter, and the various standards and lack of standards in the compost market. There was also some hands on exercises and demonstrations: the class made and monitored a compost pile, measured the water content of compost, saw how to use the Solvita compost testing kit, and used a spreadsheet to build a compost recipe.
The class also toured two different municipal composting facilities (Cheyenne, WY and Boulder, CO). It was great to have a chance to ask questions of people on the ground, doing real industrial composting. Another interesting tidbit was the US Composting Council was started as a way to deal with the public relations problem of disposable diapers.
A highlight, for me, was visiting John Anderson’s worm farm but I’m hoping to get another post up with some pictures from that visit, so I won’t go over about that.
Compost making seems like a relatively young science. Brinton mentioned several times that there was a large amount of disagreement in many aspects of compost, including what it actually is, how the process works, and how to characterize it in terms of quality. There are few nationwide standards, and any group can put out their own standard (as a group of Colorado composters did a while back). The class was fascinating, and there’s a ton of work being done.
My overall takeaways from this course:
- finding a market for compost is the most difficult part of the process, but there are markets out there
- large scale composting is real and happening
- large scale vermicomposting is not prevalent, at least not around here
- compost nutrient value and process depends highly on the purity of ingredients
- there’s no ‘one way’ to make compost–how you make it depends on your end use
April 18th, 2009
Here’s part three of my interview with Michael, a worm keeper. See part one, where he discusses how he ignored his worms for 3 weeks post purchase, how he uses his worm bin currently, including what types of scraps, and how he built his worm bin and part two, where he talks about earthworm orgies, the five gallon bucket of worms he started with, and ignoring your worms. Below he talks about worm trenches, how worms are like bees, whether he’d keep worms in his kitchen, and how worms fit into the permaculture way of having systems you can ignore that will do work for you (do you sense a theme?).
The money quote, for me, is
I feel like it’s been a success for me because I haven’t put a lot of effort into it. And I’ve been able to kind of ignore it. And I like having systems around my house, my property that will take care of themselves and are self-sufficient. So, with as little effort as you can put into it, I say it go for it. Because you can’t make them do anything. They have to do it themselves.
Dan: Huh. I don’t remember [John] saying [that worms were in short supply, see previous post] but along that vein, you said you might want to sell worms or give worms away, do you have friends that have asked you for them or asked you about them?
M: No, but I also haven’t offered them to anybody…
D: Somebody else I interviewed, Linda, actually said that she was talking about her worms and had a bunch of people interested and then when she actually had them to give, they were not interested anymore but I don’t know what the deal is with that.
M: I don’t know myself either.
D: Yeah.
M: So like I said, maybe starting a 2nd worm bin because we have such a high production of organic waste here; we could easily support 3 more of those.
D: Well, you guys have enough land here that you could definitely do like a worm trench, you know like 20 feet long and just…
M: Carpets or something like that?
D: Yeah carpets…
M: So it’d be a windrow, is that?
D: Yeah exactly. Well I mean a windrow, to me, is much bigger, but you know, I mean, you could definitely…
M: I was thinking just a pile on the line.
D: Yeah, yeah exactly a pile on the line, but Forest actually was telling me about piles, I mean he in Hawaii he had one that was 20′ long and they just…
M: And 5 feet wide or something?
D: No I think it was less wide than that, I think maybe1 or 2 feet wide [note, according to the interview with Forest, it was 4 or 5 feet wide].
M: You need to keep it covered though. Is that the idea right?
D: Yeah basically they had a hoop over it and rocks on both sides and it was actually in a chicken house so that the foxes and whatnot couldn’t get into it and then they had a really big shade cloth over the hoops and I think they had some misters too. But you can move a lot of organic matter through the worms. Although maybe just a couple of worm boxes would be easier to maintain. I don’t know.
M: I’m new to it, I’m a total amateur.
D: Really? Did you read anything or did it sounds like you have done some looking around just kinda see what you can expect or…
M: A couple Google searches and then the class we had on it was pretty much the extent of my worm knowledge really.
D: And then you just kind of just jumped into it because you felt like it was a really good counterpart [to other things you were doing on the land]?
M: Yeah, it just seemed to make sense and I thought… It was more just wanting to try, see what would work. You know I’m happy with it and I’ll keep doing it.
D: Sure.
M: It’s easy, it’s extremely easy. I mean building the box took a little bit of effort but not much and you don’t do much. I mean I really like the permaculture idea of having the different um components of your system doing all the work for you. I’m a pretty lazy person by nature.
And I really resonate with the idea of, you know I love having the bees out there, we keep a beehive. So I really like the fact that bees are also very, very easy to keep. Very, very low labor, you know. We probably visit the bees once every 6 weeks or something, you know, just check in with them every 2 months maybe.
D: It’s been a while since you checked out the bees, hasn’t it?
M: Yeah, certain times of year you do certain things but that’s about it. But, then the bees just sort of do their thing and what they do is they increase pollination, which is probably their primary asset, then they produce excess honey, surplus honey. This is the first year we had a hive and it produced 70+ lbs of honey which you know we can sell for $5/lb or whatever.
D: Sure.
M: It works out really well, it’s great gifts, Christmas gifts this year will be honey. Anyway, It’s the same thing with worms, you give them the right conditions and they do all the work, it’s really nice compost.
D: Obviously you’re not gonna get enough worm compost to spread across your huge garden out there, are you planning to [make] compost tea, are you going to focus on certain plants or have you given any thought to that?
