Dan: What piqued your interest in vermiculture?

Sharon: Actually, it was Jennifer Craig (Durango Compost) whom I met at the Farmer’s market in Durango a few years ago, and I was tired of buying expensive worm casting soil for my garden.  Now I have tea, and great compost.

D: How many bins do you have running?

S: I have one huge bin… a commercial metal bin that holds about 16 pounds of worms.  It has a heater, but it is not adequate for our cold winters (it has to be outside on the dock at school)  so I had to use rope lights wound around it with a thermal wrap over that.  It worked great; however it is now difficult to regulate the heat factor, so I am wrapping it with reflective material. Unfortunately, there is no other spot.

D: How have the kids reacted?

S: They think it is very cool!  Of course, some of them don’t want to touch the worms, but I make them, and then they are ok.  Now, since we are turning over soil in the garden, they bring the biggest earthworms they can find and are very proud of themselves.  Who can figure?

D: How have the parents reacted?

S: Great!  I am holding a workshop in April to show them how to make their own worm bins so I’ll let you know how many are really interested.

D: Is it in the classroom, or in a different space?  Is it inside?  How do you handle odors/fruit flies (if you have them)?

S: It is on the dock.  I had them in an empty room in 5 different bins, but fruit flies were an issue.  No one was patient enough to see if the neem oil would work, so we took them to the big bin, where they are not a bother.  I will be spraying neem oil soon to that bin.  The bin odor is not an issue, as we must be feeding them the right amount because it doesn’t smell bad…just earthy.

D: How much do you feed the worm bins a week?  How many worms did you start with?  Do you feed them mostly food scraps?  What do you use for bedding?

S: Right now we are feeding them about 4 lbs. of food a week, mostly raw food scraps and coffee grounds.  Our bedding is shredded paper and newspaper.  We started with 5 lbs of worms, but given our data, we think there are about 8 lbs. now.

D: How do you harvest the compost?

S: It is mechanical—a handle rotates and it comes out the bottom.  I don’t like it as well as our smaller bins (we had layers of screening with bedding and food, and they worked their way up, and mostly compost was on the bottom.

D: How much time/week do you (or your class) spend maintaining the bins?

S: We take the temperature daily and feed once a week, so no more than 10 minutes a day.  Sometimes we do data collecting which will be a class period.

D: What overall lessons are you trying to convey with the worm bins?

I received an email from Jim McIntyre at Covered Bridge Organic, in Ohio.  He’s another worm bin vendor, but with a slightly different take.  His focus is on outside worm bins, as well as hot composting.  Currently, he is running trials on keeping worms outside during the Ohio winter, using a two shell composting system, with leaves or other insulation in between.  I was able to ask him a few questions about his experiences.

Dan: How long have you been doing composting?  How long have you been doing worm composting?

Jim: I’ve been composting, though not continuously, for 20 years. Began with windrow composting of dairy and horse manures used in growing produce as a member of Covered Bridge Organic Farms Coop. The Wishing Well composter I developed is a spin-off from the ag coop. At a recycling trade show nine years ago I bought the working display model from a vermiculture exhibitor and kept it working in the basement, then in the garage when we moved.

We’re an independent distributor of the smaller Soilsaver Classic compost bin along with our larger Wishing Well design. When I needed more room in the garage two years ago, I dumped the worm bin contents into a Soilsaver that was set up outside by the back door. As fall came, the worm bin’s indoor space was gone. I had to figure a way to leave those poor worms out in the cold. I made a blanket of leaves stuffed between the larger Wishing Well bin surrounding the Soilsaver containing the worms. Easy, an off the shelf fix, or so I hoped. After a cold northern Ohio winter, I opened the bottom gate on the Soilsaver to find hundreds of worms in the very first shovel full.

D: Why do you prefer outdoor worm composting to indoor worm composting?

J: Worms belong outside. No flies, odor, chance of spillage while moving,  floor space taken up, nor mess on the floor while cleaning.

D: What are possible upsides/downsides of outdoor vermicomposting that people should consider?

J: The two factors to affect outdoor vermicomposting are weather and volume. Temperature extremes need to be avoided: summer’s heat and winter’s cold. The volume of the bin’s contents needs to be of sufficient mass to allow for migration of the worms to a favorable environment.

D: What particular challenges of indoor vermicomposting does outdoor vc overcome?

J: As above–Worms belong outside. No flies, odor, chance of spillage while moving,  floor space taken up, nor mess on the floor while cleaning.

