A key component of the redworm bin system is the bedding. This is the carbon rich environment into which you will place the worms and the food scraps. (This entire post is probably of interest only to the home worm keeper–industrial worm operations have different needs.)
Bedding materials need to have the following qualities:
- carbon rich; if not, then hot composting and ammoniaifcation can occur
- capable of absorbing water; as the worms like to live in a wet environment
- relatively light; for moving the bin around
- cheap; you’ll go through a lot of bedding
I’ve used the following materials successfully:
- shredded paper and newspaper
- shredded cardboard
- leaves
- paper towels
- yard waste (dried grass clippings, etc)
Each of these has their pluses and minuses, but my current favorite is leaves. I typically will find 6-10 bags of leaves on the street in the fall. I gather those up and use them throughout the following summer. For an indoor bin, shredded paper might be better, as leaves introduce other insects and can mat.
Don’t be shy about adding more bedding. Redworms (and their attendant microorganisms) will not only eat your food scraps, they’ll also break down the bedding matter.
September 27th, 2009
On the_worm_bin, someone posted about using silage for worm food–does it make sense?
First, what is silage? Silage is a fermented grain, usually (always?) corn, that is often used to feed animals over the winter. The fermentation process preserves the nutrition for longer than fresh corn would keep. However, silage will not keep forever. For more on silage, see these pages (at the top of Google’s search results): Corn Silage, Silage Fermentation and Preservation,
Someone asked: “Has anyone had experience in feeding their worms silage? I have a dairy operator friend that has some slightly spoiled silage that he is willing to allow me to have.”
There were a variety of answers. Someone suggested experimenting, and putting some on a location that the worms could either migrate towards or away from. In general, this is always a good practice when feeding new kinds of food to worms. They’re smart enough to run from what isn’t good, so give them the opportunity to do so! This advice was seconded by another member.
I found some links of interest. Here’s someone using silage, along with manure and hay, and precomposting it first: “RTS began accepting and actively pre-composting approximately five tons of separated dairy manure solids and off-specification dairy-cow feed (hay and corn silage) per day.”
Here’s an article talking about using silage as bedding: “Fourth grade students helped a parent volunteer build five worm bins, which they set on concrete blocks. To test the effectiveness of different beddings, they placed shredded newspaper in two bins, pulverized cardboard in another, old corn silage in the fourth bin, and composted horse and cow manure in the last bin. Of these beddings, the manure worked best, because red wigglers love manure. Newspaper also made a fine bedding, but dry cardboard was a hassle to handle; when it was moistened, it got too soggy.”
I also made some points about the pH of silage; according to this, it has a pH of 4.3 (although I imagine the pH depends on where the silage is in the fermentation process). Worms like more neutral environments: “Redworms do best if the pH is around 7.0, however, they can tolerate levels from 4.2 to 8.0 or higher. Lime (calcium carbonate) may be mixed with the bedding material to correct acidity or to maintain a more
favorable pH. Pulverized edd shells also correct acidity. (Warning! Use only limestone and never hydrated lime. The wrong kind of lime will kill the worms!)”
Of course, all the links in the world aren’t worth real world experience. Someone else said: “When I use silage as feed for my goats, the upper portion of my silage drums are mostly spoiled and these go direct to my wormbins. I have not had any problem with doing that.”
So, in short, it appears that silage can be a worm feedstock. If you are a home worm keeper, this probably isn’t of much interest to you, because if you were offered silage, it probably would be spoiled and would come by the truckload 
. But if you’re in commercial vermicomposting, perhaps you can find a farmer willing to give you free worm food!
September 17th, 2009
Via an article in the Summit Daily News about getting your garden ready for winter (summers are short up in Summit County!), I found out about a vermicomposting workshop happening up there.
If you want to learn more about composting with worms, attend the Conservation Center’s Compost Tea and Vermicomposting Workshop Sept. 16 from 5:30 to 7:30 at our office in Frisco. The workshop is $10 and you can pre-register by calling 668-5703.
The full article has more steps to take as your garden winds down this year. Here in Boulder, we have a few more weeks until our average first frost.
September 11th, 2009
Boulder County Resource Conservation is putting on three free recycling workshops in November. While these aren’t worm centric, I thought they might be of interest to readers.
LAFAYETTE
Compost Workshop (FREE)
Thursday, November 5, 2009, 6:30-8:30 pm
Lafayette Public Library
775 W Baseline Rd, Lafayette (located at 287 & Baseline)
LONGMONT
Compost Workshop (FREE)
Saturday, November 7, 2009, 10am -12pm
Boulder County Parks & Open Space
5201 St Vrain Rd, Longmont
For a map see: <http://www.bouldercounty.org/openspace/contact_page.htm>
BOULDER
Compost Workshop (FREE)
Saturday, November 14, 2009, 10am -12pm, for America Recycles Day
Boulder County Recycling Center
1901 63rd St., Boulder
RSVP to Jennifer Bohn (space is limited)
Feel free to RSVP to Jennifer at jbohn (at) boulder county (dot) org, or give her a call at 720 564 2242 if you have questions.
September 8th, 2009
Via the Pueblo Chieftain, I found this article about a recycling village planned for 40 acres outside of Pueblo. The folks behind the whole village concept are at the Gaia Institute Wellness Center. Currently, the focus is on composting with redworms. They are being used to compost sewage sludge:
State health officials and the city of Pueblo have given a green light to using sewer sludge as part of the diet of worms.
…
The worms eat through about 2 tons of composted garbage, paper, dirt and sludge in a little more than two weeks…
This part of the project is called ‘Happy Worm Herders’, and they seem to have an informative site (though their ‘vermicomposting basics’ appear to be lifted directly from Wikipedia).
