This is the final part of my interview with Linda and Mark, home worm keepers. Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.
M: So, Dan, what’s your educated eye tell you about our worm box?
D: I think your worms are doing fantastic. I love the shredded newspapers bedding. I guess you guys have a regular office shredder you put your stuff through?
M: Yes.
D: Is [the box] insulated on the bottom?
M: No, there is no insulation on the bottom.
D: It was kind of a worry, right?
M: It’s a compromise, right? You have to have ventilation but at the same time I didn’t want it to turn into Swiss cheese having holes all around we wouldn’t have a prayer of keeping it warm other than moving it indoors. I think, with this setup, the way it sits right now, we should be good for about 8 months out of the year. In other words, November, December, January, February, and sometime in March, probably go back outside, because usually by March were done with the sub-zero.
L: And, I’m considering maybe putting bales of hay around it or moving onto plastic. If we don’t we need to get something to catch the worm juice that comes out of the bottom. It just goes down there now.
D: It didn’t stain your deck, or anything, it looks like.
M: Well it sat there from day one.
D: The only thing I would say is I would have the whole thing covered with bedding, I wouldn’t have any food on top. And when the leaves fall [you'll have a] source of like a ton of bedding. It might keep the smell down a little bit. I think that’s more of a difference of opinion, and like you said, if you guys aren’t bothered by this right now. I guess that’s kind of what the carpet serves.
L: In general, I think part of the smell is because by the time we get [the food scraps] out there [they are nasty]. We should rinse [the compost keeper] out.
M: Its fermenting.
D: Yea, well plenty of anaerobic activity happening, right?
L: In general, this box hasn’t really smelled anything other than earthy.
D: Even now it doesn’t smell. I mean it smells a little bit funky because you stirred it all up.
M: The nice thing about the carpet is that its [covering the smell].
L: And I usually do cover it. It’s just that they have eaten it down so much lately, they‘ve eaten it all away so now I need to start saving papers again
M: But fortunately, as Dan pointed out, fall is coming and we are getting a lot of leaves. There’s an Oak tree in the front yard…. Those leaves are bigger than my hand and there brown and so I could see us laying down a nice [layer] of oak leaves
L: Yea, that was my plan. Well actually I’ve read if you have the insulation in the winter you want it filled up to the top.
D: Oh, interesting. So there’s no dead space. No air.
L: I don’t know, it just said to fill the bedding. I just recently read that.
M: Well it is interesting because air is an excellent insulator if it’s still. That’s the trick – it you can keep it still it’s a wonderful insulator. If you can’t then maybe having something like an oak leaf, which I don’t know what the heat transfer coefficient is through an oak leaf. Probably less than moving air. So you can go ahead and do that. And I’m guessing the worms would probably love a few oak leaves
L: Well, they’ll love it but it takes forever, but its really hard to break down. I have given them oak leaves before. They do love them. They have access to maple leaves and then the apple leaves. We’ll probably mix them up
D: You said you wanted to experiment with this one. Are you going to have something in reserve? Would you just experiment in terms of just leave them out over the winter and see if they survive?
L: Well that was my plan and maybe start an additional bin. We haven’t decided if we are going to bring this one in or start a second one. How do yours work out?
D: They survived last winter just fine. Although maybe that’s why they aren’t as happy as yours is I take much less care of them than you guys do, I think. I don’t harvest them. I pull out casting compost when I want but I don’t do anything else to make an excellent environment for them. I haven’t really put in much bedding; I put in leaves but that’s about it.
M: So, we could probably slack off, a little bit, on our worm care taking duties and still have reasonable compost .
D: I think you could, yea. I think you guys right now are maximizing probably the amount of compost you’re going to get.
L: I really like the idea. I really want to have the maximum amount of compost because it does go quickly. There’s a big yard.
M: In addition to putting it in a garden, Linda went around our house and she gave our houseplants some samples. They seem to enjoy it.
L: So, yes at this point normally I would have a cover [layer of bedding in the bin]. Normally this would be covered with another layer.
D: Because I’ve read that some people throw all the food that there going to put in the worm bin in the freezer because it kills flies and after it defrosts easier for the worms to eat but you guys just throw it in there; and cover it up.
M: Cover it up; [the keeper has a] charcoal filter; cap and that’s it. Yea, there’s no freezing of it and this is the end result.
Food scraps bucket
L: Can you explain that again?
