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.

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

• freezing all scraps
• fruit fly traps
• compost keepers

I don’t like the idea of freezing the scraps because

• my freezer is typically full
• the whole point of vermicomposting for me is to reduce my garbage and overall impact on the earth; freezing doesn’t fit with that

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?

Dan: Hi. I’m here with Michael who is a classmate of mine and he keeps worms and he’s going to talk to me about his worm keeping.  So, how’d you get started?

Michael: I got started from permaculture class.

D: Ok.  So you bought some from John.

M: I bought uh a 5 gallon pail from John Anderson and brought em home.

D: You took the whole pail?

M: Took the whole pail, yeah and when was that, May? I think it was our May class.

D: Yeah.

M: So in the 2nd weekend in May and it probably sat outside–it stopped freezing at this point–it sat outside for about 3 weeks just in the pail.

D: Because you just didn’t have time to deal with it.

M: Yeah, exactly, I didn’t have time to deal with it.  But I did get a worm bin together.  What I did was I saw a posting on Craigslist for a bunch of old wooden crates out in the back of a warehouse and I went over there and picked up a big wooden box that I found and I cut that down and retrofitted that into a worm box so it came out to be about 2 feet x 4 feet by 18 inches high.  And drilled a whole bunch of holes in it and I painted it.

D: Holes in the bottom?

M: I did a whole bunch of holes in the bottom, like quarter inch holes, and in the sides and a few in the top.

D: Ok.

M: Mostly I left the top sealed.  Actually, I left the entire top sealed, in the sides and the bottoms I put a ton of holes.  I just took my cordless drill and I put a whole bunch of holes in it.  I painted the box because it was just pressed board material. I painted it with an oil based paint on the outside to make it more weatherized and I put some hinges on it and a handle.  It kind of looks like a chest

D: We got those pictures, and it looks, you know, that’s nothing you wouldn’t expect around a house, you know it doesn’t look grungy at all.  You put it on the south facing side of the house.

Open worm box

M: The south facing side of our house is pretty shady in the summer time but in the winter time but in the winter it’ll get pretty direct sun, we turn it against the big stone wall.

D: Very nice.

M: So it’ll hopefully you know have good solar positioning.

D: Are you planning to do anything else in terms of temperature?

M: I mean I thought about throwing some straw bales up against the side of it just to give it a little insulation

D: Sure.

M: We’ll see if I get around to doing that. And we’ll see what it looks like on the inside. I mean, now it looks pretty good on the inside. It’s been cold lately but nonetheless there’s still a lot of activity in there it seems like.

D: It’s also in contact with the ground too right?

M: It actually about 2 inches above the ground, so there is airflow underneath.

D: Gotcha, ok.

M: So what I did is I took the worms and I just, when we moved in this house, there was a whole bunch of sawdust out in the yard, in the barn, so I piled all that up and dumped the worms in, dumped the sawdust on top of the worms.  I had a bunch of newspapers around, a big stack of them–I kinda just ripped them all up, threw them in, got some shredded paper from work, threw that in, leaves I had around.  There’s a lot of leaves on the property so I just put a big wheelbarrow load full of leaves, threw them in, that’s what I used for bedding, pretty much.

D: Ok.

M: And then I sort of followed some instructions I found somewhere, I don’t know if it was from John Anderson, or if it was from some handout we got in class, whatnot.  And we have about a 3 gallon pail we keep under the sink at our house.  And that is our compost bucket. So when that fills up I take that down to the bin and kind of remove some of the bedding, throw it on the ground, on part of the worm bin and cover it back up with the bedding a little bit.

Food scrap bucket

D: Do you cover the thing you have in your kitchen or?

M: No it’s open.

D: And how often does it get emptied, I mean you guys make pizza dough and whatnot?  Does it get flies? How often do you fill it up?

M: I think it fills about every 2-3 days.

D: Ok. So there’s not really enough time for flies.

M: No and it’s actually much more organic material than the worm bin can handle.  So we have a compost pile in addition.

D: How do you know, did you overload the worm bin at some point, or you just, based on the number of worms, and just your feeling?

