Wormgineering Waste Food into Humus for Urban Gardens

Blue sky, green grass, bright red butterfly in the middle

This entire site was written before I decided to try to develop my own worm bins. It is basically two pages in one: The upper portion and its menu is about a thought experiment I conducted and documented here, namely "how to divert a large chunk of Portland's food waste to vermiculture." This plan was never more than a wild idea. But then I realized there was a need in the marketplace for an affordable "do it for me" worm bin based on the popular but not always successful plastic bin design.

Math can be fun.

Really!

Waste

Worms

Humus

Worm Math

Do you like math? No? That's a shame, really, don't you think? You like figuring out how to do things, right? Math helps with that.

Oh well, if you don't like math, that's OK, because I do. I do math for fun. (Now you KNOW I'm an Engineer.)

I'm going to "do the math" for Vermiculture. I've taken a first stab on the 'Vision' page and I'll copy some of that over to here. I can't do it all, but I can cover the basics. Here are some of the things I want to determine and make available to everybody:

How do I know just how much water to use with my shredded newspaper?
How do I build a super-cheap worm bin?
How do I build a worm bin of exactly the size I want?
How do I build the largest worm bin I can from a single sheet of plywood?
How many pounds of worms are in my bin these days?
Do I need to worry about pH?
What's the deal with adding grit and soil and lime and other stuff?

This is just a starter list, more later. For one thing, I want to set up a mathematical model of a generic wormbin and see where that analysis takes me. The idea would be to come up with some predictive equations based on empirical data, perhaps using dimensionless parameters. :-) That would give us the ability to "dial in" our worm bins: we could then feed at the optimum rate for vermiculture, vermicomposting or vermicycling, for starters. It's the kind of study that will cause questions to present themselves - and hopefully provide answers for them.

Also, I'm pretty sure I had some other basic stuff for this list that is slipping my mind right now. But I am my own webmaster, so this page WILL get updated when I remember.