Vermicomposting

The Canadian winter can be enormously challenging in the winter for composting. With layers of snow and the earth frozen, it’s nearly impossible to start a hot compost without first collecting a few cubic feet of brown and green materials.

Therefore to compost most household paper and green materials, I enrolled a pound of red wigglers worms in a 3-storey worm farm.

Red wigglers are interesting creatures. When in the right conditions, they can consume 1/2 of their body weight daily and convert food waste and other organic materials to a nutrient-rich compost known as vermicast. Gardeners can then sprinkle vermicast into the garden directly, or turn it into compost tea with an aeration process.

The inital worm farm. The top layer is where one can add organic scraps, the middle layer is for harvesting, the bottom layer is for catching excess liquid.

I’ve been testing using different materials for the bedding. Left side is the “before” casting produced by the worm bin, the right side is the “after” shot, with much more nutrient dense casting.

Mixing bedding for worms. It’s a combination of shredded paper, old casting (to add established microorganisms to area), cardboard (for worms to hide and breed), and coffee grounds.

By the second year of raising worms, the worm bin is established healthy enough that the worms are multiplying every month or so. Therefore a second bin was started to house the additional worms.