A month or so ago, my oldest daughter brought home the newest members of our family: a handful of slimy red worms. Her Sparks group had been learning about composting and had an expert in to teach the girls how to make simple kitchen compost bins. Chris and I were actually quite excited about this as vermicomposting is something we've wanted to try for a while.
So, after staying late at Sparks to chat with the worm guy, we brought home our 5 gallon pails, worms and other bits and pieces to get us started.
Before I go any further, I'll give you the backstory on the compost situation in our house. We currently live in a strata townhouse complex. We have a small backyard with a teeny garden which is in spitting distance of at least 3 sets of neighbours. For the first 2 years that we lived here, we cringed everytime we had to throw away food scraps. We've thought about various solutions but nothing seemed to make sense for our family. Finally, this year, for my lovely husbands 31st birthday I gave him a gift that I'm sure only he could fully appreciate...a rotating compost drum. We've been using that as our main compost since April but have discovered two main drawbacks. 1) It smells a whole lot more than the manufacturers let on and 2) to actually get compost from the bin, it needs to be filled and then left alone for at least 2 months. Which means we can't continuosly add food scraps all year round. So, we've been coping with it and trying to formulate a compost solution and it has now come in the form of our kitchen compost bin. Our plan is, since we would like fresh compost by April, to continue using the drum for the bulk of our food waste until February. At that time, we will hopefully have our indoor bin working well enough to handle our families needs until the spring.
We've started out quite slowly with the worms, just adding a handful of scraps every week or so. It seems to be paying off since, now a month and a bit into the process, our worm population has grown significantly and we have been delighted (really!) to see evidence of worm reproduction. (I'm sure that is a sentence I never thought I would use!)
So, a few observations on the kitchen worms for you:
1)No, they don't smell at all. To be honest, I actually enjoy the scent of our bin. When the lid is on, despite air holes, there is no smell at all. When you do take the lid off, it simply smells of fresh, healthy earth.
2)Be sure to keep the food scraps covered with the worms bedding material (in our case old newspaper)
3)Worms like to be moist. When we first started out, the materials inside seemed to dry out quickly so we just added a few spritzes of water and all was well.
4)Worm bins are a great tool for teaching kids about composting. We talk about issues such as composting and recycling a lot in our house and the kids have been well aware of our outdoor compost drum. However, having the worms right in our kitchen, the kids get to see the entire process everyday. They've seen the scraps go in and they've seen how it's all been broken down into 'worm poop' and the resulting compost tea. They've seen how worms form egg sacs around their bodies and then what those egg sacs look like when they are shed.
I hope to find the instructions online on how to make our particular type of setup and I will post it here.
Hope you will consider adding worms to your family!!
Stay Green,
SuperGreenMomma
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