Verms, Baby. Verms.

Vermicomposting is a super-wicked-easy way to compost. It’s fast, it’s active year ’round, there’s no odour and, best of all, you don’t have to haul your scraps outside to do it.

The first step is to build yourself a “worm bin” to house your table scraps and your dark minions (the worms). You can purchase pre-made bins if you want to go the easy route, but making one yourself isn’t difficult. The following is for an ‘average’ bin size – if you have a large family, eat a lot of vegetables (or have a lot of vegetables go bad in your fridge!) you may want something bigger. Or, you may want a second bin! It’s always a good idea to start small, however, until you know what your actual needs are.

The method I’m going to describe here is only one of many. We decided to go with the “double binned” version rather than the “drainage tray” method because we have dogs. Dogs like things that smell bad. Dogs will then consume bad-smelling drainage. Humans will then gag a lot. In a household with well-behaved pets (and kids that don’t poke around in things) you may prefer the drainage pan method instead of the double-bin. Do a google search for vermicomposting bins for more ideas.

Head over to Canadian Tire or Zellers and pick up a plastic Rubbermaid bin that’s slightly larger than a “blue box” recycling bin. This bin will be used on the outside of the worm bin – to collect any excess liquid that drains out – keeping your worms from drowning in vegetable juice, essentially.

Next, find another plastic bin that’s a tiny bit smaller and which has a lid. This will be the bin in which the worms will actually live. It should fit into the larger bin, but with a bit of a gap between the bottom of the inner bin and the bottom of the outer bin. You can fake this gap by putting two or three big rocks in between the two bins to ‘jack up’ the inner bin a little, though the rocks will get kind of funky and require washing/replacements.

Turn the smaller “inner” bin over and drill some small holes for drainage in random areas. Ideally, you’ll make the holes small enough that the worms can’t escape and drown. Some people add a mesh screen to the bottom – we’ve never bothered to do that, and our casualties have been minimal.

Grab a bunch of old newspapers that you’ve been meaning to put out with recycling, and start shredding it all into small strips. We use our regular “office” paper shredder to do this – the process was faster and we got all the paper a consistent size. The newspaper serves two purposes – one, to provide shelter for the worms, and two, to provide them with extra snacks when they’ve finished eating all the vegetables you toss in. Consider it “bedding” for the worms.

Once the paper is fully shredded, put it in your kitchen sink and add water. You want the paper to be wet like a sponge – not turned into pulp – so use your hands to mush the water into the paper until it’s all moist but not super-duper soggy. Some people add shredded cardboard, brown leaves, straw, peat moss or sawdust – anything that’s naturally edible by worms. You can definitely combine bedding materials if you want.

Dump the wet paper into the inner bin. You’ll want it to be about 3/4 full – so add more if needed. Mix in a few handfulls of organic soil – something that has no pesticides (duh). The worms use this as “grit” to help them digest the food. Fluff everything up using your hands – the worms want space to move around in there!

Next, you need worms! Red Wigglers are the ideal vermicomposting beasts – they’re hardy, eat faster than anything you can imagine, and they’re usually sold by the pound either locally or by mail order. You can start with one pound as the worms increase their population very quickly with the right (food) encouragement. I haven’t sourced a local supplier in KW, but I’ll post that info when I do. It’s possible to use other types of worms, of course, but they’re much less efficient and you’ll be waiting a looooooooooong time for them to eat your scraps. Find the Red Wigglers!

Toss the worms into the bin and close the lid. They’ll start the housewarming party almost immediately – by disappearing. You won’t be seeing them again for a while as they’re not fond of light.

Now you’re ready to start feeing the little suckers. The trick is to get them used to regular dining by starting slowly. You don’t want to overwhelm them, but you do want them to know that if they want to make a bunch of little baby worms you’ll support ‘em. One pound of worms will handle about 1/2 a pound of vegetable waste daily!

Worms have a specific diet, and it’s important not to give them anything they can’t/won’t eat. They’ll happily eat fruit and vegetables and their peels (try to avoid a lot of citrus as it upsets the pH in the bin), egg shells, tea bags and coffee grounds. Do not add meats, dairy products, oily foods, or grains as they cause odors, bad pH and make for unhappy worms. You can also toss in paper (shredded, of course) and boxboard (your milk carton, for example), used kleenex, paper towel…

Chop the vegetables into small pieces using a knife or, if you’re fancy, a food processor. (Seriously? Too much work and clean-up that way!) Open the top of the bin and note that there are no worms visible. Using your hand (or a wooden spoon) you’ll want to dig a small hole down into the bedding. Don’t use a metal spoon/fork/etc as you may injure the worms that are hiding in there. Drop the food into that little hole and cover it back up with bedding.