M: Well, it’s sort of an intuitive thing, but I filled up, you know as the summer was going, as it was starting I put a pile of it [food scraps] in then I would sort of wait until the worms ate it, then I put another one in…

D: Oh, interesting, ok.

M: And I would kind of go like that, and then right about kind of the end of August, I just filled it all up, with just 4 of our bucketfuls in a row. And just filled the whole layer up with raw, organic material, food scraps.  And then mulched it really heavy with big flakes of straw bale.

D: And that’s what was still there.

M: That’s what’s there now [October]. So it’s taken them 2 months and they haven’t fully eaten that whole thing.  So I haven’t harvested any castings yet.  My idea was just to build up the population um as big as I could for now. And just let ‘em do their thing, and be worms in the box.  And hopefully they’ll multiply next spring. I want ‘em to be healthy enough to live through the winter, basically.

D: Sure.

M: So, next spring we can maybe start doing some different things with them, maybe take some worms out, put ‘em somewhere else, or get another box going… I don’t know.

D: Ok.

M: We’ll see. Sorry to disappoint anybody here!

D: Sure, sure.  So what kind of like stuff do you put in there, in the 3 gallon bucket, everything that you guys eat that’s organic that isn’t meat or dairy?

M: Yeah.

D: Ok.

M: Yeah so, Liz has only put paper stuff in there like tea bags or paper towels.

D: Junk mail?

M: No. No, none of that sort of thing, that stuff we just recycle.

D: Ok.

M: We just have so much organic waste, we don’t really need to bulk it up.  Let’s see, I was estimating I think we produce probably about 50 lbs a week of organic waste.

D: This is just the 3 of you, not counting any of the people downstairs?

M: No, I guess it’d be the whole household–4 adults and 1 baby.  So the baby doesn’t really eat anything yet.

D: [laughs]

M: Um, but really like I haven’t put anything in there in the last 6 weeks.

D: Interesting.

Liz: We eat enough vegetables for about six people.

D: Yeah I mean my guess is that since you guys have a vegetable garden in the back, you probably eat a lot more vegetables than the common person.

M: Yeah cause of our backyard garden plus Liz works on the farm, she brings home a lot of produce.

D: Sure.

M: And you know like the last 2 months have been like the hardest time.

D: Sure.

M: That’s when things are most abundant and we’ve been doing a lot of canning and processing so you know if we have tomatoes, we’ll cut a bunch of rotten parts out of tomatoes, we’ll have a whole bucket of tomatoes or something.

D: Sure, sure.

M: And I could fill up the worm bin easily.

D: So those have all gone to the secondary compost pile.

M: Right.

D: You haven’t done any worms with that stuff.  Ok.

M: Yeah, pretty much, we put a lot of corn husk into that bin just because corn was really in season.

D: That was the corn time.

M: Yeah.  And we threw corn cobs in there too just to see how they’d do.  Kind of curious if they’ll eat the corn cobs.
D: Yeah, the corn cobs I’ve got, I put in the worm bins, it was like they come out and they’re like somebody got every last kernel.  The cob is still there for sure. You guys planning to put food in there over the winter then?

M: Yeah maybe. Probably. Like I said, what I did was when it was starting to get cold, starting to get to the end of August, you can feel the weather changing, so really I just wanted to pack it full and and then…

D: Get em healthy…

M: And just really do a heavy layer of straw and that’s what we did. No one told me to do that; I just sort of thought that might be a good idea.

D: I mean the one thing that kind of jumps to my mind is, when worms are in their own waste, just like any other animal they have a harder time and I don’t know what the situation is down there but it looked like underneath the straw was pretty rich, pretty, you know, dark and not a lot of bedding, so I don’t know whether that’s good or bad for them.

Redworm closeup

M: Well, I don’t know either.  My hope was that they would eat some of the straw for bedding but I don’t know if that works very well.
D: I think so.  It’s pretty good as long as you dig it in.

M: You have to kind of mix it in a little.

D: Or you put the food in the straw, so you could split the straw.

M: Maybe I’ll just start dumping raw waste on top of the straw and then put another layer.

…

More on earthworms in the garden and how Michael got his worms in the next segment