My New Vermicomposting System

I've been really excited about this. Worm composting has interested me for years, but I just haven't gotten myself together to do it before now. But as I've told several people, I don't think I'd be much more excited if I'd gotten a puppy instead of a pound of worms.

As I alluded to in the last post, I've been having a few anxiety issues in the last few days. Much of that has dissolved in my excitement about the worms. Worm composting is very, very fascinating. Check out the website for Flowerfield Enterprises, a worm composting business: Flowerfield Enterprises

And yes, that is a live link that you see.

Flowerfield was founded by the woman pictured a few posts ago, Mary Appelhof, who authored the book that I can be seen reading below, which is entitled Worms Eat My Garbage.







I ordered a kit through Flowerfield that included the bin, the worms, the book, and a few other accessories.



The first thing that you need to do to compost with worms is prepare some bedding for them. The most common bedding is wet newspaper strips, which you can see above. Those newspapers strips are from nothing less than copies of the Mt. Sterling Advocate and the Ithaca Times.

I then mixed in water, a little bit of soil, and some egg shells. The soil and egg shells are to provide grist for the earthworms.








They were in the box you can see above. Cool, huh?













Aren't they great?





Once you've opened the box, you just spread them on top of the bedding. Then, you leave them in a room with the light on, so that they'll dig into the bin, in order to get away from the light. The instructions from sweet Mary Appelhof said that they would do that within an hour, but they were moving so slowly at first that I worried a bit. But already so much calmer because of my new hobby, I tore myself away and attended to some work for an hour.




And sure enough, as you can see in the next two photographs, there were no worms to be seen on top of the bedding. I can now feed them various kinds of foods, which they'll turn into compost!









And for those of you grossed out by worms, you should know that dear Mary Appelhof started worm composting because she didn't like the smells that resulted from her kitchen garbage when she didn't compost. Her instructions are pretty finicky, and it is clear that she does not like food-rotting smells any more than the rest of us. Of course, her concerns grew much broader as she evolved into a kind of worm composting activist, who recognized that the consumption and disposal patterns of the United States were just not sustainable.

And with that, I welcome my Red Earthworms into my home.

I'm going to go feed them now--to help them settle in a bit, you know.