Boulder Vermicomposting

End of The Human Hair Composting Experiment

March 2nd, 2010

It’s been a while since I checked in on my human hair + paper towels + negligence worm bin.  Here’s part 1, part 2 and part 3. To review, I wanted to see if worms could survive and/or thrive on a diet of just human hair (gathered from a barber) and wet paper towels (from an office bathroom), and minimal effort on my part.

About a month after part 2, due to some subtle pressure, I moved the worm bin outside.  After that, the only maintenance I did was to move the worm bin from flagstone to a garden bed when the weather got cold (so the worms had the option to find greener pastures, so to speak).

After a year of almost total neglect, the worms weren’t doing so well.  I looked through the bin, and only saw a couple of them.  I was also moving, so I added the contents of the hair worm bin to my large outside bin:

Human hair added to worm bin

You can see that the hair is partially decomposed, but definitely, 1.5 years after I started the experiment, not totally converted to castings, even though the environment looked pretty worm friendly (not too wet, not too dry, dark).

This leads me to the conclusion that pure human hair is not a good feedstock for worms.  I think it clumps up too much, has difficulty absorbing water, and break down quickly (“[m]icroorganisms [need to] soften the food before worms will eat it”).  However, I have added hair into my larger worm bin and had it get processed fairly quickly, so I think some hair is fine to add (for example, the hair seems to have disappeared from my outside bin, based on a brief inspection).  Just don’t overdo it.

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