D: How do you use your vermicompost/castings?

J: Mid-spring, as weather warms, I remove the Wishing Well enclosure from around the Soilsaver worm bin, open the bottom access doors and begin to shovel out the finished material onto a 2 foot by 3 foot piece of plywood placed over  a wheelbarrow. As worms avoid light by migrating into the pile, the top layers are pealed into the wheelbarrow until remaining worm mass is saved. Continue to harvest, then place the worms back into the bin. Wheel barrow contents is then used in spring planting.

D: How is surrounding a soil saver with a wishing well and stuffing leaves between superior to using hay bales or bags of leaves?

J: Makes a more visually attractive outdoor appliance that is easy to assemble. Offers an insulated winter worm composter that can be separated into a spring through fall yard waste composter, the Wishing Well, and a separate worm composter, the Soilsaver, for 9 months of the year.  Leaves are free, hay bales can be hard to find and costly in urban areas.

D: Any advice to starting worm composters?

J: Worms are not tender creatures with exotic needs. They can ingest a wide range of organic materials, survive in a temperature range from 30′s up to almost 100F, migrate to find food, avoid light and pH extremes. Composting worms are native to Europe, and have been introduced  to every other continent except  the Antarctic. They’re hardy creatures which are native all over the world.  Keep them outside where they belong.

D: As far as your business goes, have you found people receptive to worm composting?  Is outdoor hot composting an alternative or a first step towards worm composting?

J: This is the second year of field trials. Although I’ve found much supportive data on the Net, we’ve not yet developed a product package. Outdoor hot composting during the summer in the Wishing Well could be a preliminary step to worm composting in the Soilsaver during winter.

I like that she shares a couple of tips for dealing with fruit flies, talks about how to deal with John Anderson’s worm buckets (after she raves about the quality of his worms) and keeps her worms in her dining room!

Dan: When did you start worm farming?

Melanie: I started worm composting (I like that term instead of farming, I compost with my worms and do not grow them to sell, etc) with an indoor bin about 7 years ago.  We have always lived in an apartment or condo, so it works well for us.

D: How many people does your worm bin support?  What percentage of your food waste would you say goes in there?

M: Our worm bin just supports 2 adults, can’t do much more than that.  I’d estimate that at least 50% of our food waste goes in there (except for the last few months…see below), but that is a rough estimate.

D: Any factors to worry about in Colorado?

M: Not if you are doing it indoors.  I do a bin inside my house and it works great year round.  The biggest worry I would say is to get worms grown in Colorado and not mail-ordered from California…I find the Colorado worms do better overall.

D: Where did you get your worms from?

M: John Anderson, the “worm man” in the Fort Collins area.  I only buy my worms from him because they are hardy (they live outside year round) and they are used to Colorado and all that means in terms of soil, weather, etc.  And he, or a friend, often come to the Boulder area so its easy to hook with him and get them without having to drive up and get them.

D: Cool.  I visited his worm farm in April and it is quite a place.  Did you buy the 5 gallon bucket?  If so, did you separate out the worms from the vermicompost they were in (I realize this was 7 years ago, so no worries if you don’t remember it)?

M: This weekend [this was a few weeks ago], I will be separating the worms out, yes, as I get mine going again (Have them in my bucket from him, ready to go!).  I like to spread the contents of the bucket out on a tarp, and do a mix of hand sorting them out and tossing them into the new bin (on top of the newspaper bedding I already put in there).  Then, besides the worms, I add back to my bin about 2 inches or so what they were living in, the castings, (to get all the babies, etc, too)  The rest of the castings left in the bucket from John is just fabulous worm castings that I will use to make compost tea and use selectively in my garden (again, because its valuable precious stuff).

D: What do you do with your worms/castings/vermicompost?

M: I have used the castings mostly on my garden plot.  They are a precious commodity, since not a lot is produced and I have a large garden.  I have also used mine to make a compost tea.  The worms I have used to start a second bin at work.

D: Have you done any experiments on how worm castings help your garden?  Have you noticed how it helps the plants?  How much do you put on plants, and how often?

M: I have not done any experiments with this.  However, I find that worm castings is the best stuff for plants, better than even regular backyard compost.  Since worm bins don’t produce a lot of worm castings, I use mine mostly in the spring and mix it into the soil before I plant.  If I get some out when its not that time, I save it for the spring when I’m adding compost to my garden soil or use it to make a compost tea (great to apply anytime to plants!)

D: Any particular challenges to keeping worms?

