Relax, don't worry, Red Wigglers are highly adaptive. You can do this - just make sure you take care of the basics
and the worms will adapt to your lifestyle. Take care of your worms just a little bit and they'll take care of your food waste.
Vermicycling, Vermiculture, or Vermicomposting?
What is your goal?
The wormgineer thinks this is the key question. You're going to want to set up your worms with different homes depending
on what you want them to do. Three-ring circuses with worms jumping through flaming hoops is asking a lot, but short of that,
these reliable performers react to their environment and can be "trained".
The importance of the question of what your goal is led me to define terms. Sorry, it's an engineering thing.
- Vermicycling
- Maintaining a worm box for the disposal of food waste
- Vermicomposting
- Maintaining a worm bin for the production of castings and tea
- Vermiculture
- Maintaining a worm bed for the production of worms
These are the three primary functions, and they are usually combined,
and there are other good
reasons for
keeping worms. One important reason is simply because one wants to do something green. You got along fine without
worms and their benefits, right? But we live in a progressive era and I certainly think there is everything right
with doing something green just because it is a good thing to do.
For those reasons and others, another definition is offered, to provide an overarching term for worm-keeping.
- Vermipractice
- The activity of continuously maintaining worm beds
Enough jibber-jabber, time to get on with talking about your worm bin choices. The point is, step 1 in my view
is to make sure you stop and think about what your goals and reasons are. The rest of this page is organized by
those three definitions. You have three choices for a primary goal in terms of your main reason for keeping the
worms:
Vermicycling
Vermicomposting
Vermiculture
For the actual bin, you have two basic choices: a commercially made plastic multi-tray system, which work very well,
or some kind of homemade system, which saves you significant dollars. Remember that just about any given bin will
do a reasonably good job at all the functions, so it's mostly a matter of what any particular bin is good at.
Worm Bins for Vermicycling
So the idea is to get rid of your food waste, as much as possible? Worms can do that.
But there are at least two versions of a goal to get rid of food waste: are you trying to get rid of as
much as possible, or are you trying to balance the amount of waste you normally produce with the ability
of the worms to process it? In other words, are you going to set up for extra capacity, or set up your
worm box no bigger than is typically necessary? When you clean out the nasties in your fridge, if it is too much
for your bin right now, is throwing it in the trash OK?
A third version: a worm bin that adapts to normal seasonal variations in the amount of food waste you create.
Extra Capacity Vermicycling Worm Bins
This is one of the few goals that is probably not well matched with a plastic tray system. There simply isn't room to
put in massive quantities of food waste (10 pounds or so) and keep it buried and not upset the nice flow you can
achieve on a multi-tray system. (This is a conclusion on my part which I will be verifying with others once I get
this site fully launched.)
What is required here is a deep bin so that a large food pile can be well buried, and also rest on top of more than a
little bedding underneath. It is true that Red Wigglers are "surface dwellers", meaning that in natural soil they make
their home in the uppermost few inches, but in a well-ventilated worm box with good bedding, they will go deep
to get to the food.
The depth that matters is from the bottom of the bin to the top of the bedding, the "bed depth". The bin itself can be taller without
problems, except perhaps making it more difficult for you to work in it. My research indicates that the very deepest
bedding depth that makes sense is 24 inches, and that requires special ventilation tricks. Anything beyond that does
in fact risk creating a zone where the worms will not go, and that would be bad. 18 inches is still very deep.
I recommend the right size for this application, for a small family, as an 18 inch tall bin with 12-15 inches
bed depth, no more. A typical large plastic tote is not going to be big enough - something closer to a 2 foot x 2 foot
square box would be a minimum so as to avoid that large food mass from overwhelming the system and risking
odors and flies.
(As time goes by, I plan to develop more precise guidelines, but that engineering analysis awaits more personal experience
and controlled experiments. I would love to get a local science class or ten involved in this stuff - there is some real
live actual science to be done in Vermipractice.)
I am not aware of a commercially available product for this goal. The natural thing to do in this case is to build
yourself a wooden box. (I'll be providing nice detailed plans in the future, please check back and/or get on my
mailing list.) I have to leave it at that for now.
