Composting Series, Part 4: Worm Composting

Worm composting, or vermicomposting, is an easy, efficient way to recycle food waste and produce fine, high-quality compost for your houseplants or garden. Worm bins can be used in apartments, gardens, and even offices.

Compost bins can be easily purchased from your municipality. Once filled with kitchen waste and bedding material, red wiggler worms go to work and munch through your food scraps.

Why compost with worms?

Here's the dirt:

1) Reduce your garbage

Organic waste such as kitchen food scraps and garden clippings make up about a third of all household garbage going to the landfill today. Composting is one of the easiest ways to help reduce garbage volume.

2) It's easy

Once your worm bin is established, adding materials and bedding (brown material) become routine. Plus, the worms do most of the work for you!

3) Help the environment

Less waste means fewer trucks on the road moving garbage to landfills, not to mention less methane gas generated by landfills. Composting also helps to recycle nutrients back into the earth.

4) Improve your garden

Using compost in your garden will help the soil retain moisture after rain or watering.

5) Reduce use of chemical fertilizers

Help keep local waterways clean by avoiding chemical fertilizers -- composting provides a high-quality source of fertilizer, minus the chemical impact on the environment.

Source: Planet Natural

How do I get started?

The sample principles for backyard composting apply to worm composting. Layering dry, brown, carbon-rich materials in between your kitchen scraps and regularly aerating your compost will help improve your composting success. Similarly, fish, meat, and oil should never touch your composter.

1) Fill your empty worm bin with a variety of bedding material and two handfuls of sand or soil.

2) Add water to the bedding so its overall moisture level is like a wrung-out sponge. Ensure that the container is half-full of bedding.

3) Lift the bedding gently, using a tool, to create air spaces. This helps control odours and gives the worms freer movement.

4) Add the worms.

5) Add food scraps by pulling aside some of the bedding, dumping in the scraps, and covering the scraps with bedding.

6) Bury successive loads of food scraps in different locations of the bin.

7) Harvest your compost in one to three months. The contents of your bin will be brown and earthy-looking when ready.

For a handy guide on worm composting, and on composting successfully and common problems encountered, visit the Metro Vancouver website guide here.

Missed the earlier parts of the series? Check them out here.

Part 1: Food Scraps Recycling
Part 2: Backyard Composting
Part 3: Apartment Composting

Composting Series, Part 3: Apartment Composting

Want to divert your food waste to a compost bin but don't think you have the space? Believe it or not, if you have even a small balcony or unused corner in your apartment, there's a way to compost!

Here are a few ways for apartment dwellers who want to compost. Not sure if it's for you? Start small and see what works for you.

Indoor compost bin

Source: Apartment Therapy

One of the cheapest, easiest ways to compost indoors with minimal space is to use a metal garbage can modified for use as a compost bin.

All you need is a garbage bin in a size of your choosing (drilled with holes), newspaper, a rubber mat, potting mix, composted manure, old furniture legs or small wooden legs, and of course, food scraps. With this method, it will take approximately 3 months to generate usable compost.

Worried about the smell? When properly aerated and kept, with a balance between food scraps and dry material, kitchen bins will largely be odourless.

This is a simple, inexpensive way to compost and costs only as much as you're willing to put down for your garbage bin and other supplies.

You can find a step-by-step tutorial on making your own indoor compost bin here and here.

Fermentation

Fermentation... for compost? That's right, folks!

Source: Bokashi Composting

The Bokashi Composting System uses a microbial agent to ferment food scraps to produce ready-to-use compost in just two weeks. Unlike other composters, you can even compost meat, fish, and dairy, with no gross smells or bugs -- all you need to do is add your food scraps and the bran containing the necessary micro-organisms to anaerobically ferment your kitchen waste.

Once the fermentation is completed, the compost scraps (or pre-compost) can be added to a worm bin or buried directly into soil. They'll take anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks to integrate into the soil, depending upon local soil biological activity and local climate. You can also convert the pre-compost into usable potting soil.

Starter kits, complete with bin and bran, start at $50.

You can find out more about fermenting compost at the Bokashi website here.

Electric composters

Source: NatureMill

If you're short on square footage, a mechanized composter is a garbage can-sized unit that can easily be stowed in a standard cabinet.

Electric composters mix, heat, and aerate food scraps before transferring the material to a lower chamber, which produces fresh, garden-ready compost -- every two weeks!

Though odour-free and small, the composters can get pricey, so be prepared to pay upwards of $100 for a unit.

Vermicomposting

Vermi-what? Vermicomposting refers to composting using worms and taps into the digestive talents of wriggly earthworms to break down organic matter into compost. It's good for small spaces but can also be used as a substitute or supplement to backyard composting.

Want to learn more? Visit us next week for the last part of our Composting Series on worm composting!

Missed the first two parts of the Series?

Part 1: Food Scraps Recycling
Part 2: Backyard Composting