M: I think the biggest challenges are overfeeding, and this leads to the second challenge, fruitflies.  I think because its so easy to toss things in (our’s at home is located about 10 feet from where we are chopping veggies, etc) that there is a tendency to overfeed the worms, plus you start to see food scraps as something valuable that you don’t want to throw away, even if the worms already have enough food.  This extra means fresh food is left sitting on top of the pile in the worm bin for a while and so this attracts fruitflies.  Easy enough to deal with, but still annoying to have them buzz out at you when you open the lid.

D: so, if you try to avoid over feeding, what do you do with the extra scraps you can’t feed the worms?  How much does a week’s worth of scraps weigh?  How do you deal with fruitflies?

M: The extra scraps we have put into a ziploc bag (gallon size) in the freezer to add to the compost collection at our garden plot ([at the] community gardens).  Also, sometimes, they do just go into the trash (I know, bad!).  A week’s scraps are about 4 pounds or so, I’d guess.  As for getting rid of fruitflies, we typically just take the bin outside, and open the lid and let most fly out and away.  Let the bin sit out, lid off for 10 minutes or so, and that gets rid of most of them.  To help avoid the fruitflies, we often nuke in the microwave whatever we are putting in (banana peels, veggie trimmings, whatever) for 1 minutes.  That brings it past the fresh point enough that the fruit flies aren’t interested.  It just really works.

D: Where is your worm box?

M: In our dining room, on hardwood floor, underneath our antique hutch and just about 2 feet away from our table.  It is fun to scare our guests and say “Did you know we have worms in the house?” and point to the box.  They often think the worms are going to jump out of there or something at them.  Makes for a good opener on educating that they can do worm composting, too.

D: Any pictures of it?  What does it look like?  Where did you buy it?  How big is it?

M: No pictures of it, as I am just getting it going again.  My husband kind of went overboard adding things to it and it became too wet and fruitfly-ey even for us. That was several months ago and we are just now getting it going again (I know, bad me!).  However, what we are using is a 10 gallon roughneck Rubbermaid tote, bought at McGuckins for $12 or something.  It is about 8″ H x 30″ wide x 12″ deep.  Has a tight fitting lid.  I have drilled the holes in the lid and upper part of side. Wouldn’t buy [a commercial system] as they are expensive (like $100+) and in my experience, these homemade ones just work much better.

D: What do you feed your worms?

M: Mostly fruit & veggie scraps, egg shells.  We have found that they don’t like herb trimmings.  One time while making pesto, I tried to put the herb stems in the worm bin and by 2 days later, all the worms were on the ceiling of my worm bin (to get away from the herbs).  Once I took the herb stems out, they were fine.  That is something I love about worms, they will tell you if they don’t like something (by crawling away from it).

D: Raw eggshells, or just egg shells from cooked eggs?

M: I would feed them both kinds, doesn’t matter!

D: Any advice for new worm farmers?

M: Feed your worms gently at the beginning…we are usually enthusiastic to start and we tend to overfeed them right away, which leads to fruitflies, which leads to frustration on your part.  Better to underfeed than to overfeed in general.

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.

Linda: The last time everything smelled great by the time we harvested. Actually, most of the time we’ve had the worm box it smelled great, but this time we’ve really been feeding the worms a lot, although I think there starting to catch up.  Actually they’ve eaten quite a bit. And on this side I’m doing an experiment.

Dan: On the new side.

L: I layered shredded newspaper with bark.

D: OK, I see some big chunks of bark.

L: There are big chunks and small chunks.  I read that the chunks can often help provide oxygen and air space.

D: Oh, interesting…What kind of bark is that, just whatever you have laying around?

L: Yes, we heat with firewood a lot.

D: OK, gotcha.

L: So it’s usually leftover; actually we have a whole garbage pail full of it.

D: I see you are putting carpet across the top. Is that insulation and smell control? Or keeping the worms out of the light so you can open the box easier? What’s the point of the carpet?

L: Well, the point of the carpet was that ‘John-the-worm-man’ said that worms absolutely love carpet. And, I will totally agree, they love it. They will come all the way to surface and just hang-out on top when the carpet is there. And I think it helps keep the moisture in. I think it also helps keep the heat in and it’s like them being under a little rock.

D: Is it natural carpet or synthetic?  They’re not going to eat it, right?

Mark: No, they’re not going to eat it.

L: That’s what he had recommended. We just happen to have that synthetic scrap of carpet.