D: Now I haven’t done it myself but they say they have something like your gallon container in the freezer they just throw stuff in there; it freezes and kills any fruit flies or other kinds of bugs that might be in there.
L: That’s a great idea for the summer – fruit flies are a problem.
D: Yea, let me know how it goes. What have you found most of your knowledge from? Just experimenting or have you read books? Or, have you called John and asked some questions?
L: Not yet. I thought about it.
D: What books have you read that you found were useful?
L: I’ve just read our handout and then the “Worms eat my garbage.”
D: That’s the little book by Mary Applehoff?
L: Yeah. I just recently read that though. So I would say I read 2 handouts, the one from John and the other one from our class. And that’s how I got started. We used John’s handout as a guideline to build the bin. And I did do some searches; Google searches.
D: Overall it’s been a positive experience, it sounds like? You’re super happy with it?
L: Oh yea, super happy. I’d like to get my kid’s daycare to start doing a worm bin.
D: Yea, you think that’s a possibility?
L: I think it would be because they just recently started a compost for all of their paper. There was someone I spoke to about it; they were super excited. They are not presently working there anymore; they’re on leave. So, I need to bring it up again.
D: If I was interested in introducing worm composting into a club I’m a member of or anything like that, how are you going about doing that? Are you saying I will provide the worms; I will provide the expertise or are you saying you guys should do this or, I mean, how are you approaching that?
L: I haven’t approached it yet.
D: How are you thinking about approaching it?
L: I would probably provide the worms and expertise.
D: OK, and expect them to provide the box and maintain the box after you taught them.
L: Yea, I would be willing to check on it.
D: Sure, add one more worm box to check on, that’s cool.
L: Yea, I would babysit them for 6 months.
D: OK. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve put it here, do you think? Has it pretty much all been pretty standard stuff you get out of the grocery? Have you put in any cuttings from other plants around your garden or anything that sticks out in your mind; jeans like John did?
L: I did throw some jeans in, or cloth. I’m trying to remember. It was with the first batch. And, I think what I found is that it was whatever I threw away it must have been partially synthetic because it wasn’t eaten and I had to remove it. Maybe it was some kind of a bag. That was the weirdest thing I’ve put in so far. I considered putting in my daughter’s leather shoes.
D: Oh, that’s interesting.
L: It was just last night. I’m like “should we throw these in to the worm bin?”
D: Because she is done with the shoes.
L: There are some little holes in them.
D: Interesting, wow! You should; it would be interesting to see how long it would take. That is natural fibers, right. Bury it at the bottom and see how long it lasts. What advice you would give to anybody who is thinking about doing one of these? You guys did not start small; this is a very large bin. It was quite a bit of commitment. How much money was it to build this?
L: Scrap wood and then a $3 plank from Resource 2000.
D: So it wasn’t a ton of money.
L: We even had the insulation.
M: It was a half day of mine on my chop saw.
D: Still, this is not starting small. You are definitely jumping in with both feet; would you advise that for other people or do you think that based on your experience you might start with a smaller bin or a commercial bin?
L: Everyone that I have spoken to that has a small bin I think they feel somewhat limited; at least the folks that I have spoken with.
D: They are [saying] “I can’t put as much in there as I want; it smells”.
L: And “I can’t feed them all of our kitchen scraps”. So, my goal in this was to [compost all our waste] and I think this worm box will support it as soon as we get enough worms in here and I think it’s getting close. I would like to be able to put 100% of our scraps in here and have them consume it. That would be my goal. My recommendation is if you have the motivation and you have someone to build you a box I would say go big. I would call this a medium box; you call this a large box?
D: What’s the square footage of the surface, because that’s the thing that tells you how big it is, right? It’s not so much how deep it is.
M: The square footage of the box is … (measuring) … let’s say it’s 20” x 40”; that would be 800 square inches; … its about 5 square feet.
D: My understanding is that when I was building my first worm bin they said 8 inches is deep enough or 12 inches is deep enough. You can have it deeper, but I think once you get past 3 feet they don’t go down there; they don’t go down below a meter. But, to get back to your original question, I don’t know whether this is big or small. I haven’t seen a ton of worm bins; if it requires 2 people to move it, it seems like it moves more towards the bigger size. As you’ve said you have found that it doesn’t eat all of your kitchen waste for 3 people. Did you guys say you eat at home a lot?