M: Again I’m just been more concerned with building up the population in it, as far as getting anything out of it this year. I don’t know, I’m kind of thinking about it more now that you mentioned that they don’t like to be in their own waste as much. I’m actually not totally sure about how to harvest it. How to get it out of there now at this point because it’s sort of mixed in with rotten food.
D: Sure.
M: And how do you do that?
D: I mean I can tell you the couple ways I’ve done it. One way is you can just take out stuff. You can take out about half of your worm bin if you wanted to and put it places and of course you’re losing all the worms that were in there but the other half will come right back eventually, right? That’s definitely the lowest effort way.
You can also kind of push everything, all your bedding and your vermicompost to one side and just move it to the other side, slowly, and after, I’ve seen everything from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, the worms will migrate to where the food is and of course, the half where that was old, you will be able to take all that out. There will be cocoons and whatnot in there. But you’ll definitely [retain] more live worms than you would if you did the first method.
And the last one is you can pull all the compost out and pick through it, which doesn’t really go with along with your idea of not much effort, but does make sure that you get almost every worm that you can catch. And it can be fun; I did that, once. I mean for a pile of worms half the size of my fist, maybe a little bit smaller, took me about 45 minutes. And it was a pile about 2 feet wide of vermicompost that I went through. So it sounds to me like the second method is probably most in keeping with your ideals.
M: I don’t really know what to do now that its getting cold, sort of entering winter here [it was October].
D: Yeah I’ve definitely had worms freeze and die in the winter. Although your box is pretty big.
M: It’ll be ok, I just have a feeling it’ll be ok out there. But we’ll see. I might throw some straw bales around it just in case.
D: Yeah.
M: It’s insulated.
D: Yeah, that sounds pretty good. Any thoughts about keeping them actually in [the house], inside because that’s kinda the attraction of worm bins is that you can conceivably have them inside.
M: No.
D: No? That’s fine.
M: We don’t really have room for them in here.
D: That’s fair enough.
M: It’s pretty packed at this point.
D: So other than the compost pile is there any other place you want to put them in? I guess that’s pretty much the natural place for them.
M: Yeah. I mean I would be interested in experimenting more with maybe laying down worms, plus raw compost and then heavy mulching around plants so that they’re [in the ground]. I’ve heard of techniques like that before.
D: Just to increase plant productivity?
M: Yeah just to increase vermicompost right at the base of the plant. [Beneficial chemicals and nutrients] are right there, readily absorbable by the plant.
D: I saw a cool video…Youtube’s great… where you can get a 3 or 4 inch diameter PVC pipe and drill a bunch of holes in the bottom and then dig it like a third of the way in and then you put worms in there and then you put food in there and then you cover it with like some kind of cloth to keep flies from getting in there and then you cover it with something to keep the sun out and then you can feed the worms in the tube and then they’ll go in and out of the holes and you can have those stationed around your garden, same kind of thing, but it’s ongoing. [Apparently, I speak in run on sentences!]
M: Yeah I see what you mean, that’s interesting. Little…
D: Stations. Almost like feeding stations. Yeah.
M: Do you think worms like weeds and things like that? We have to weed a lot.
D: Sure.
M: So like, grass or pigweed or mallow, things like that, vineweed, stuff that it’s dead, you pulled it out of the ground, can worms eat that?
D: Is it dead?
M: No it’s green.
D: It’s green? But does it have seeds and whatnot?
M: Maybe?
D: Cause I mean I think that if it didn’t have seeds, the worms would be fine…that’s just like lettuce leaves, right? I mean worms would be happy with that. I don’t think [vermicomposting] gets hot enough to kill seeds, so that’d be my worry. If you were gonna put the vermicompost under the cardboard, like if you were sheet mulching something, I would say no problem. But if you’re gonna have to put in house plants, well then… Definitely some of the vermicompost I’ve used around plants sprouts stuff periodically because it just doesn’t get hot enough for composting. [Vermicomposting does have some kind of effect on pathogens, though.] I think they [the worms] like any kind of green matter they can get.
M: I think that would be good for that windrow method.
D: That’s the thing that worries me about worms in general. It’s got to be consistent input. I guess you could put a huge chunk of matter in and just let them go to town but for maximum throughput I think you want to give them consistent amounts over time.
M: Yeah. Maybe next year that’s what we’ll do with our excess worms, start a worm trench.
D: It’d be interesting, I read an interesting book called “How to raise worms for fun and profit”, printed in the 60′s and reprinted in the 80′s. They talk about industrial production of worms, about windrows with concrete inside which the worms go. I guess if you’re raising worms for profit…
M: Like in peoples’ houses or something like that?
D: No inside, like garages.
M: Like a warehouse or whatever?
D: Yeah. I mean, if you’re selling [worms] for $25/lb, that’s back in the industrial system I guess. Anyway do you have any advice for somebody whose interested in keeping worms for the first time?
M: Just go for it. You know, play around and experiment.
D: Any do’s or don’ts? Do leave them alone for the 3 weeks when you first get them? Don’t ignore them for long periods of time?
M: I feel like it’s been a success for me because I haven’t put a lot of effort into it. And I’ve been able to kind of ignore it. And I like having systems around my house, my property that will take care of themselves and are self-sufficient. So, with as little effort as you can put into it, I say it go for it. Because you can’t make them do anything. They have to do it themselves.
D: Sure, ok. Well thank you very much for your time, Michael.
M: Absolutely.
April 6th, 2009
