Via the Fort Collins worm exchange list, I came across this offer from John Anderson, the Colorado Worm Man (whose website is currently down).
My offer still stands for those who would like to exchange 3hrs work at my worm farm for a starter batch of worms and what ever knowledge you can absorb from my experience.
Now, on the one hand, 3 hours of your time, especially if you need to drive to Fort Collins from elsewhere, can be more expensive than just buying the worms yourself. But, on the other hand, you get the chance to ask John questions, see how a large scale operation works, and head home with a batch of worms for your self. When I toured his worm farm a year ago, it was quite eye opening.
If you’re thinking about keeping worms and have some time, and if Fort Collins isn’t too far away, you should contact John (cowormman at Juno dot com) and see about setting up a three hour learning experience.
August 30th, 2010
I just saw John Anderson, the Colorado Worm Guy, at the Colorado Permaculture Convergence today, and he let me know that he has a new site. It’s cowormman.org. Make sure you visit and check out all the information he has.
August 22nd, 2010
The Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Association is hosting a vermicomposting workship, run by none other than the Colorado Worm Man himself, John Anderson. I found out about this via this tweet from the Front Range Permaculture Institute. From the description:
In this workshop participants will imagine the re-use of materials and the repurposing of items into a functional and efficient organic conversion machine. Really! John will cover super simple on ground designs to elegant flow-thru concepts to keep our worm friends comfortable inside or out. John will show and tell and inspire from fifteen years of designing, constructing and using worm bins. Then we will get to work physically creating worm bins from the items and materials that have been gathered at the ReSource site. Some we will start, some we will be able to finish, and some we will sell to support non-profits.
Sounds like fun to me!
April 8th, 2010
I thought this exchange, on the Fort Collins worm exchange list, was enlightening, so I thought I’d post it here with comments.
Aaron Orechwa asks:
Hi I am in charge of implementing a compost program here at our office in Fort Collins, CO. Our office consists of approximately 35 people, and I thought it may be a good idea to start a composting system to divert daily organic waste into our solid waste stream. Right now I am looking into a green cone system for food waste and a rotating barrel system for yard waste as well.
Given the current climate and weather conditions, is worm composting a good idea? We will have to place the compost outside because of corporate policy difficulty in having an indoor system. Let me know if you can help or suggest any better ideas. Thanks
John Anderson answers:
Corporate policies of externalizing costs have gotten us in this environmental perdicament to start with so that needs to no longer be an acceptable practice. Worm composting can be done outdoors effectively. . What do you suppose they did with out us for 6 hundred million years? Systems can be designed to fit your resource output and our weather extremes with no on going carbon footprint. To size the system you must first need to know volume of the resource by weight on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Hope that helps.
See me at cowormman.com for further info. The intent of this exchange is for community households with or without composting worms to get connected and exchange their resources. Talk to you soon about possibilities?
John A. www.cowormman. com
I was unable to find sizing information on John’s website, but a bit of googling turned up this:
The rule of thumb for bin size is two square feet of surface area per person, or one square foot of surface area per pound of food wastes per week.
Making some wild assumptions about Aaron’s situation, lets assume that we can get away with 1/3 sqft/person, because each person only eats lunch at the office (1/3 of their meals), and 1/2 the time folks eat out. Therefore 2sqft/person*1/2*1/3 = 1/3sqft/person. (Of course, the best way to estimate size would be to measure discarded organic waste first.) 35*1/3 equals approximately 12 sqft of worm bin. That’s only 2×6, which is probably a fine configuration.
Other considerations:
- having the worm bin outside: eminently possible here in Colorado. Just make sure the worms can escape into the ground and insulate. You can see pictures of John’s worm windrows here, and they definitely survive the Fort Collins winters.
- overfeeding: as Melanie Nehls Burow warns, “[b]etter to underfeed than to overfeed in general.” It’s easy to get enthusiastic and overfeed your worms, especially if you didn’t put enough in the system to start with.
- underfeeding: especially in winter, how is feeding going to happen? This is obviously a key issue, and should be resolved at the beginning
- what to do with resulting vermicompost: you’ll have a lot from a bin this size. Give it to employees? Give it to the landscaping company? Advertise it on craigslist/freecycle? What you definitely don’t want is to end up throwing it away.
- general maintenance: replacing bedding, removing castings and/or vermicompost, watering bin when dry. These are all tasks that need to be done on a semi regular basis.
I think, in general, worm composting for office situations is better than traditional composting. No work to turn it, capable of processing large amounts of food wastes (which I imagine are the typical wastes from a typical office), and relatively low cost.
December 15th, 2009
I get email every time Google finds a post using the words ‘redworms’ or ‘vermiculture’. (You can set up the same thing with Google Alerts.) I have been letting these accumulate in my inbox, but there are a number of interesting articles showing the wide-ranging nature of vermicomposting, so I thought I’d compile and publish them.
Grand Rapids, Michigan sent a beekeeper to Nicaragua; there he learned vermiculture and now has “a compost pile with thousands of red worms.” In Detroit, Justin Pawloske “[collects] food from two area grocery stores that otherwise would have found its way into a landfill, and [composts] it with the use of worms”.
In Wisconsin, Will Allen of Growing Power uses worms in his composting systems on his urban farms because “[t]he worm castings make great fertilizer.”