M: And, last Saturday when we had the cool, rainy weather there, when I pulled that up there were worms actually on the back side of the carpet. They had actually come up to the top and they were everywhere, there was almost like a highway; more like a parking lot. It’s kind of interesting to see how the worm’s behavior would change with the weather, and that’s when I got the idea that I should put in the insulated top. I noticed our temperatures did much better.

D: What were they doing before the top was on?

M: Before the top was on it was within 2 or 3 degrees of ambient. With the insulation in there it was a solid ten degree difference, in fact this morning it was 57 and the outside air temperature it was 44. It does make quite a bit of difference if you can believe these little instruments that were using.

D: It’s not scientific precision, but it’s good enough for this kind of experiment.

L: And, definitely, letting it capture some heat during the day.

M: Yesterday, we hit in the 90’s in fact.

L: Just the air [in the bin].

M: I think the soil temperature – you need a soil thermometer, but you’ll find, at least now, it’s cooler, but of course at night time it gives it up, so to speak.

L: So, one thing that we haven’t done, and I wonder if we should do, is that they recommend that holes be drilled all along the edges.

D: On the sides of the edges or the bottom?

M: The bottom is drilled.

D: So, like midway or 2/3 of the way down the sides of the worm box?

L: We don’t have that now, and we can see the worms seem to be multiplying and pretty happy, but I know I’ve read that you should have more holes.

D: Just for oxygenation?

L: I do open it and stir it. I think those worms are doing well.

D: Yea, they look pretty fantastic

L: I can’t believe how much they’ve eaten on this side; this was solid newspaper.

D: Have you guys noticed your trash doesn’t go out as often?  Has it affected your life other than to come and check out the cool worms?

M: Our daughter loves to come and say “see’em, see’em, see’em”, and show her friends. Prior to getting a worm box we were composting. Of course it is a little bit different with that kind of compost. Whereas the first load that that we got in the worm box we put it over there and within a week we noticed almost an immediate effect. Yea, a basil plant that wasn’t that great, it turned into a prize. And then the pile started to attract wildlife.

L: We saw a huge snake wrapped around the pile.

M: It was a 3’ garter snake just sitting in there. The pile is over here and in fact I just poked around in there and found a bunch of baby worms

D: Sure, cocoons that you moved have hatched.

M: Its been out here for about a month… probably a raccoon or something digging around for scraps.  You can see when I dig down, there’s a lot of tiny worms, there just picking up scraps.  The richness of the soil is what really impresses me, because to the layman’s eyes, someone would just look at this and maybe say oh you got some compost or you got some potting soil or something like that.  This was food and newspaper, and now it is this incredibly lush rich looking soil, which looking at the basil and the eggplant it really likes the flavor.

Basil plant near vermicompost

D: So how is that different from the compost that you guys have done in the past, in terms of speed, in terms of quality?

M: I’d say that speed is one. it’s just amazing just how quickly it actually turns it into something that you can use, as opposed to the compost that we did in the past we would say compost for a season, say in the spring, and then the following spring we would take that, depending on how it was broken down, we would move the highest quality portion of it over to our garden.

L: Seems like it would take a year. And now we get the stuff in 3 months

M: And there’s something different about it. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s different that the compost.

D: I sent in a sample of worm castings to a soil lab and got a bunch of numbers back and it would be very interesting to look and see what compost has for potassium, for all the vital elements that plants need.

M: It would be really fascinating because the results, I mean, this compost ‘rocks’. It’s much better than what we’ve been using before. And, the speed, again, at which the worms work are very impressive and their robust, I mean, the temperature drops down to 40 degrees, its chilly, and how much activity you can see today, they are a happy bunch in there.

D: Sure, they are bouncing back.

M: I kind of wonder what’s going to happen to [the worms outside of the bin] if there just going to burrow in the soil, or is this the end?

L: I think this is the end.

D: My understanding is that the type of worms, the red wigglers, need a lot of organic matter, so if your not providing that for them, maybe if you got straw and whatnot.

M: It was actually pretty neat because when we divided up the bin we actually moved this to one side and we didn’t feed it any more at that time and we just fed the new side. It was amazing. There was always a few stragglers left, and we just tossed them over there [to the new side]. For the most part they all sensed it, or smelled it, or whatever. They bee-lined it to the food. What was left were these little tiny cocoons.

L: I did leave it like that for 2 months, though.

D: 2 months is a long time.

L: And part of it was, I just happened to be gone. I thought about doing it before I left and I just said I will just give it some extra time.

