Vermiculture

A week or so ago, K and I, along with some friends of ours, made a vermiculture kit, or worm bin.  Our apartment doesn’t come with any yard space, and we don’t know of any community composting available, so for us, vermiculture seemed the best option for returning our food and other organic waste to the earth rather than sending it to a landfill where it would not have the proper conditions to decompose.  One of our friends had just been taught about setting up a vermiculture kit, and I checked out a book from the library called Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Applehof.  Setting up the worm bin was surprisingly cheap, easy and fun.  I won’t go into the details here but will instead recommend interested persons to read Worms Eat My Garbage to get a concise and detailed guide on vermi-composting.

After almost two weeks, our worms seem to be thriving and have devoured beyond recognition the first couple days worth of food that we gave them; I’ve noticed that even with a plastic bin full of worms and food, our apartment smells decidedly better than when we were throwing our food scraps into a garbage bin; and since we know we need to gather food scraps for the worms, we keep an old yogurt container by us while we cook and put the scraps in there, making cleanup a breeze.  When the yogurt container is full, we simply burry its contents under a bedding of damp, shredded newspaper and the worms have at it!  As I understand, they’ll continue to digest the scraps for two to three months, at which point we’ll have a tub of worm castings rich in nutrients for our houseplants, or to dump in an empty lot to fertilize the plant-life there.