L: We’ve been eating at home a lot over the last year.
D: Would you say that is 20 meals a week; is that 10 meals a week?
L: We’ve been going out maybe once a week
M: Once a week we go out for dinner. So, if you believe that you have 3 meals a day, which isn’t always the case, that will be 21 meals a week, we probably are good for 15 or 16 meals easy, at home
L: And we often skip one meal. We’ll eat breakfast & dinner or lunch & dinner. But [our daughter] eats; she’ll eat 3 meals a day. I think this box, from everything I’ve read, this box should be able to support all of our scraps. And then it’s just a matter of the worms doubling and doubling and I think we’re getting there. I think we have the most amount of worms that we’ve had.
M: I think there was a little bit of a set back when we actually harvested. They didn’t quite bounce back as much as we thought. But, looking today Dan, this is the best I’ve seen the worms in a while. Easily since end of August, when we came back from our trip on the east coast, because we had that worm compost in that blue cooler there for a long time because we were trying to separate. But, anyway I think they are bouncing back now and so we should be able to give them more food at this point.
L: I have a question, Dan. This one right here which is bigger than the other small ones, is that a baby worm?
D: On this right here? I don’t think so, I think that’s a different type of worm, because you can see those are mites. I bet you it’s a different kind of worm. Small worms I’ve seen look red.
L: OK, because he said in our class these could be white.
D: Well, John obviously has a lot more expertise than I do; the ones I’ve seen that were small were about that size but they had a pointy tip and were red.
L: We have a good variety of other things in here.
D: You have started with what Juliette and I each gave you a quart of vermicompost – not just worms.
L: I look at this and I see they’ve definitely multiplied several times. I guess this is a large box considering we probably started out with just a little tiny amount yea, and it was compost, it wasn’t pure worms.
M: It wasn’t just pure worms.
L: I’m guessing we probably started out with maybe a hundred worms?
D: It’s a thousand worms a pound, roughly. It depends on the size of the worms. So, yea, maybe a couple hundred worms.
L: Yea, that’s what I think. Maybe two hundred worms at the most. There were more worms in this stuff – in your compost than there were in Juliette’s.
D: Sweet!
L: I think she picked through them.
D: What’s the most [time] you guys actually have left the worms without doing anything?
L: I was gone for 3 weeks.
M: During the 3 weeks you were gone, I was gone one of those weeks myself, so nothing happened during that week.
L: These are pretty self containing.
D: Apart from what you said, putting some food in, changing the bedding once in a while, and making sure the initial setup is ok.
L: Occasionally I do add water.
D: Oh really, you watered them?
L: The first load that we did, the first box, I never really had to add water. I almost never added water. But, on this one we’ve had a few drier scraps. The cornhusks are on the drier side.
D: So the food content isn’t as wet.
L: So that’s were I’ve been adding a little bit of water. If the food content is wet then I find I don’t need to.
D: Have you guys experimented with worm tea at all; the compost tea?
L: I haven’t.
M: We pondered about it because it’s a challenge to collect it. I want to try to get some trays, like some old baking trays.
L: Well no, worm tea is when you take the compost out and you let it sit in a pot of water, and then you just use the water.
D: Actually, I did a little research on that because I was confused myself. The stuff that comes out of the worm bin is actually called ‘leachate’ which doesn’t really have any benefit.
L & M: Really!
D: This is what these books that I was reading say.
L: It seems like it would be the same.
D: If you take the castings and put it in water, that’s much more beneficial than the leachate.
L: The couple times I did water it pretty well and it started to pour out, I figured that was worm tea. So, the reason why I haven’t is because, since we have a medium size box it’s been just as easy to use the compost and I figured if you water it each time its going to run through the compost then the plants will end up with the same benefit or greater, so I haven’t done it just out of laziness. However, when I recently read that when you use the compost you can bring things into the house. Have you ever considered that?
D: Of course, makes sense. Because that compost is crawling with other critters, for sure.
L: The stuff I looked at seemed to be fairly inert. After reading that I might [reconsider doing it indoors].
D: This is right out of “Worms can eat my Garbage” but the other thing I’ve read is that you can cook [the castings] or have it in plastic.
L: It seems like that would kill things that you might want.
D: I guess cooking would kill the bacteria as opposed to being in water probably wouldn’t kill the bacteria.
June 9th, 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