Worm closeup

D: Now, when you moved it to the one side, one of my concerns would be that the side you’re putting food in would get over fed. Is that kind of what happened?

L: No, it didn’t happen. I’m not really sure why. I think there were enough worms to consume what we were putting in.

D: I guess you have a certain amount of worms, roughly, in a smaller space?

L: Yea and I think they are multiplying more now. It has taken awhile.

D: Mark, you said you were surprised by the fertility. Were there any other surprises you guys have had in terms of what works?

L: It’s been fun

M: [Our daughter]  likes it. Its one of those things we like to encourage with her, because she’s getting to see the workings of the earth. And she‘s ecstatic, even more so than Linda and myself. After the worm box was built, Linda was looking at it almost everyday.

D: I certainly did that with my first worm box.

M: But, I think now we’re down to 3 times a week.  We worry about the worms sometimes, like when it gets cold. I went out and bought another temperature transmitter because you put all this attention to them it would be a shame for them to perish.

D: Are you planning to do anything with harvesting the excess worms like giving them to friends.

L: The surprise that I have had is just about every one I have asked has back out.

D: Taking worms from you for free, essentially?

L: Yes, they got scared.

D: Have you asked them what they were scared of?

L: I think it sounded good to begin with, but when reality set in they just weren’t interested. One friend decided they now have the City of Boulder composting, so they preferred to do that. Other people are a little worried that it’s going to take too much work, although I don’t believe it takes work. And I think Sharon and Dave, some friends that were just here, I would suspect that they will do it next year.

I guess the other surprise is I thought that the worms would have multiplied enough by now to eat all of our excess food. It seems like a lot of the worm advertisements show that worms eat about 7 pounds a week.

D: A pound of worms can eat between a half-a-pound to a pound a day

L: So I don’t know how many worms we have but I’m guessing were feeding this about 7 lbs a week and maybe they are eating it.

M: Here you go Dan, just a quick survey [of the contents of the worm bin].

D: Ok, I see some onions, I see bananas, I see, looks like turnip tops. Is that pineapple?

M: That’s spaghetti squash. We usually save the best for the worms.  Maybe just a little bit of caffeine in the form of used coffee grounds, just to keep the guys motivated. Eggshells… we were actually banning eggshells, but now we are starting to put them back in.

D: Why would you ban them?

M: We were banning them because we weren’t consistent in our delivery. We were sometimes throwing in whole shells; other times we were breaking them up, and it was like ‘well were going to put all those items in with the other compost.’

D: Oh, so you’re still maintaining the compost [pile]?

L: It’s not a proper compost pile.  [Looking in the box] I dug down in here the other day and I hadn’t dug down in a long time and I actually felt kind of bad digging down.

D: Cutting [the worms] in half or something?

M: Can you really kill a worm that way?

L: Yes

D: Yeah.

L: I think they are starting to multiply enough. You know if we have another decent month of weather I think we will have enough to eat all our food. We are not really putting that much in there now in the last few weeks.

M: We have been averaging one complete kitchen composter a week for the compost.  It’s a one gallon stainless steel container.  We make donations about twice a week.

D: Then in the winter time you’re just checking on the worms?

M: Yes, that’s the worm check-in schedule.

L: I don’t usually stir them up. Look at that!

D: Wow, what a mass!

M: I kind of like it because Linda is grossed out and amazed at the same time.  They seem to be a happy bunch. The corn husks are pretty tough for them.

L: The ones that are buried, they love that stringy stuff…

D: What’s that called?

M: The hair, almost.

L: Wow, they moved over here

M: Never a dull moment when you’re poking around the worm box.

D: What other things; eggshells you mentioned they like and the cornhusks. Any other foods that they are huge fans of? Looks like the inside of that squash. That’s fresh.

L: That’s very fresh.

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….

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.

Dan: Ok, so you mentioned earlier like you had more plans for the worms next year.  Do you want to talk a little bit more about that?

Michael: Well I don’t have too many plans for the worms, just I wanted to get some of the castings out of there and then offer worms to other people or kind of transfer ‘em to our compost piles or possibly garden beds if we’re doing different things like that.  I like the idea of worm bins and I like the idea of having lots of worms all over the place.

D: Sure.

M: We have a really healthy worm population in the backyard.

D: Really?

M: Yeah. Which I didn’t necessarily think we would because it’s really pretty dense clay soil up there.  But I started really early, kind of like early April irrigating really heavily out there after I tilled it once, about a quarter acre I tilled, and then I just started watering, just watering it all the time.

