Last October we decided to start a worm compost and purchased our first composter – the Eco-Stack Composter from Gardener’s Supply.

With all the gardening we do and all the kitchen scraps we produce, the responsible thing to do would be to recycle it all and give it back to the garden. And it has been working superbly. Digging to the composter’s lower depths reveals a mucky “black gold” of compost. Its odor reminds me a bit of our cow barn when I was growing up, and frankly that’s not a bad thing. It smells of nutritious earth.

After a while, though, a composter needs to be closed off and left alone for a few months. This allows the compost “cooking” to complete itself all through the pile. You don’t add new flour to a cake when it’s baking, right? If you keep adding scraps and sticks to a compost pile, the newer additions are never completely broken down.

So on the first of July, we stopped adding new material to the outdoor composter. We will let it sit for the next four months to finish, turning occasionally to make sure everything in there is being acted on.

Opening Up a Worm Compost Factory

What to do with our food waste now? We bought a Worm Factory composter and 2 lbs. of red wiggler worms from Gardener’s Supply. It’s more of a worm “apartment building” with four trays or “floors” that stack one on the other. Each tray has a perforated bottom. You layer worm bedding – a combination of coconut shell fiber, shredded newspaper, garden “dirt” and some pumice sandwiched between two layers of moistened newspaper.

Starting with Tray #1, we added a small pile of food scraps—carrot ends, zucchini peels, egg shells, coffee grounds—to one corner and the batch of newly arrived red wigglers to the opposite corner. Then we covered the tray and let the worms get used to their new home, making their way over to their food over the next few days.

Over the next 4-6 weeks, we’ll slowly distribute food over the whole tray, and they will happily eat their way through it. When the food level reaches within an inch of the brim, it’s time to place Tray #2 on the food surface and let the worms work their way to the “apartment building’s” second floor. We are just about to reach that second step this week. If everything goes well, by the time Tray #4 is full of food, Tray #1, at the bottom of the stack, should be full of vermicompost.

Vermicompost

Vermicompost is the fancy term for what the worms produce. The worms eat the food scraps and process it through their bodies. What they expel at the end is basically worm poop, rich in phosphorus, nitrogen, and all the good nutrients that were in those scraps of tomatoes and egg shells. If you’ve ever seen a worm hole in the ground, the piles of “dirt” around the opening are vermicompost and the same consistency of what you’ll get from your worm bins.

Worm compost is a nutritious yet mild fertilizer with very little odor. In fact, I’ve collected some worm compost that filtered out of the tray and have sprinkled it onto some houseplants. We keep our worm composter in the house. In fact, it’s sitting right next to the cats’ litter box, and you wouldn’t even know it was there. The cats suspect something fun is happening inside the trays, however.

This is, of course, just a brief synopsis of worm composting. But please consider it a positive testament to having a worm bin. I’m thrilled with its possibilities for continued food scrap recycling—and so are the cats.