Your choice and application of bedding is going to be important for a deep extra capacity bin. Newspaper is great,
but adding some coconut coir makes a lot of sense here. Also, coffee grounds would be a very good food for this bin.
Both of these would help your worms get to where they want to be, newspaper can get kind of matted up.
You'll want to bury the regular feedings at medium depth, and the big additions of extra food deeper. The regular feedings
won't be as thick themselves as when you do a heavy feeding. So if your bedding is 12 inches deep before feeding, a regular
food layer of 1 inch thickness could be buried with about 4 inches of bedding on top of it. The heavy feedings, as much as three
inches thick, should be basically the opposite: place on top of about 4 inches of bedding/castings and bury under about eight
inches of bedding.
Normal Capacity Vermicycling Worm Bins
If the amount of food to be processed is not too large, and you're fine with it not being able to take care of occasional large
extra amounts, a plastic multi-tray system is a very good match.
(Note that if you want to, faced with a big chunk of good worm food
that you want to vermicycle, you can always set up a new bin. See the Hatchery Bin in the Vermiculture section.)
A multi-tray system is all about creating something close to a continuous flow system. The trays are each at different stages
of completion, and
you can put food in the top tray and harvest the castings from the bottom tray on a regular basis. This isn't exactly a continuous
flow system, I'd call it a "staged batchwise processing method", but it works; a lot of people have had a lot of success with it.
It is a very nice, sanitary, home-friendly way to go; the main disadvantage is the cost, but they are affordable for a lot
of people.
Each of these multi-tray systems has its own quirks and tricks, and I hope to collect some of the wisdom of experienced
worm-keepers in the forums on this site, so that you can benefit from it. I personally have not yet kept one of these systems,
and I like to know what I'm talking about before giving too much advice. For now, I'll simply list the systems I've found available
online.
If you are on a tight budget, or simply like doing things with thrift, a wooden box can be made that will work absolutely fine to
achieve this goal. Of course the other cheap method is to use large plastic totes. They absolutely work well, and for the urban
application that the wormgineer focuses on, they are the way to go. What you give up with both is the
ease of harvest of the castings. Also, you will be mucking around in the contents of your bin from time to time. Personally, I LOVE
playing with the contents of my worm bin, but then being grossed out is a rare thing for me.
One of the things I can offer that you won't find on other websites is very detailed plans for home-made worm bins. I hope to make
this a major
part of the site. I got into this on a minimum-cost basis in the first place. My first worm bin is a prototype for a
cheapest-possible worm bin of large capacity, specifically the largest bin I could build from a single sheet of 1/2" plywood with
a minimum of additional material and hardware. I'll have the updated version of that up soon. (Please make sure you get on the
mailing list to be
notified of new content as I develop it.)
Variable Capacity Vermicycling Worm Bins
This is a smart goal, and while I want you to stop and think about your goals down to this level of detail, in actual practice
this is basically the same thing as the extra capacity version above. Pending further study, the size of the box needs to be
no different, and the bedding would be very similar.
The only real difference is that you might need to lower your expectations a small amount in terms of how fast the food waste
gets processed. For Extra Capacity, you're going to want to make sure you don't ever starve your worms, and you might find yourself
feeding the bin food that is not necessarily waste (extra winter squash or other veggies, for example).
With what I'm calling Variable Capacity,
the idea is that the worms take what they get and if their food supply decreases, the worms might decrease as well, so
when you go to add a lot of food again, they will be slower to process it. (I need to do
more research here too: it is not clear if the size or quantity of worm decrease in this situation. Probably both, but I've
seen conflicting statements on the subject.)
Worm Bins for Vermicomposting
So your goal is to garden with worm castings and tea. Way cool. Getting rid of food waste is great, but what you're
looking for from your worms is that end product, which is like magic, from all accounts.
The plants shoot out of the ground so fast you have to duck out of the way!
But here is one of the main things you need to know about worm-keeping:
You WILL be waiting several months before you get the
kind of high quality castings we're talking about.