D: Every day or every other day?

M: Yeah about every other day; just leaving it or letting the water run for 12 hours or something.

D: Ok.

M: Use the sprinklers and just really, really water the hell out of it. Cause it was really hard packed stuff. And what I noticed was that the more I watered it and the more water I put into the soil there, the more worms would come. So what I would do is I would go out at night time, say 11 o’clock at night and I was doing this really consistently for a few weeks.

D: Cool.

M: Like every night I would go out there with my headlamp and I’d be doing my watering at night because I had a job where I’d be at work till like 10 o’clock at night I would come home and do all my irrigation.

D: Ok.

M: At that point I was out there at night a lot which is a really interesting time to observe the garden.  Cause the worms are all out.

D: Interesting.

M: Especially after watering because they would come up out of the soil to get away from the water table because it rises.  They’re not regular worms like we have in the compost bin but they’re the big, long, thick, fat earthworms.

D: Ok.

M: The night crawlers.  And it was like a night crawler orgy there.

D: Wow.

M: I mean you would go around there would just be dozens of couples of worms, because you know they’re asexual or whatever and…

D: Don’t they have both?

M: Yeah, both parts.

D: Hermaphroditic.

M: Yeah whatever you call it, maybe it’s not asexual but they have both male and female parts and when you see them mate they actually don’t really mate with themselves, they rub their female part against the male part of another one and then the male part rubs up against their female part or whatever.

D: Wow.

M: And so, yeah, you see ‘em all over the place out there.  And I would just go out there and check them all out.

D: Wow.

M: There’s a lot of worms out there and I think it had to do with me watering it early in the season heavily, because I think, I read that the worms are attracted to water.

D: Interesting.

M: And they come to the water, to be around the water.

D: Interesting, interesting.  Did you apply any like organic material out there, or till in any organic material?

M: I guess I mowed it then let that mulch sit down then tilled that in and I put a few truckloads in, I went to Haystack goat dairy and got a few truck loads of goat manure and I bought like a truckload of finished compost from one of the landscaping companies around here or one of the agriculture companies.  I did use one chemical, I used ammonium sulfate back there, early on. I spread that out.

D: I just wonder whether the like enhanced organic material was another reason for the night crawlers coming out there. I don’t know much about night crawlers.

M: They were out there I don’t know why. I didn’t put ‘em there, they were there.

D: Don’t ask  questions, right? So do you want to spread the worms elsewhere?  You said your compost pile…

M: Or I don’t know I haven’t really thought about it too much to be honest.  The worms have just been a real side project around here.

D: Sure. That’s the great thing about worms.

M: You don’t have to do much.

D: Yeah, exactly; feed it once every couple of weeks and make sure that they have… I mean it sounds like you didn’t even water the box.

M: Well, I did do that.

D: Oh, you did?

M: There’s spigots right next to the box. Whenever I would throw any bedding in there, I would hose it down to get it wet.

D: Ok.

M: But I’ve done that a few times, I’ve thrown additional sawdust, or additional shredded paper.

D: Oh really, ok.   So just for bedding. What, you know, maybe once every couple of weeks or?

M: No, like once every 2 months or something like that.  And like you pointed out, they’re [probably in their waste.  It] would probably be helpful [to harvest], it is pretty black down there. I don’t know.

D: When John came and sold us on it, I was kind of astonished because that was pretty processed [castings] and I understand why he sold a 5 gallon bucket [of worms], because separating out worms is tedious.  When I bought my worms, [the package they came in was] 5” by 5” and it was solid worms.

M: Did you get it through the mail or something?

D: I did get them through the mail.  Yeah I got them through the Worm Lady, somebody in Michigan.

M: Right, I had a friend who set up a worm box at home and she ordered them through the mail.

D: Yeah and it works real well but there probably were about the same number of worms in John’s 5 gallon bucket and the pound of worms that I got.  So I was interested that he was selling the big old one cheaper than the pound of worms cause of the labor involved.

M: This [the five gallon bucket of worms] was like $35.

D: Was it $35? I thought the bucket was more like $15 or $10 but, I didn’t buy it.

M: No, it’s definitely not $15 or $10.  I think it was $30 for the 5 gallon bucket.

D: Ok, well, maybe that was more because [my box of worms] was $20 plus shipping for 1 pound of worms a couple of years ago.

M: Yeah.  I remember John saying it was hard to buy worms now a lot of those mail order worm places don’t have any worms to sell because they’ve sold all of ‘em.

