Boulder Vermicomposting

Worms surviving the Boulder winter

I have an outdoor worm bin, and I did some things to prepare it for the winter.  However, here in Boulder, we have had a pretty bad cold snap.

Here’s some weather data from the Weather Underground site for January of 2010:

You can see that we had a prolonged stretch of freezing winter.  In fact, a few days ago, I went out to add some food to my worm bin, and the first whack with my post hole diggers showed that it was frozen.  My worm bin is black, but it probably gets 1-2 hours of sun a day. That’s not great for winter (though it does help preserve moisture during the summer).

I dealt with this frozen worm bin a few ways:

• I added some food to the top.  I had removed enough material in the fall (putting it into my garden) that I was able to just add material to the top.  I made sure to cover the top with leaves and other carbon sources, and add some water (in the form of snow) to alleviate any smell.
• I froze some food.  This is a fairly common wormkeeping practice, though I had never done it before.  It keeps food smells down while you are storing it, and the freeze/thaw process helps break down the food faster.  However, I still prefer my food scraps bucket.
• I threw some worm food away.  I confess I did this in the deeps of the freeze, when I felt saving any more food would overwhelm my worm bin when I was finally able to add more food.

I have also added worms to a dirt bed in my patio area.  I dug it up just a few days ago and was quite happy to see some redworms happily eating some food scraps I’d added a while ago.  So, at least some of my population of worms survived the Boulder deep freeze of 2009-2010.

Add comment January 23rd, 2010

Discussion on winter worm composting

I’ve already published some of my thoughts on the topic of winter worm composting, but here’s an interesting discussion of the same on vermicomposters.com.

If you’re a wormkeeper and aren’t part of vermicomposters.com, it’s worth a look.  It’s a social network for worm composters.

Add comment December 21st, 2009

Internet Resource: RedWormComposting.com

Redwormcomposting.com, a blog and ecommerce site, is chock full of information on vermicomposting. Located in southwestern Ontario, the author is prolific; he writes for EcoSherpa and Compost Guy as well.  As well as redworms, he sells various products on the site; some of them look pretty interesting.  He answers readers’ questions fairly regularly, and also is always trying new approaches to vermiculture.   I especially like his experiments in keeping worms alive through the Canadian winter.  The writer is obviously gonzo about redworms and his site is worth reading through if you have any interest.

Add comment March 7th, 2009