Boulder Vermicomposting

Interview: Worm bin contents and temperature maintenance

May 2nd, 2009

Last fall, I interviewed Mark and Linda, who keep a home worm bin.  Linda was a classmate of mine.  They have a largish worm bin on their back patio, and aim to create compost from their entire family’s food scraps.

Dan: I’m here with Linda and Mark; Linda was a classmate of mine.  They now have a worm box.  How big is the worm box?

Mark: 39 by 21.5 [inches].

D: And how deep is it?

M: The total depth of the worm box is about 17 in.

Worm bin with carpet on top

D: Ok and you guys are a family of three, right?

Linda: Yes.

D: And what kind of stuff do you put in here?

L: We put everything in here, everything but the meat?

D: Dairy? Yogurt?  Cheese?

L: We put cheese.  We haven’t put dairy or yogurt, but we haven’t needed to.

D: ok

L: And then all our greens.  Corn husks, egg shells.

D: Do you crush the egg shells?  Do you just put them in whole?

L: We do both.

D: What do you find works better?  Or at the end it’s all just little shards of eggshell anyway?

L: Well you know, I just started this in May, and we’ve just had one harvest so far, and I guess the eggshells were mostly broken up.  But you know, I may have had something to do with that as well.  I’ve gone in there and mashed them around.  I think it would be more ideal to break them up.  But sometimes I just throw them in and a lot of times I’ll find them all sleeping inside if I don’t break them up.

D: And you were saying it’s on your patio right now, and you moved it from the shade where it was most of the summer into the sun, and you insulated it?

L: It was always insulated.

D: OK, you insulated the top more?

L: We insulate the top at night.

D: Oh, just at night?

L: So what we’ve been doing if it is sunny out is leaving this [the top] open during the day, just letting it really  heat up, and then at night we’ve been taking this extra piece of insulation and putting it on top.  We’ve noticed that the temperature…

D: Oh, you have a thermometer?

L: Yes.

M: It’s good for about ten degrees.

L: Yes, it seems it’s been ten degrees, but we’re only measuring air temperature, we don’t have a soil thermometer yet.

D: Sure.  So it’s probably warmer in the soil.

L: Yes.

M: We’d like to think that it’s warmer in the soil.

L: I’m sure that it is.

M: The insulation sits up here, so this is dead air.  So, in theory, eventually it should equalize with whatever the soil temperature is.

L: No, it stays quite a bit warmer in the soil.

Open worm bin

D: How do you know it is good to ten?  I mean, we haven’t had a ten degree day?

L: No, no no, it’s a ten degree difference.

D: Oh, ok, a ten degree difference.

L: So if it is 34 outside, it is 44 inside.

D: Gotcha, oh, that’s great.

L: So the air temperature tends to stay about ten degrees warmer.  I suspect that the soil temperature is staying quite a bit warmer than that.

D: Sure, so you guys are planning to get a soil thermometer?

L: Yes.

D: Ok, wow, are you going to put this on a website somewhere, so people can monitor the worm bin’s temperature from anywhere in the world.

L: I’ll let you know what Mark’s plan is for the winter, if we don’t move it into the garage, or even if we do move it into the garage.  He has this idea of perhaps putting a little solar panel on top, and then….  Why don’t you describe?  Some kind of heater inside?

M: A resistive element.  You’d want to set it up so obviously it didn’t catch fire.  But I think a ten watt panel, maybe twenty watt panel, either hooked up on the fence and then wired in, or we just simply have the panel sitting up.  Because we get good sun in the wintertime here, and recline it back at a 45 degree angle there.  We’d get power off it for six to eight hours a day and we would dump that power through a resistive element.  If we wanted to get really fancy, we have it on a timer so that it actually feeds a battery during the day and then complete the circuit at night, from 8:00 o’clock at night to eight the next morning, it’s drawing power off the battery.

D: That’s very cool.

M: And then it repeats itself on a timer

L: It’s just kind of an idea.

D: Yea, holy cow

L: I don’t think it’s been implemented yet.

D: It seems like moving it to the garage might be an easier solution, but that would definitely be cooler.

L: Well if you saw our garage…

D: If you’re talking about that large of amount of dirt that’s not an insignificant amount of weight to move too, right?

L: It’s very heavy.

M: It’s heavy, I mean you can slide it on the deck easily with one person, but it would take two of us to actually, you know, move it into the garage. The garage would be safest because our garage is insulated and the temperature never drops below freezing there and Mother Nature and the worms do the rest.

D: For sure.

L: The other thing, Dan, I’m considering is, I’m considering getting another worm box for the garage, and I haven’t really determined which one to get – like the Can Of Worms…

D: Like a plastic worm box?

L: Or the Can Of Worms, you know the layered ones?

D: OK, so that’s one of the ones like multi… I don’t even know what they’re called, but the worms… they’re like layers?

L: You can put food on different layers

D: OK

L: We’re considering getting another one and then taking some of the worms out of here and then maybe using this as an experiment outside to see how it goes, but kind of  having those reserve of worms in there just in case. So, we haven’t made any final decisions yet.

D: And you don’t have to yet for a little while, right?

M: Right, we still have, I think another month or so before it gets critical. After those few chilly nights, and we can show you, we can open it up and we poked around and the worms were as happy as can be, wiggling and there were big balls of worms enjoying whatever it was…something.

D: OK

M: They seem to be pretty happy.

L: The other thing too, Dan, I noticed I started my worm box with some of your worms, a little less of Juliette’s worms.

D: Ok

L: A little tiny pinch of her worms and a good shovel full or 2 of your worms.  The worms are not able to keep up with everything at this point.

D: There is too much garbage

L: There is too much food

M: There sitting on the top you see there dining on some banana.

D: Yeah.

M: There are some really big [worms] in there; see them all?

D: Wow.

L: I think they’re really staring to multiply lately

D: They are happy.

M: They are a pretty happy bunch there.

L: Ooh, even the white ones.

D: Wow.

M: We are kind of happy with the setup now. It would be sweet if we could leave it out all year and if things got really bad we could put in a battery powered light or something like that.

L: Look at that.

D: Wow.

M: There is a whole eggshell, Dan. There’s a couple of them there. There even actually loaded with worms.

D: Cool. Do you guys add bedding regularly?

L: Oh yes, I filled it all the way to here with shredded paper.

D: Initially or recently?

L: Yes, both.

D: So when she says all the way to here its like an inch or 2 below the top of the bin.  It’s definitely fallen of 4 or 5 inches, I would say.

L: Yes, I do occasionally add [bedding] back on top.  We have had one harvest so far and we use the, what do you call it, use the split method?

D: Where you put all the food and bedding over on one side and then you put in new bedding and the food on that side, basically?

L: And that’s what we did, and so we had every thing completely moved over to here, the left side, and then I had new bedding here and I’d say 90 % of the worms went over I left it like that way for a month or two, and then we eventually took out the compost.   I picked through some it for worms and we weren’t sure if I got them all. I wanted to save some of the compost so I put it in our house plants and all of our outdoor plants and we just threw [the rest of it] into a pile over there because we are still going to use it for other applications. And then I came back and I added newspaper to both sides so now I’ve been trying to encourage the worms to go back over to this side and they are.

D: Yea, there they are.

L: And so they are coming and feeding on this side.

D: Yea a good chunk there.

L: Our worm box smelled fantastic toward the end of the last month.

D: I don’t think it smells bad, I mean it smells a little earthy.

L: It’s a little bit funky because we over fed them, but I think they’re starting to catch up now

D: OK

To be continued….

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