D: Really?

M: Yeah, that’s what he was saying during the class because they’re so popular right now.

…

Next up: worms and permaculture, bees, advice for aspiring worm keepers, and plans for next year.

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

Here we finish up and discuss a wide range of topics, including:

• Forest’s view of worms in permaculture
• the new curbside composting program here in Boulder
• whether he intends to work with worms in the future
• what blueworms are good for
• worms and human manure
• keeping redworms warm through the winter
• and anti-depressants in Manhattan’s drinking supply.

Dan: I really love the fact that you were part of a real business [the worm farm in Hawaii]. Do you know, did you look at any numbers from that?

Forest: No, we never sat down and did figures around it. We just were more interested in the systems than we were in the finances around it. And there wasn’t a lot of expenses involved. I constantly questioned using fossil fuels to pick up compost and bring it back. Because some days it made sense because we were going in to town anyways but some days we only went into town just to get compost to bring back and I definitely did question it. I didn’t sit down and run the figures though.

D: Well and the labor. I assume you were all living there with free room and board

F: Yeah, some of us were being paid. Some of us weren’t. Most of use were work-trade. So we worked a certain amount of hours a day to be there, to be able to eat there.

D: I mean the one huge cost that comes right to mind, aside from fossil fuels, in terms of driving is labor, in terms of picking stuff up and dropping stuff off.

F: I mean luckily since it is Hawaii it’s really easy to get people to live there for cheap. What the owner did was he bought people’s plane tickets and then had them work it off, plus work a certain amount of hours per day to be there, and to be able to eat. So pretty much paid people didn’t have to come up with any capital on their part

D: What’s the place called?

F: And he got cheap labor.

D: Sure.

F: What did they name the farm? I don’t remember what they called it.

D: Are you planning to continue your experience with worms? Or like right now, in your current situation?

F: In my current situation, I’m not. If I had some property, yeah for sure, I mean worms are an important part of the ecosystem. We’re only taking red worms here. But in the tropics they have a blue worm, which we were working with also. Blue worms eat compost quicker. They’re more aggressive. Like if you go at them, they’ll jump at you, they’ll actually throw themselves at you.

D: Same kind of size?

F: They’re larger, they’re kind of blue grey. They’re tough little ones. What we did is we create a syste munderneath the chickens where they roosted at night so all of the their crap fell on top of the worms and then we’d put shredded paper on top of that and then kept it covered with chicken wire in so the chickens couldn’t get access and they processed all the chicken poop. So it was fresh and hot and they ate it all.

D: Really?

F: Yeah. They’re intense little worms but they’re only really suited to the tropics.

D: Cause they’ll get cold?

F: Yeah they’re really sensitive to cold. The red worms you can bring into the Tropics or here. I know there’s on the east coast the red worms have escaped to natural environments and actually caused a lot of issues because they eat things too quickly in certain ecosystems so I know that’s one thing to watch out for but it’s not an issue here in Colorado.

D: Are you sure?

F: I mean, from what I’ve heard.

D: I’ve been thinking about calling the extension office.

F: You should do that. From what I’ve heard Its too cold in the winter and not enough plant material in the wild to support them. It was on the east coast with a lot of leaf matter.

D: Sure.

F: They were able to go through that really quickly, consume it too quickly? I don’t know exactly all the ecology around it.

D: I actually found a website, or I was on a mailing list that sent a website out about that in the Great Lakes region, in Minnesota or Wisconsin. They actually have a website saying don’t release your red worms to the wild because it really does change the nature of the forest.

F: It can. It depends where.

D: This is of course an advocacy website centered in that region. They said, you know be aware of this.

F: Yeah yeah.

D: Not sure about Colorado. What are you doing with your food waste now?

F: Now I am putting them into a 5 gallon bucket and when that’s full I’m bringing em to where I work at and just throw them on that compost, which is a little more management, you know hauling it around but I don’t really have any other options.

D: Sure sure. Are you excited about the Eco-Cycle composting that’s going to come in? [note: I was wrong, it's not an Eco-Cycle program--it's a city of Boulder program]

F: Somewhat. I wish that they would introduce, I wish they would give, they would do more teaching people how to do more composting. Rather than just being a consumer of compost, giving people one more trash receptacle to throw everything, I’d rather see people have compost in their backyards because, pretty much unless you live in an apartment building you can have a compost. I could probably have one actually if I wanted to invest in one of those big black ones I could find a corner in my apartment building. Something like that. But I’m not too excited about it but I’m glad they’re trying to get that out of the waste stream also.