MONTHS. In this instant gratification era, you need to be patient.
So before talking about your selection of worm bins, my recomendation is to not worry about how long it takes. Just keep the
worms happy and the castings will come along in due time.
This means that the smart thing to do is start your new worm bin NOW,
no matter when "now" is. If it's the middle of the growing season, by golly you're going to have abundant castings for next year.
If it's the fall, think about all the extra pumpkins and apples that you might get some lucky worms set up with, instead of
letting it rot on the ground - you'll have castings by spring. Start a wintertime bin and you can have castings for summer
vegetable feedings. A springtime start might mean you need to wait a year for castings - but during that year, you'll have
disposed of a lot of food waste and amassed a large store of castings.
For this main goal - Vermicomposting - I break your options down into four categories after you make two choices: Do you want the thrifty approach
or the elegant one, and do you want / need continuous production of castings. By elegant, I refer to a commercial product as
compared with home-made. Note that you can have both by making it yourself by putting the extra effort in to add elegant
features.
Elegant and Continuous
Thrifty and Batched
Thrifty and Continuous
Elegant and Batched
Elegant and Continuous Vermicomposting Worm Bins
I wrote almost all of this page before I even started inventing the WormMaster, WormHab and WormFeeder line of products. To be
fair to my competitors, and because this discussion is for the benefit of not just my customers but anyone looking to set up
red wigglers with a home, of whatever size and purpose, I am going to leave the next paragraph unedited:
If this is your choice, you'll definitely want to purchase a multi-tray system (at least until I invent a superior product :D ).
This is what they are all about. I'm going to repeat a paragraph from above:
So I did: invent a superior product, that is. I'm not going to edit this discussion any more than I have to, but after writing it
a few months ago,
I realized that there were improvements to be obtained on behalf of ordinary people who may or may not be good at worm keeping
with available products. In other words, I set about the task of designing a worm-keeping system that is much more foolproof
than other systems, as foolproof as I possibly
can make it, while keeping it affordable.
I discuss elsewhere just what these improvements are, so I will let you get back to the original discussion now.
A multi-tray system is all about creating something close to a continuous flow system. The trays are each at different stages
of completion, and
you can put food in the top tray and harvest the castings from the bottom tray on a regular basis. This isn't exactly a continuous
flow system, I'd call it a "staged batchwise processing method", but it works; a lot of people have had a lot of success with it.
It is a very nice, sanitary, home-friendly way to go; the main disadvantage is the cost, but they are affordable for a lot
of people.
My product line, the WormGin™ worm bins, belong in this category. Being brand spanking new, I cannot
say my system is mainstream but I will list it first because, well, it's my website and you're going to want to buy the cool
innovative product anyway, right?
There are also four main-stream commercial multi-level worm homes.
WormGin™
- Sophisticated Plastic Bin for High Capacity Food Disposal
- Manufacturer: Wormgineering LLC, Sherwood, Oregon
- Manufacturer website: http://www.wormgineering.com
- Product Website: http://www.worm-gin.com
- http://www.worm-gin.com
See the complete list of worm homes on the How-To page.
Worm Tea
This is a good place to talk about Worm Tea for just a second. This is the liquid you get when you run water through mature Vermicompost,
rich in castings. True Worm Tea is made from pure castings, so it can be drawn off directly from a mature staged worm bin with a bottom
layer ful of unharvested castings. If the water you put in is not running through castings, or if you have a simple box, and you pour
water over it, the tray you keep underneath the bin will collect a liquid, but it isn't necessarily worm tea. Technically, it's called
'leachate' and if it is weak, what you want to do is return that liquid to the bin (unless the bin is too wet).
So leachate isn't Tea unless the water
runs over castings, and until your simple box gets pretty advanced, with a thick layer of castings on the bottom, you get leachate,
not tea. So you can make tea directly from your simple worm box, but not for several months after you start up.
So this is an advantage with the staged tray approach: you are sooner able to make worm tea. Now, making Worm Tea from
castings is easy, so once you've harvested from whatever worm bin you've got, you're in business; whether this advantage
is important is up to you.
