Garden Recycling with Red Worms

When I moved to the Texas hill country, I wanted worms to help me make compost faster. I was composting horse manure which doesn’t compost as fast as some of the other manures and I needed lots of compost to amend the soil in the garden. By the time I got around to ordering the worms, I found I could only get them shipped in the winter and early spring.

So this past February, I ordered a pound of worms. I re purposed one of the large storage bins we had packed our household stuff in to move it here. Worms need air and they make a liquid as a byproduct of their digesting garbage. This liquid needs to be drain off so the worms don’t get too wet and drown. So I drilled lots of one-fourth inch holes in the sides and bottom of the bin and set it on some left over 2 X 4’s to keep it off the ground and allow good drainage and air exchange.

Then I shredded paper – mostly junk mail, ads on flat paper, phone books,

and newspapers, and mixed it with my horse compost that had composted twice. That is, it composted a few weeks, then I turned it into another bin for another few weeks before mixing it half and half with the paper. I moistened it all and added the worms. I waited a few days to start adding the garbage and, at first, only used part of the garbage for the worms.

In two months, I was able to harvest worms and put the old vermicompost into a new bin. It still had a few worms and lots of worm eggs in it but I just put a lid on it and left it in the same shady place where my worm bin resides. I made a new batch of matrix with the shredded paper and composted horse manure and put the harvested worms back. Now, almost another two months later, this batch is almost ready for harvesting.

To harvest the worms, I just dumped the contents of the bin on to an a piece of plastic. Then I scrapped off the top layers, allowing the worms to borrow deeper and deeper until they reached the bottom. Finally I was able to have a pile of almost pure worms, which I gathered up and dumped into their new bedding. Now, almost another I can add the garbage from a household of four and they are able to keep up with their golden habit of turning it into really rich compost.

There are easier ways to harvest. You can just take half the bedding, along with the worms that are in it and put it to finish ripening in another bin. The worms will die and add to the to the compost. You can even buy a system that has a stack of worm bins. You just add new bins as needed and the worms can move up from lower to higher bins. You harvest the vermicompost from the bottom-most bin.

Worms are endlessly fascinating to children and my grandson loves to visit them. And soon, I hope, we’ll take a few fishing and catch some sunfish. Meanwhile they work endlessly to get rid of my garbage and help my garden grow.