September 8th, 2009
“The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms”, by Amy Stewart, is 200 pages of fun for any home worm keeper. While Stewart’s home worm keeping, including her own journey and experiences, inform the book and pop up throughout the text, the focus is larger. Starting with Darwin, Stewart covers a broad swath of worm science. The writing is easy to follow, refreshing, and interesting. At least if you’re interested in worms. However, as the subtitle indicates, if you aren’t already, you may be amazed by what they can do! These lowly creatures, with hardly any organs at all, are responsible for creating soil. And, as the book Dirt showed http://bouldervermicomposting.com/2008/12/31/book-review-dirt/ , soil is the foundation of human civilization.
Stewart does a great job of describing some of the characters in the world of worms. Sam Jones http://www.nhm.ku.edu/inverts/sam_james/ started out studying grasslands, but ended up “one of the world’s leading earthworm taxonomists”. Exotic species of worms are now his passion, to the point of creating a “Worms of the Philippines” poster (I search for this online, but was unable to find a reference). She also goes to Ohio and talks to Clive Edwards http://entomology.osu.edu/personnelsingle.asp?strid=180 , a professor who’s done a lot of experiments on the efficacy of worm castings. Edwards on vermicompost: “We found that 2 to 4 tons [of worm castings] per acre [of cornfield] increased yields, and also reduced crop loss due to disease and damaged fruit. Not only that but there was a residual benefit that lasted up to four years.” Scott Subler, a former coworker of Edwards, founded a worm composting company, which unfortunately doesn’t appear to be around anymore. He is interviewed talking about vermicomposting dairy cow manure with an industrial grade worm “reactor”. He has even “gone on QVC to sell his product and spread the message about the benefits of worm castings”. Subler has found that “the inputs [to vermicomposting] are not the problem… It’s the output that’s a problem”; that has certainly been what I’ve found in my readings on large-scale vermiculture.
I don’t want to give the impression that Stewart focuses on people entirely. On the contrary, each chapter is devoted to a specific aspect of worm knowledge or history. She discusses the business of raising worms for sale, spends a page or two on the biological history of worms, writes about how she harvests and uses her worm castings, and covers different types of worms. She even talks about the difference between red wigglers and redworms (they’re different species). Stewart even visits a sewage plant in California, where her uncle is working on a pilot project to use worms to process biosolids (I didn’t see any mention of vermicomposting on the facility website http://www.cityofpacifica.org/depts/wwt/caleracreek/about_the_facility.asp so I guess the pilot project didn’t work out).
Stewart’s book covers wide ground, from Darwin’s studies of worms to modern use of worms as biodetectors, from giant worms in Australia to the destruction of the Minnesota forests, due to non-native worms (more on that here http://bouldervermicomposting.com/2009/01/22/invasive-earthworms-paper/ ). She also has a very useful epilogue where she discusses how to get started keeping worms, a two-page bibliography full of interesting books that talk about worms, and an appendix full for resources, from newsletters to websites to worm bins. The book was published in 2004, but many of the resources listed are still around.
All in all, a fantastic, fun book. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.
“The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms”, by Amy Stewart, is 200 pages of fun for any home worm keeper. While Stewart’s home worm keeping, including her own journey and experiences, inform the book and pop up throughout the text, the focus is larger. Starting with Darwin, Stewart covers a broad swath of worm science. The writing is easy to follow, refreshing, and interesting. At least if you’re interested in worms. However, as the subtitle indicates, if you aren’t already, you may be amazed by what they can do! These lowly creatures, with hardly any organs at all, are responsible for creating soil. And, as the book “Dirt” showed, soil is the foundation of human civilization.
Stewart does a great job of describing some of the characters in the world of worms. Sam Jones started out studying grasslands, but ended up “one of the world’s leading earthworm taxonomists”. Exotic species of worms are now his passion, to the point of creating a “Worms of the Philippines” poster (I search for this online, but was unable to find a reference). She also goes to Ohio and talks to Clive Edwards, a professor who’s done a lot of experiments on the efficacy of worm castings. Edwards on vermicompost:
We found that 2 to 4 tons [of worm castings] per acre [of cornfield] increased yields, and also reduced crop loss due to disease and damaged fruit. Not only that but there was a residual benefit that lasted up to four years.
Scott Subler, a former coworker of Edwards, founded a worm composting company, which unfortunately doesn’t appear to be around anymore. He is interviewed talking about vermicomposting dairy cow manure with an industrial grade worm “reactor”. He has even “gone on QVC to sell his product and spread the message about the benefits of worm castings”. Subler has found that “the inputs [to vermicomposting] are not the problem… It’s the output that’s a problem”; that has certainly been what I’ve found in my readings on large-scale vermiculture.
I don’t want to give the impression that Stewart focuses on people entirely. On the contrary, each chapter is devoted to a specific aspect of worm knowledge or history. She discusses the business of raising worms for sale, spends a page or two on the biological history of worms, writes about how she harvests and uses her worm castings, and covers different types of worms. She talks about the difference between red wigglers and redworms (they’re different species). Stewart even visits a sewage plant in California, where her uncle is working on a pilot project to use worms to process biosolids (I didn’t see any mention of vermicomposting on the facility website so I guess the pilot project didn’t work out).
Stewart’s book covers a lot of ground, from Darwin’s studies of worms to modern use of worms as biodetectors, from giant worms in Australia to the destruction of the Minnesota forests, due to non-native worms (more on that here). She also has a very useful epilogue where she discusses how to get started keeping worms, a two-page bibliography full of interesting books that talk about worms, and an appendix full for resources, from newsletters to websites to worm bins. The book was published in 2004, but many of the resources listed are still around.
All in all, a fantastic, fun book. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.
September 7th, 2009