A number of schools are doing vermicomposting. In Utah, West Point grade school is “using Red Wigglers to compost cafeteria scraps”. In Ontario, Scott Young Public School is also vermicomposting their cafeteria waste. In Kansas, Starside Elementary has set up vermicomposting systems, where “red worms eat food scraps, newspapers, and even junk mail.” In Ithaca, Caroline Elementary school’s fourth grade class is vermicomposting.
In Pennsylvania, the Haverford House, a part of Haverford College, is vermicomposting.
In the developing world, Spier Hotel, in Zambia, has a “waste-plus-worms-equals-compost vermiculture programme” as well as other sustainability initiatives. They are using Biolytix [PDF], an Australian sewage technology.
In India, villages are setting up backyard vermicomposting and selling vermicompost.
In Guatemala, a non profit considered using vermiculture as a profitable rural enterprise.
In South Africa, vermiculture is part of an “agricultural job-creation project.”
In the Philipines, residents who have been resettled near Bayanijuan plan to “start a vermiculture project.” There’s also a facebook page about a vermiculture project in that country.
In Minnesota, Mark Campbell, a resident of Edina, “tosses his kitchen waste in his vermiculture bin in the basement and uses the “tea” and castings to fertilizer his garden.” He also “ripped up most of the grass in his yard because he considers grass a waste of precious resources”. You can view a video of Mark here, though it focuses on fruit trees and apple crisp.
In Massachusetts, residents of cities with ‘pay as you throw’ garbage collection use vermicompost to save money and process their food scraps.
The Wall Street Journal reviews various composting options, including the Worm Factory, a vermicomposting bin.
In Maine, Redworms for a Green Earth exhibited at the Green Home and Living Show. Redworms were also featured at the Christ Episcopal Church‘s ‘Blessing of the Animals’ in Ponte Vedra, Florida. In California, a real estate blogger covers why vermicomposting is important for green real estate.
And, because this is a blog about worms in Colorado, here’s another great article about John Anderson and his company Garbage Busters.
I also got a lot of fishing reports–apparently redworms really are popular with fishermen!
November 25th, 2009
From the Broomfield Enterprise:
John “The Worm Man” Anderson, an expert in the art of vermicomposting, will present a workshop on the basics of using worms to compost kitchen and yard waste from 9 to 11 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 7, in the Lakeshore Room of the Broomfield Community Center at 280 Lamar St. Cost: $10. Sponsored by Broomfield master gardeners. Registration required: 720-887-2286.
Here’s all their upcoming events.
October 19th, 2009
I had the good fortune to interview Melanie Nehls Burow recently. She has been teaching the Basics of Backyard Composting and Worm Composting in Boulder County for 9 years through the County’s Master Composter classes and other compost workshops. For an updated schedule on where and when she is teaching next, or composting questions, contact her at andrewmel at yahoo dot com. She has been worm composting for 7 years. Melanie recently dealt with a setback (more on that below) but is headed back to worm composting full bore.
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.
August 7th, 2009
When I was up in Fort Collins for the Rocky Mountain Compost School, some classmates and I were able to get a tour of the facility of John Anderson (aka, ‘The Worm Man’). I was able to snap a few photos, and you can see most of them below.
Here is a view of the entire Worm Man operation, including fridges, wormbulances, and windrows.
Windrow containing worms. Notice the carpet covering the windrow, and the bales of hay.
Carpet covers all Johns windrows, preventing light from entering and moisture and smells from leaving.
Protecting the windrows from freezing is key. John uses bales of hay to prevent the prevailing winds from stealing heat and moisture from the windrows.
Here is a better shot of a windrow with the carpet pulled back. John is using a pitchfork to move some of the bedding to better show the redworms.
On the right is a pile of bedding and worms, covered in carpet. I believe the left is an uncovered pile of bedding.
John uses fridges as a cheap, effective worm bin. They are almost water tight, insulate well, and hold a large number of worms.
Here are some happy happy worms in the bowels of one of the modified refrigerators.
Here is a fridge that John made early in his experimentation. You can see the plastic on the door was not removed, and it is starting to get squishy.
John hot composts a lot of his feedstock for the worms. He got these large square bins from an A/C company, and mounted them on an axis so he can rotate the compost.
Here you can see John rotating the tumbler, using rope and his truck. I wish I had gotten video!
John makes money selling castings as well as worms. He stores finished castings in these 55 gallon plastic drums.
This was a piece of old farm equipment that John had on his site. A classmate of mine is indicating how it could be used as a continuous flow harvester. You would scrape off the bottom of the worm bin periodicaly, getting most of the castings and few of the redworms.
John built a separator on an old gurney; here is his primary casting separation setup. Worms and castings and bedding are taken from the wheelbarrow and put into the upper end. The barrel is rotated and the worms and vermicompost fall to the lower end. Castings fall through the screen onto the tarp.
The back of the ever popular Wormbulance.
June 28th, 2009
Boulder Organic, a new publication from the folks at the Boulder Weekly, have a new article about red worm composting, John Anderson, and rescuing a bad compost operation. John is his characteristic, no b.s. self:
“Our prime directive in this culture is to make more food to make more people to sell more shit to,” he says. “The system has to stop designing waste. We design things with waste on purpose because of somebody’s back pocket.”
The article also discusses other important aspects of home wormkeeping, including how to feed and harvest red wigglers, and provides a list of things that can be vermicomposted (one which is slightly different than the one I’ve provided).
June 22nd, 2009
This is the second part of my interview with Michael. Feel free to peruse the first part.
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.
March 17th, 2009
