While on vacation in June, I had a chance to visit one of the Worm Ladies of Charlestown. Lois was kind enough to show me and my fiancee’s family around.
Worm Ladies of Charlestown Logo
She has an integrated operation–growing rabbits and red wrigglers. The rabbits Lois raises are sold for pets (her partner raises angoras and sells the hair, hence the domain name). The redworms are sold by the pound, or in kits. They also produce castings for sale to gardeners. She mentioned that they have an industrial worm separator (purchased used from a fellow who used to sell castings), at her partner’s place, so I didn’t get to see the castings separation process.
Worm bin underneath rabbith hutch
Above is a rabbit hutch with a worm bin (the blue plastic bin). Hay placed in the hutch for food and rabbit bedding falls into the worm bin, as does the rabbit poop and pee (I also noticed other vegetable and leafy matter, so there may be auxiliary feeding). The redworms convert that waste product into more worms and castings–what great synergy!
However, it is not a totally sustainable operation–the ladies have found the best redworm bedding is coir from Sri Lanka (there are husks available from Mexico, but these are laced with salt). Lois said they switched from peat moss to coir for bedding because “it is much easier to hydrate. [It] is not as acidic as peat, [and is] easy to ship in a kit because of it being in block form.”
Coir that the Worm Ladies use
Lois said she used to keep the worms in cinder block squares under the rabbit hutches, but has converted to the rubbermaid bins because it is easier to bring them inside during the harsh winters. She has a workspace where she keeps the worms during the winter, and does other various Worm Lady activities.
Winter worm storage and workspace
In addition to the bins underneath the rabbits, Lois also has standard compost bins, like mine, that she uses for extra worm habitat. You can see her in front of these bins–she had about four that I could see.
In front of compost bins (extra worm habitat)
She also vermicomposted chicken manure, like Forest did in Hawaii, and mentioned that neither the rabbit manure nor the chicken poop smelled after the worms had been at it for 24 hours.
Lois also mentioned doing a lot of outreach–talking to home school groups and elementary school kids, and educating people in how worms can turn garbage into gardening gold. She certainly did a fine job of showing us around her operation.
As far as the business end of the wormkeeping goes, Lois had no complaints. The worm ladies incorporated in 2009, but have had tremendous demand for years (since 2003, when a newspaper interview sent her and her partner “reeling into business”), for both castings and worms. She has done some exploring of other business models (eco tourism, bed and breakfast) but after looking at the numbers decided to focus on worms.
The Worm Ladies have sold redworms as far afield as Canada and Alaska (they had a request from Jamaica, but weren’t sure what import/export hurdles were present). She guestimated they sell about 600 pounds of redworms a year. They have a buyback program started, where they will pay you $5/lb for unseparated worms and $8/lb for separated worms–which sounds like a good intro into the vermiculture business. (If this piques your interest, I’d contact them for more details.)
Inside a small kit
In addition to selling castings and worms by the pound, the worm ladies sell two different sizes of kits. In the kit, they have created habitat in a plastic bin suited for redworms–just moist enough, aerated holes predrilled, and with just enough bedding. They sell you the bin, instructions and an appropriate weight of worms, and you can use the bin to ‘test drive’ worm keeping with little fear of failure. (She also mentioned wormkits.com.)
Larger Redworm Kits
(I’m doing the same thing with a shiitake mushroom kit). This is an exciting product to me because it lowers the barrier to entry for worm keeping–instead of having to spend around $100 for a full worm composting system, you can use one of these kits to see if you enjoy it.
Outside of smaller worm kits
All in all, it was a pleasure to get a chance to meet someone who loved worms as much as Lois obviously does (she signed an email to me ‘Wormly, Lois’!). Reforming the waste stream that is currently in place is not going to be easy, but education and business ventures like the Worm Ladies of Charlestown are part of the effort.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Youtube is fantastic; what a great way to share knowledge across the world. Here’s a video that explains how to build a worm tower in your yard:
Basically, the idea is to provide a safe place for worms to eat food scraps, while at the same time letting the worms move around your garden. When the worms move, they will distribute castings and aerate the soil Even red wrigglers and other epigeic species will move earth around to some extent.
I think this is a fantastic idea. It fits with the permaculture idea of using biosystems to minimize work. It enriches soil. If you make more than one worm tower, it creates redundant sources of worms. Depending on climate, it may make worm keeping outside a possibility.
However, there are some downsides as well. The PVC pipes recommended in the video are made of fossil fuels. Any substitute that will be durable probably has a high embedded energy. Depending on location and your type of worm, you may be introducing an exotic species. And obviously, a worm tower is not useful in an apartment or on a balcony.
With all that said, I’m grateful to the person who put the video on YouTube for introducing me to a new idea in such a pleasant manner.
What's a feed? Using an RSS Reader like Bloglines or Google Reader, you can be notified of new posts, and read excerpts of Boulder Vermicomposting content, without having to visit the blog.