Thrifty and Batched Vermicomposting Worm Bins
You can definitely do worms on the cheap. Not only cheap, but very easy. You might already have everything you
need to get started (except the worms) just sitting around your home. That includes apartment dwellers.
What you give up when you go the cheap route is appearance, quick results, and continuous harvest of the worm castings.
Not that a thrifty bin is ugly! The simplest bin is simply a plastic storage bin with holes in it, basically a common
enough household object. Not exactly living room furniture, but the worms are happy in any heated space, so your
worm bin doesn't need to serve as an ottoman anyway. The quick results advantage is for you to be aware of, and the
continuous conversion is no big deal if you accept batch-wise harvesting of castings - the food disposal is still
continuous, but you'll need to keep things balanced as you grow the worm population and the capacity of your bin.
The month matters
I want to again touch on the time of year when you are starting your worm bin. It was pointed out that
the elegant solution gives you quicker and more regular worm castings. That's nice for the growing season, but if
it's November, you don't need castings and tea right away anyway.
As I write, it is early April, so I'm getting ready to start my container garden. I started a thrifty worm bin in
January, so I'm expecting worm castings soon. But I made a large box, and purchased only a pound of worms, so the
contents of my bin is still mostly bedding. The castings have not started to get concentrated on the bottom yet.
As the wormgineer I am, my veggies need to grow on vermicompost, so I am going to go purchase some castings to get
started. That's fine, but the lesson learned is that you really want your worm bin well-established before growing
season starts.
So the point is that you'll want to allow for the time it takes for your worms to get up to speed, and for you to
get a feel for how much food you can put in, and how often. Even with a single simple bin, you can harvest castings
on a regular basis, once it is established.
Update, June 1 2009: I ended up getting a pickup load of compost-rich topsoil for my veggie garden (and same extra
large containers), so I didn't need castings or tea right away. But I'll be buying some this week from Walter at
www.wegotworms4u.com.
My worm bin is doing great, but I don't want to mess with them to harvest castings yet. Walter's product is top-notch,
his prices are too low IMO, and man, does he have nice worm beds. Nice guy too.
Supplemental Feeding
Since your goal is to make castings, you may want to feed
the worms non-waste food to make sure they keep growing in size and in number. Any vegetable or fruit that, when
unharvested, would end up rotting on the ground, is good for this. Another good one is cooked rice - especially if
you are committed to maximum thriftiness. You don't want to be buying fresh produce for your worms, but if you have
a temporary reduction in your food waste, it's OK to feed your worms to keep the population up.
Set it and almost forget it
The thrifty solution, if you don't have all the castings you need, requires you to be more hands-on with your
worm bin. I think it's fun, but what if you don't agree? Well, it looks to me like
if you want the ultimate lazy-man's way to do vermipractice,
all you have to do is add patience to your thrift. (Benjamin Franklin would have loved Vermicomposting.)
Here's what I
mean: you can set up a plastic-tote worm bin with a large amount of food, get the moisture and ventilation right,
and maintain it only once a month for 6 months, and you should end up with a large amount of really good vermicompost -
and some hungry worms. (I say this confidently, but again, I'm a beginner still and I need to verify some of my statements -
I am hoping to get as many people as possible to help me experiment with this technique.) There's a lot to talk about on
this concept, and I hope you'll join us on the forums. To me, the thrifty and effectively continuous worm box is one of
the keys to enabling explosive growth in vermipractice.
Have I confused you yet? I'm sorry, it's just that I want you to stop and think about not just your goals but your
circumstances and the timing of your adventure in worm-keeping. It turns out that this category has a very large number of
choices, and I want you to realize that if you like doing clever things cheap and with your own approach and style, the
worms are there for you, baby. Do it your way, I'm all for supporting that as your friendly neighborhood wormgineer.
For example, do you have an old small cheapo dresser? That would make an awesome wormbin, they can migrate up and down
between the drawers, it would be like a super-sized plastic tray set-up.
