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.

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

• Cost: Free
• Where: Boulder County Recycling Center, 1901 63rd St., Boulder
• When: Nov 15, 8:30 – 10:30 am
• RSVP: Space is limited to 30 people. RSVP to jbohn@BoulderCounty.org or call 720-564-2242

Full description:

This workshop is suitable for beginners and seasoned composters wanting to brush up on their knowledge. We will look at a variety of composting methods and home uses for your finished products.

Backyard composting . . . What is it? How does it work? How do I start? Learn with hands-on learning through interactive demonstrations. Tools and techniques for successful backyard composting will be explained.

Residents are encouraged to compost in their own backyard. Keeping food scraps, yard waste and other organics out of the landfill and composting them in your own backyard is the best way to reduce your carbon footprint.

Plus, you will get beautiful compost to use for your own plants and flowers.

While not strictly related to vermiculture, composting is another useful way of turning waste into gold. They also will be selling the square compost bins, that I use as my worm bin, at a discount.