D: Sure.

F: So I’m alright with that.

D: Yeah. Cool! Well do you have any other things? We’ve got a good amount of time. Do you have any other parting thoughts, anything else you would say about worms?

F: They’re an important part of permaculture. They’re really important in order to manage waste effectively. The combination of the chickens and the worms was just incredible.

D: In terms of destroying large amounts of food waste?

F: Yeah. Transforming that very quickly and efficiently. You know I mean literally you can take all your waste, throw it into, just your plant based waste, into your chickens and right then you’re getting eggs and meat back and then it goes throughout your worms and then you’re getting the nice rich source of your compost too. So it’s nice because the chicken shit, if I can say that, gets mixed up into the compost also, and that gets put into the worm system too and that’s one way to handle that waste too. It worked well, it worked well. There’s some management in it, management of temperature, humidity, and I’ve never found a nice composting system, like already pre-manufactured. Oh, no, I used to own one of those black ones, they have multiple trays.

D: Ok.

F: ‘Worm hole bin’ or something they call them, or ‘bin o’ worms’? I had that five years ago. I didn’t manage it very well. I got fruit flies also, but it does take some management and some tweaking to figure out a good system. And I’m kind of now more in the lines of not necessarily having to give them their special spot but actually incorporating them into the compost. Because what I’ve learned about them is if they’re in your compost and there is nothing to eat they’ll come out and they’ll start looking for other sources of food actually.

D: Red worms will?

F: Yeah. Also, red worms you know compost outside. Cause one of the problems with most bins is they’re too small to hold heat in the winter. So they get killed in the winter. If your normal compost pile is a good size, it’ll keep heat all winter and actually they’ll go into the center and live there.

D: That’s actually been my experience because I have a 3×3 black plastic compost bin and I had a 2×2 wood worm bin where they actually lasted, this was 2 years ago or 3 years ago, they actually lasted almost through winter except when we had like a week of really cold temps, they all froze and died but, last winter, these guys in the compost bin were a-ok. I mean I’ve looked at [another classmate's] worms and her kind of special worm bin, and they’re much happier than my worms. I still have plenty of worms. And so maybe mine isn’t the optimal environment but it’s very low maintenance.

F: That’s nice. Yeah its definitely something to think about, is the level of management involved in it.

D: I don’t know about you but like when I first got worms I was checking on em, you know, every day. I was really interested in how they’re doing and then now, I’m just really glad that they do their job.

[laughing]

F: Yeah yeah, now in Hawaii, there were some people experimenting that we had talked to, and I never saw any of their systems, with composting all their human waste with it, also. So they collected their own waste into 5 gallon buckets, that they went in and layered it with sawdust and then they put that into special bins and they had worms and they let the worms work that for a year and they were then using that on their plants.

D: I assume … Everything I’ve ever read about human manure is you put the resulting compost on fruit trees or you know, not on leafy vegetables.

F: I know people who do it on leafy vegetables. Because the problem is… that’s a good rule of thumb, to only do it on fruit trees. It’s just playing it safe. But as long as you reach the proper temps or a certain length of time it’s totally alright. It’ll break down into just soil. It’s the E. Coli is why they don’t want you to do it onto leafy vegetables. There is a threat of it spreading. As long as its properly decomposed it’s not an issue. The Humanure book? I don’t know if you read it?

D: I think I browsed through it at class.

F: I’ve read that book all the way through and they do put it on their whole vegetable garden. The authors. But they let it sit for two years and properly break down. They layer their compost properly, they have it on there and leave it alone for two years and then they use it. But by then there’s nothing in it that would cause problems. It’s the length of time, it’s the temperature.

D: From what I’ve read is people use their municipal sludge on farms too. So yeah.

F: It’s legal. That doesn’t make sense to me. To me, part of it’s the chemicals that people flush down the drains, that what always concerns me.

D: Sure sure.

F: You know in Manhattan’s water supply they found anti depressants?

D: In the tap water?

F: It’s detectable in Manhattan tap water because they recycle the water from the waste stream and that stuff doesn’t break down. The chemical structure doesn’t break down and so by the time its processed and chlorinated and all this stuff, it’s still detectable in the water supply. It’s scary, isn’t it?

D: That’s really scary. I’d love a further conversation with you about just general systems, natural systems and what we gain out of them because it’s something I’ve really been interested in learning more about but not tonight. Well thank you very much, Forest.

F: Thank you.