I’m going to use this is to document my first attempt at vermicomposting.
Of course, there was a logical path that got me to trying vermicomposting. It came up because of a neighbor of mine was showing me her composting bin and the “castings” she was harvesting for her garden plot in the community garden. She was showing me the worms and the castings, aka worm poop. 😊 She said I could have some if I needed it for my flower bed. Explained that it helped the soil out a great deal. I’ve struggled with the flower bed since I created it. The soil in our subdivision is clay. It’s not the best for growing anything other than a few types of weeds.
I’ve been working the yard to make it more inviting to spend time in since, 2020… I like many others, spent more time at home starting in April of that year. I wasn’t a fan of how yard looked. I remembered back to when I first moved into the house thinking it could be so cute and a lil’ oasis of sorts with the right amount of effort. I had a plan for that when I first moved in and did all the work on the landscaping. After the first 4 years or so it was ignored until 2020, my attention until then was strictly on work and motorcycles. However, that was also the year that my knee gave up on me too. I had to have a TKR in Oct of that year, it was a hard recovery for me. I stopped racing and even riding the dirt bikes was a bit iffy at times while I was trying to build my strength backup in that leg. So…… I started to focus on the house and the yard. It was a great deal of work, but it is now a place I love to spend time in, now back to the flower bed.
I have adopted a free for all approach to the arrangement of the items in the flower bed. I just randomly put varies plant, herbs, and vegetables in the bed. I still have green onions coming up in random spots from having them in a pot by the sliding glass door about 10 years ago. Same with Dill, I’m okay with that, since it’s one of my favorite herbs. I don’t worry much about anything taking over, since every few years, I have some ground rodent tunnel into the yard and it totally clears everything from the plot. Now that is the reason, I nabbed some old horse watering troughs from Robin. They didn’t hold water for the horses anymore, so I used them as planters for things I didn’t want the visiting rodent to clear out. That lead to having more flowers in pots, which lead to turning the area around the sliding glass door/doggy door being blocked off with more planters so visitors wouldn’t think about trying to enter the house via that door. (I absolutely love the floor plan of my house, but you have to walk to the very back part of the house to enter the “front” door. It’s very confusing to anyone visiting for the first time. It’s the reason I now have a doorbell on my yard entry gate.) I now have a lot of planters, in addition to the flower bed. I’ve even been thinking about adding a few more to the area next to the garage where there is just a 9×20 foot gravel pad with nothing on it, but my trash bin, recycling bin, and a rain barrel. I might even put a green house there at some point. Now, it should make a bit more sense now as to why I would think about composting. Besides, it being an environmentally responsible thing to do. Also, who doesn’t love homegrown items over store bought?
I should get back on topic…. Vermicomposting.
When Josie was showing me her bin, there wasn’t any real odors coming from it. It smelled earthy like potting soil. I really like that smell. Regular composting that I’ve seen pretty much always has a, should we say, pretty strong, that not pleasant in the least bit. This intrigued me even more. I started to look around at the yard, as to where I could put a bin. It would need to be a sheltered area, so it wouldn’t cook in the summer heat or freeze in winter. I didn’t have many options in my yard for it that I was willing to use for that purpose. There are already planters in most of those areas. I also didn’t want a 3’x3’ or larger bin just sitting out in the open, it might ruin the aesthetics of the yard.
I started to do some searching on bins. I found that there are a lot of vermicomposting bins for indoors. I was further intrigued. There were also a lot of how to make your own bin out of tubs or buckets out there. These work like the expensive bins that were for sale. When I say expensive, the costs for them where anywhere from ~$75 to $400. Pretty much all of the indoor ones were trays that you have to swap and sort. The outdoor ones like my neighbor’s bin were kind of a continuous feed and you collected the casting from the bottom. To me that seems to be the best approach, as I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy sifting through the trays to move the worms and the cocoons (worm eggs) from the tray I want to harvest back into another tray. This left me with two options…. One that was just about $400 bucks or a more moderate cost at $140 option called the Urban Worm Bag. Shown below:
From the instruction manual:
Next up was to buy a few other items for the bag. I am a geek remember? I bought some coconut coir, as it is supposed to a forgiving bedding (aka carbon source) for beginners to use. I also bought a 4 way soil tester, along with a temp gage to leave in the bag, some extra coconut coir for future use, worm chow, mortar bin, spray bottle, and a worm blanket set… It’s very dry here in NM, so it should help keep some moisture in the bag. (I also picked up a counter composter to put food scraps in). Getting everything I need for quite some time cost me: ~$230. Not too bad for a new hobby set up. Getting set up to do the acrylic painting I do was more than that. The last thing I had to buy was worms. This was the priciest part. ~2,500 worms to add to the bin cost me an additional $120 so final cost was $350. It could have been done cheaper, if I had gone with home made stuff. Everything but the bag and worm chow I can use for other purposes. So figured it was easier to go the way I did.
I received Urban worm bag on March 26th. I set it up in under an hour. I filled up the bottom of the bag with one brick of coir that I had soaked in water while I was putting the bag frame together. Then I raided Josie bin for some already composting materials (likely with a few worms too) to get the microbiome going along with some leaf mold from the flower bed. I put 1 more brick of coir on top of that. (Now they say: You can never have too much bedding. Adequate bedding reduces the likelihood of leachate, fruit flies, foul odors, and most other problems.) I was counting on this being accurate.
It sat for only a day before the first worm shipment of 500 red wigglers showed up. I used the water spray bottle to spray them with a lot of water after I dumped them all on to the top of the materials in the worm bag. The next day I headed off to a two day trials event in San Ysidro.
I’ve decided to make this into part of the BLOG, under Vermiculture. I’ll post updates on how things are going. Going forward all the blog posts will be under Random/Vermicomposting
Photos of the bin as I get them…