Plastic Tote or Wooden Box
To clarify a bit, when I say a 'thrifty' bin I'm talking about either a plastic tote with holes punched in it or some sort
of wooden box. (My first worm bin is a prototype for the largest bin you can build from a single sheet of plywood and
little else.) Because there are no false bottoms like in a tray system, you need to manage the contents more actively.
My objective with this page is to let you consider how to create your individual worm bin solution
by thinking forward to what you'll be doing to maintain it. I hope you get the idea that this is a very easy
thing to do. You don't have to be a craftsman or a green thumb type or athletic and graceful even. I can even tell you
how to do it in a single paragraph:
Build a cheap box with
airholes, rip up a bunch of newspaper, get it wet, lay in food waste, more wet newspaper, more newspaper than that even,
maybe a few handfuls of things worms like (grit & soil etc.), maybe some bedding extenders like coir, cardboard or aged
manure, but newspaper only works fine and works very well as the top layer of bedding.
Buy worms, lift up the top bedding and put them on top of the food and bury the
food and worms. Pop the lid on and put the bin where it goes, you are done. You'll check it, and once you know you've got
good ventilation and the right amount of water, leave them alone for a while. Gather your food scraps in a closed
container, feed weekly, move the food pile around a bit. Observe and react.
Providing additional information on the detail of how exactly to do each step, for those who are looking for that level
of detail, is what the "below the fold" section of this website is all about. There is a lot of good info on the web, I'll try
to send you to the best of it, provide a little commentary, and introduce you to the wild world of worms. After the site
launches, I have high ambitions for creating my own multi-media material. My focus is going to be on providing very
complete information so that beginners can get off to a great, individualized start by being well informed and well
prepared.
The 'observe and react' line at the end of my one-paragraph overview covers a lot of ground. You'll want to know what
'normal' is, what different kinds of 'abnormal' to watch out for, and what to do about it in each case. Look for future
updates where I will be sorting this all out.
Harvest the castings in batches
I didn't really talk about the batch-wise aspect of this category. In actual practice, what this means is that you're
going to work your worm bed over monthly or more often and the bottom and corners will start becoming areas where castings
are concentrated. At some point, you will establish an area to harvest in the next month or so. You'll keep food out
of that area until then, and work the bed with that plan in mind. When ready, you pull a batch of castings out of that area,
remove the worms and send them home, and you can start feeding in that area now. With a big enough bin, you can also
work it so that you now have the ability to harvest batches of castings from other areas in their turn. This is what
I mean by batch-wise harvesting.
Thrifty and Continuous Vermicomposting Worm Bins
I sorted vermicomposting bins out into four categories even though the two discussed above cover the vast majority of typical
worm bins. But this category is interesting to think about. Is there a way to get multi-tray convenience by clever
management of a simple box full of bedding, food and worms? My answer? Maybe, I don't know, I'm just a beginner
with big ideas. HOWEVER, from an engineering standpoint, there is a very simple solution.
Above, I discussed that if you combine thrift with patience, you can do a very low-effort worm bin. It's low effort
because the vast majority of the work is ripping up newspaper and other bin start-up tasks,
like drilling holes, which is of course fun anyway. You do almost all the work
up front (when you're all excited about your new project: this aspect is favorable to worm bin growth); after that
maintenance is light duty. Weekly checks and feedings make more sense than monthly, but worms are forgiving.
In combining thrift and patience, logically we're talking about investing, right? If we extend our involvement in vermipractice
such that we get excited about it once a month, instead of just once in a lifetime, we can invest in worms and reap the rewards
at a future date. (What a great lesson for kids here!)
What I am suggesting is that if you set up a worm bin every month or two, collecting food waste in closed containers between
start-ups, well hey presto when they start reaching maturity you will have massive quantities of castings and worms to
provide to friends and families. To keep each bin fed, this might take more food waste than your family normally produces,
and I certainly would be
against the regular practice of feeding them stuff fit for human consumption, but if you arranged to get the food scraps
from neighbors, this would be a worthwhile endeavor for the enthusiastic worm-keeper.
One little problem: it might be illegal, in violation of health codes, etc., for individuals to supply their food
waste to other than their licenced refuse hauler. Yet, my information shows there are cities doing this.
