The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out...

When I was in college, I signed up to take an Environmental Science course, despite the fact that I was firmly entrenched in my hippie-hiatus period.  It would seem that my subconscious was not so subtly trying to tell me something.

I don't remember a heck of a lot about the class aside from two things:

1. There are a surprisingly large amount of nature preserve parks in Palm Beach County.  I know this for a fact because 50% of my grade depended on me finding these parks, visiting them, and subsequently writing essays about their flora and fauna.
2. My professor was a total hippie.  Hair down to her waist, barefoot, worm composting kind of hippie.  When she was explaining her kitchen worm compost to the class she enthusiastically offered her surplus worms to whoever was interested in starting their own. At the time, I thought she was a total loon.  The thought of having a nest of worms on my kitchen counter sounded ludicrous to me.  

Well, this is me eating my words (thoughts, really).  The idea stuck with me all these years and now that I've embraced this hippie-feeling I decided a worm compost was just the ticket to minimizing my contribution to the landfills.  

Adam and I eat a lot of fresh fruit and veggies and it made no sense to me to put easily biodegradable food waste into a not-so-biodegradable plastic garbage bag.  Not to mention the fact that you can only feed so many raw veggies to the dog before his farts reach toxic, nose hair singeing levels.  After doing some online research Adam and I made a trip to Home Depot and our local bait shop.

We purchased:

• a 3 quart Rubbermaid plastic storage container
• 4 dome wall protectors (you know those things you line up with your door nob to keep it from whacking into the wall and leaving a dent)
• approximately 5 dozen red wigglers  

When we got home I drilled about 20 holes into the bottom of the container with a 1/4" drill bit.  I did 10-15 holes on each of the sides as well.  Next, I stuck the self-adhesive wall protectors onto the bottom 4 corners of the container.  (These will be the feet to facilitate drainage.)  Then, I dug into my perpetually full shredder bin (not something I ever remember to empty on trash day) and filled the container halfway with paper shavings.  A light mist of water to moisten the paper and voila!  A happy house for my new creepy crawly pets!  I put the lid under the bin as a drainage tray and used an old OR towel with a rubber band to cover the top.

Surprisingly I haven't noticed any smell associated with the essentially rotting plant matter on the kitchen counter.  I love the way this bin has basically cut our weekly garbage contribution by half.  We've had our worm compost for about a month now and have strayed a bit from the online guidelines.  Here are my observations:

• We have been lazy about burying the food waste when we put it in the bin so fruit flies have been a problem.  Learn from our mistake and when you drop the food in the worm bin, cover it up with some paper shreds.  It's worth the 2 extra seconds it takes.
• Research recommended feeding your worms once or twice a week.  We have been dropping food in daily as we acquire compost-able items.  Seems to me they are taking an awfully long time to munch our tasty morsels.  We haven't really figured out the ratio of worms to food yet because I can't bring myself to weigh the amount of worms we have and the total amount of waste we put in the bin per week.  I figure they will eventually procreate and make up for the apparent discrepancy.

So, there you have it, sports fans.  My worm composting adventure!  Stay tuned for the next exciting episode:  "Oh Jungle, my Jungle!" 

(For more information check out this link.  It, along with many others, were what I used as a rough guide for making and maintaining my worm bin!)