Vermicomposting - Setting Up A Worm Bin

Promote Global Worming

What Is Worm Composting?
vermicomposting) is using red wiggler worms (Eisenia fetida) to eat your kitchen scraps to give you worm castings, the most desirable and nutrient dense of all organic fertilizers.

How Do I Make A Worm Bin
Setting up a bin is really simple.
Here is a pretty straight forward video on setting up your bin system. This video shows Rubbermaid bins being used. You might also consider 5 gallon buckets, kitty litter containers. Anything similar will do, as long as it's not clear. Your worms need 100% darkness to be content.
Set Up A Bin Video 1
Set Up A Bin Video 2
Transferring Worms



Where Do I Keep My Bin?
It's too hot and too cold here to keep your bin outside, so you have two options - the garage or the house. GASP! Yep, the house. The most common locations for a Las Vegas worm bin in the summer is the laundry room, and the garage in the winter. The ideal temperature for a bin is less than 90F. A healthy bin has no odor, and won't be taking up too much space. Your little kids in the house are going to love having a bin, and I have heard of them ending up in the closet of the boys room! Any inconvenience in all of this this should be more than worth it considering the free fertilizer your getting. Besides, think of how blown away your friends will be when they find out your a worm rancher.

What Do You Feed Your Composting Worms?
All fruits and vegetables. Cooked, raw, frozen, old, spoiled - no problem. Crushed egg shells are also great for your wigglers.
AVOID meat, dairy, bread, corn. The first two seem pretty obvious. The last two will spike the ph and may 'sour' the bin. Give the worms the veg and the bread to your chickens. Also avoid citrus, coffee grounds, filters, tea bags. Go easy with them in the bin, but load em up in your compost pile.

Julia Roberts is a worm rancher?!
What the what?
Hard to believe but she was on Oprah once preaching her worm bins.
Worm Bins On Oprah



Where To Buy Your Worms
Woms are shipped by growers when they are confident that the inside of the UPS truck will be bellow 90F. Red Wigglers are $20-$30 a pound delivered, and a pound of worms will contain about 1000 worms.They will multiply amazingly fast, and you might consider partnering with someone and spitting up a purchase. You can start up a new bin on half a pound of worms, let them build up a population and start splitting those off to your garden friends.

Red Wiggler Worm Trivia
2000 worms will eat one pound of garbage per week. A red wiggler will eat half of it's weight per day. The life span of a red wiggler is 2-3 years. 1000 worms will yield 4 egg cocoons per week. 3 worms will hatch from each cocoon creating 12,000 worms per week. 48,000 worms will be created a month in a well cared for bed. In 6 weeks the 12,000 freshly hatched worms will begin breeding, and so on. You can see how quickly 1000 worms will soon be hundreds of thousands. Tell your friends to get ready for some worms.

What Are The Two Kinds Of Worms Gardeners Need?
This post has focused only the compost worm. These guys are adapted to live in 100% organic material and are perfect for compost making, but the don't do well in dirt here. The soil building worms you need for the garden and turf are earth worms. The most productive of those are the Belgian or Europoean earth worms (Eisenia hortensis). I'll talk more about the earth worms in another post. You might want to consider combining your order of earth and red wigglers to save shipping.

If you want to super nerd out on worms, here are a few lenghty in depht articles on vermicomposting and worms
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THE ULTIMATE WORM FACT SHEET
A TERRIFIC WORM COMPOSTING SITE