Another task for post-launch of the website: research and report on this topic. (Did I mention that there is
much to talk about on the forums?)
Also, we have to note that you would need worms for each bin, and worms don't come free (nor should they!!) but
hey, that's why I call it an investment. They are either going to multiply or at least - if you stop feeding that is -
give you the castings you wanted in the first place, and in plenty.
The other alternative
OK, maybe you don't want that many worm bins but you'd like to have continuous harvest. Did I mention I'm an inventor?
I am going to design such a bin for low cost and not much more for tools than a cordless drill, so that you can go to the
lumber/hardware store and pick most or all of what you'll need, whip it together and get started low-cost but full-featured.
(Please make sure you sign up on the
mailing list to receive updates when new content is released.) That will be published for free download in the
spirit of open source.
Update, June 1 2009:
I invented something similar instead. :-) But I'll leave this promise in place and if I am successful with my line of
products, I will deliver on this design. The thing is, plastic totes are less expensive than even cheap plywood boxes.
Elegant and Batched Vermicomposting Worm Bins
This is the fourth category, but there's not much to talk about on this one.
For starters, this indicates to
me that the plastic multi-tray systems are not just the way to go for anyone looking to avoid the home-made look,
including the plastic totes, but that these commercial products are mature designs, well matched to the market. I
am interested in supplying people with thrifty solutions, but that doesn't mean I think the tray systems are
at all overpriced. Not at all: I think they are good value, and if you can afford one, don't hesitate to go
that way. Remember too that you can always keep more than one bin if you have the food supply. (Have I mentioned
that there is some real science to be done with worms?)
The other point here is that I smell a design opportunity. I have a rough idea in the back of my brain for an
innovative design for a very convenient batch-wise harvesting method. To fit this category, it would be a commercial
product I would bring to market, but I might decide to publish a plywood DIY version instead. We'll see what develops.
Worm Bins for Vermiculture
OK, switch gears to a different goal. This section is about bins designed for the goal of growing worms: we need more worms,
we always are going to need more worms. Bring me worms! More worms! Let our worms rule the world! bwahahaha...
This is a subject for the pros. There are worm pros, you know. Guys and gals who are the pioneers of the future comeback
of composting worms. They breed and raise mostly Red Wigglers, but the European Red Worms and the African Nightcrawlers are
also grown on a commercial basis.
Compared to those guys? I don't know nuthin'. So this will be a very short section for a change.
My understanding is that a breeding bed is typically not very deep, no more than 6 inches.
It is of course well-fed and well-observed. The bedding is loose but never allowed to go dry. There is
typically a thick but breathable cover over the top, such as carpeting, to retain moisture. The bed need
not be in a heated area, but shelter from sun and wind and temperature extremes is a must. Many
operations are tied-in with a steady
source of manure. Note that most but not all animal manures require a year of aging before becoming
worm-ready.
Worms in limited quantities can be easily harvested simply by dragging your hand through the bed to capture
them, because a well-established, thriving bed is very densely populated. It appears (unconfirmed) that the
worms will breed in response
to the removal of adults, so the worm-keeper can just feed at a constant rate unless the bed is over-harvested.
My research turned up some interesting tricks and techniques for raising worms up as fast as possible. Some
very interesting techniques indeed. Yet another area of research I need to do post launch of this site.
(BTW, if you want to get a junior high or high
school science class going on some real live science experimentation, or maybe a science fair project, let me know!)
I'm not holding out on you - I just like to know what I'm talking about before I write. I'm looking for confirmation
first before relaying these tricks.
Hatchery Bins
I promised a section on this, when I was talking about how to deal with a big chunk of food by starting a new worm bin. One version
of your new bin could be a hatchery bin. What you do is feed them a lot at a time and then starve them a bit. This stimulates cocoon
production. That's what my research and best guess says, anyway.
So you get another short section here - I need to run a few experiments and talk to more people about all this stuff before I start
telling everybody what works and what doesn't. As soon as I gain some certainty, this section will be updated and I'll have instructions
on setting up hatchery bins.
