Earthworms Will Thrive on Eating Your Kitchen Garbage

You can have worms dispose of your garbage.  Everyone has potato peelings, banana peels, lettuce leaves, and other organic waste streaming from their kitchen. These are things that worms thrive on and they thoughtfully convert it into rich soil for houseplants and gardens. Under the right circumstances, one pound of worms will eat a half pound of food waste daily, a discard which you can remove from the waste stream.

SCHOOLS USE IT

Increasingly, schools are setting up vermicomposting operations to rid themselves of organic kitchen waste while at the same time offering an object lesson in ecology and biology as well as environmental responsibility.

The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity reports that organic waste, not including paper, comprises 11%-13% of all landfill material.

CONTAINER

It isn't hard to do. I had a worm bed in my kitchen some years ago. I ordered a thousand red wigglers by mail (best for vermicomposting, nightcrawlers are not as good). Red wigglers live 2-4 years and mature in 10 weeks, at which time they can begin reproducing, turning out up to three cocoons a week. The worms don't smell and if you keep them in the window, with a damp burlap bag over the surface of the container but not overlapping the edge of the container, there should be no problem with a prison break.

A Rubbermaid box was my container. I cut a hole in the bottom and lined it inside with a patch of window screening which I secured with melted wax from a candle. This provides drainage.

Stryrofoam picnic coolers are very cheap and would work well, but any container can be used, even an old refrigerator. There is no standard requirement, except for a rule of thumb relating to productivity....for every pound of waste you wish to dispose of weekly, provide one square foot in depth and one square foot of surface area, 1'X1'x1'.

I lined the bottom of my Rubbermaid rub with gravel I took from my driveway.  Atop that I laid a mat of several newspapers. Then I introduced the medium the worms would live in. When the worms arrived, I filled the box with wadded pieces of newsprint. The soy-based inks currently in use won't hurt the worms and the paper itself is a digestible wood product.

I then sprinkled the bedding and let it sit so the water could soak in. A bed solely of newspaper is not recommended but I wanted to see the worms convert the paper into soil. Of course, by the time I added soil from a discarded houseplant container and other items, there was quite a mix although it was still paper more than anything else.

Anyway, the wadded paper unwadded and spread out, but at least it didn't mat and that was what I wanted to avoid. To avoid matting and preventing the worms from moving throughout the bed, the newspaper would have been better thoroughly mixed with leaves or potting soil

HOME SWEET HOME

I opened the package with the mail order worms and spread them and the medium they had been living in across the surface. The worms are entering a new environment and the familiar chemicals and other elements contained in the medium they traveled in helps them settle in.

Once they're settled in you can start adding organics to the soil and let them eat it, turning it into rich night soil with their waste, excreted matter referred to as castings.

I probably made a mistake by using the newspaper as bedding because that provided too much food for them to work their way through when the point is to get them to rid you of your organic kitchen waste. Ideally, it seems to me, that would actually mean a fairly nutrient-poor bedding is preferred so that when you add the organic waste, they go after it. On the other hand, paper is free.

There are a few things you don't want to put in with the worms. Citrus is number one, meat is another no-no. Avoid salt, animal feces, heavily spiced foods, oils, any inorganics. For the most part, worms are not too finicky. In fact, coffee drinkers will be please to know that coffee grounds are a popular menu item for worms. Any green waste like corn husks should be dried and aged a bit, perhaps in a compost heap (or mini-heap) outdoors before being given to the worms.

GET THE FACTS

One final note. Read up on the subject. Hunt up a copy of the late Mary C. Applehof's book Worms Eat My Garbage, examine the impressive archive at Earthworm Digest, and check out the search engines for leads to more material.  You can also check out my articles on operating your own worm ranch for a living at my Small Business Ideas group.