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 2: Backyard Composting

So, what if your municipality doesn't have a food waste recycling program (Composting Series, Part 1)? Whether you're an avid home gardener (cheap fertilizer!) or just looking for a way to use those food scraps, if you have some yard space to spare, keeping a backyard compost bin can be a good way to reduce garbage going to our landfills while also producing a valuable resource.

Backyard composting is an effective and environmentally-friendly way to manage the organic waste that households produce. It helps to reduce pollution, our carbon footprint, and disposal costs, while also improving the environment and keeping organic matter in the ecological cycle.

And did we mention that it'll reduce the need to store (increasingly) smelly garbage indoors until garbage collection day?

Source: Enviro World

That's all fine and great, but how does composting work?

Your compost bin works through the power of bacteria -- all you need to do is create the right conditions for the bacteria in the bin to thrive, and they will produce rich, earthy-smelling compost using just food scraps.

Bacteria need three things:

1) An equal mix of carbon-rich ("brown") and nitrogen-rich ("green") material.

Nitrogen provides the protein for bacteria to grow and multiply, while carbon provides the energy that bacteria need to do the work of composting.

For every bucket of kitchen scraps or lawn clippings you put in, add an equal volume of fallen leaves or paper products. Always cover "green" material with a 3- to 4-inch layer of "brown" material.

Click here for a list of "green" and "brown" material, as well as other compostable materials.

2) Oxygen

Oxygen-loving (or aerobic) bacteria transform organic material into compost without producing bad odours. Add oxygen at least once a week to your compost using a pitchfork or strong stick or a special aerating tool. The more you aerate, the faster you will have finished compost. If the contents of your compost bin get too compacted, anaerobic bacteria will ferment your food scraps, creating ammonia, or rotten egg, odours.

For more on aerating your compost bin, click here.

3) Moisture

Without water, living organisms die. The contents of your compost bin should be moist like a damp, wrung-out sponge. The fresh "green" material you add to your bin will usually provide enough moisture; however, if your bin is in the sun, you are using a lot of dry "brown" material, or if it is a particularly hot outside, you may need to water the contents of the bin to keep the bacteria and other decomposers alive.

Source: Home Composting Made Easy

What do I need to compost?

These 10 easy steps will get you composting in no time!

1) Choose a flat, partly-sunny area with good drainage.

2) Purchase a compost bin -- you can get one from your municipality or from a store -- or build your own rodent-proof compost bin. Keeping a lid on your bin will help keep out rain and wildlife. The ideal size for a bin is one cubic metre; this will help the bin retain the heat it generates.

3) Create a 6 to 10 cm base layer using straw, leaves, or woody brushy material to promote air circulation.

4) Alternate layers of "green" and "brown" materials.

5) Whenever you add a layer of food scraps, top it off with a layer of "brown" material, about 5o to 8 cm high. If you use only "green" material (e.g. kitchen scraps), your compost will likely be wet and will break down more slowly.

Tip: To ensure you have plenty of "brown" material throughout the year, collect dry leaves in the fall in an old garbage container and use them as needed.

6) Mix the contents of your compost bin every week or two. This allows air into the bin and helps the bin to heat up again so that the contents decompose faster.

7) The moisture content of your compost should be damp like a wrung-out sponge or dishcloth. Only add water if the contents of the bin are very dry after mixing.

8) As your pile of compost shrinks, continue to add layers of "green" and "brown" materials until the bin is almost full.

9) Your compost will typically be ready after 2 to 3 months, though ageing the compost for an additional 1 to 2 months is recommended.

10) Harvest your compost when the compost at the bottom and centre is decomposed, full of healthy worms, and moist. Dig out the compost with a shovel. In a commercial bin, use the door at the bottom of the bin. If you built your own bin, move the top layers aside and dig the compost out from the centre layers.

And that's that -- not that difficult at all, eh?

But what if I don't have room for a traditional compost bin? What if I live in an apartment?

Visit back next week for Part 3 of our Composting Series on apartment composting.

Resources

North Shore Recycling Program
Metro Vancouver