There. You’ve fed the worms.

Each day that you add food, you’ll want to put it in a different place. It makes sense to start in one corner and work your way around the bin, or do a specific pattern that you’ll remember. The idea is to allow the worms to spread out through the bin and do their job. It’s also good to avoid disturbing the worms when they’re “working” on eating something from a previous day.

As your worm population increases, you can add more food in. If you don’t eat veggies on a particular day, that’s okay too – the worms have that newspaper bedding to gnaw on, and probably some leftovers from the previous days. Still, you want to try to be somewhat consistent so you don’t have some sort of mass-worm death on your hands.

On a regular basis, check the outer bin for liquid and empty it. It’s amazing when used to ‘water’ plants – the nutrients are fantastic. Alternately, feel free to dump it outdoors in your garden. It can stink like nobody’s business!

One neat thing is that the composting is not being done solely by the worms in your bin. There are anaerobic microbes helping out – they start the digestive process and the worms come along and finish it. Sometimes you may actually see little ‘mites’ in the bin – this, too, is nothing to worry about.

Eventually, several weeks or a month or two later, you’ll note that the newspaper seems to have disappeared from the bin and has been replaced with brown dirt. Also known as castings. Also known as worm poo. This is like gold for your plants and gardens. It’s time to harvest your bin and get things freshened up.

There are, of course, several ways to harvest your bin. You can choose between the hands-on method (the one that involves touching the worms quite intensely) or the method that takes longer but doesn’t involve any human-worm contact.

To do the hands-on method, lay a big black garbage bag (or tarp) in the middle of your kitchen floor. Dump the bin out in the middle – into a big pile of.. worms and castings. Wash out the bin with water, and prepare it again as if it were a whole new bin (wet, shredded newspapers and dirt). Using your hands, dig through the castings and pick out worms. Toss them into the fresh bin.

This method, while kind of gross, is a neat way to actually see your worms. You’ll first be stunned by how the population has increased – it’s seriously crazy stuff. Then you’ll see all the little lemon-shaped egg sacs that the worms have “laid” – each one contains between two and twenty baby worms. (You can decide whether to put those eggs into the new bin or not.)

If your population has exploded greatly, you’ll want to remove some of the worms (start a bin for a friend, start a second for yourself, put them in the garden..) You may be surprised by how many friends are keen on the idea – so offer them up, first, before you toss ‘em outside. (And, obviously, don’t toss them in the winter!)

Once you’ve picked out all of the worms, the rest is, as noted, pure gold. Store it in sealed containers (we use old plastic ice cream tubs) and it’ll keep for a good long time. Put a sprinkling of castings on the top of each houseplant and watch them explode into bloom. It’s crazy!

Hand out small yogurt cups of the castings in your office to promote happy growth of the deprived spider plants in all the cubes. Put it on your flower bed in the spring (if you collect enough) or give it as gifts. People will look at you like you’re insane – until they try it and see the results. Castings are exceptionally high-quality compost – consider that they’re made up of.. pure vegetable nutrients! Some people make “worm tea” by adding castings to water, stirring, and watering their house plants with it.

The other method – the less hands-on – for harvesting involves gradually changing out the bedding in the bin. By pushing the castings to one side and filling the other side with new bedding (and only adding food to that side) the worms are encouraged to move on their own. It is said to take about 2 weeks for them to complete the move. You can then harvest the castings that they’ve vacated in favour of greener pastures and add more clean bedding. We’ve never tried this method, so YMMV.

A good bin that’s been well cared for will have no odours, save for the ‘wet newspaper’ smell when the bin is opened, and any drainage that you need to remove from the tray or outer bin. There are no fruit flies or pests buzzing around in or around it. The worms are healthy and multiplying gleefully as they eat and eat and eat. Since the bin can be kept anywhere you choose (out of direct sunlight and heat) you can put it under your kitchen sink, in a closet, on the counter.. wherever it’s convenient for you.

And that’s it. That’s all there is to worm composting. It’s super-duper easy once you’ve got yourself setup, it’s faster than traditional outdoor composting, it’s odour-free, and it’s FUN. I mean, come on! WORMS! In your HOUSE! NEAT!