Go Green with Worm Composting

It's estimated that last year in the United States, 21 million tons of food waste was burned or dumped into landfills. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that over 64% of the waste generated in the United States is organic.

Instead of disposing of these materials in landfills, they can be recycled, composted, or
vermicomposted.

You can recycle your waste with the help of worms. Vermicomposting (composting with worms) turns many kinds of kitchen waste into a nutritious fertilizer for plants. When worm compost is added to soil, it increases the nutrients to plants and enhances soil texture and drainage.

Using worms to decompose food waste offers these advantages:

* It reduces kitchen garbage disposal costs;
* It produces less odor and attracts fewer pests than putting food scraps into a garbage container;
* It reduces the cost of water and electricity that kitchen sink garbage disposal units use;
* It produces a free, high-quality soil (compost);
* It doesn't take much space, labor, or maintenance;
* It produces free worms for fishing.

What type of earthworm should I use for vermicomposting?

Of the 4,000+ species of earthworms, only half a dozen of them are suitable for
vermicomposting. The most commonly used species is Eisenia fetida (Red wigglers).

Where do I obtain Eisenia fetida earthworms for vermicomposting?

Don't buy vermicomposting worms from a bait shop. You need at least 1,000 worms, and bait shops only sell about a dozen worms per cup. Buy them in bulk (roughly 1,000 earthworms per pound) from a worm grower.

How often do I feed the worms?

Feedstock throughput in vermiculture is based roughly on how many worms you have. Eisenia fetida will consume 50% to 100% of their body weight per day. Assume the worms will eat half of their body weight each day. The number of worms you have is measured in pounds; there are approximately 1,000 red wigglers per pound . So, one pound of worms can consume half a pound of food per day in the proper conditions.

Earth Worm

Earth worms are mysterious to most people. They are deep in the earth working for us with out anyone really noticing. Worm farms are a new way to learn more about worms and get rewards from their castings while also recycling your food scraps.

Worm-farming involves the use of special breeds of composting worms and this kind of farming can be implemented on any sized scale. Vermiculture can be pursued as a pass-time for homeowners that want to start their own soil rich vegetable gardens or for farmers that produce foods on large scale.

If you are less than excited with idea of having hundreds of worms around your home, you need not worry. To make this compost does not need much direct contact with the worms. All you need is to provide them with a comfortable home inside the bin, as well as a healthy diet of foods for them to chow on.

Red worms or Eisenia foetida is a species of earthworm adapted to the environment of decaying organic material1. Rotting vegetation, compost and manure are its ideal companions. It is very popular for its innate ability to convert organic material into compost and is usually the species used for worm composting.

You see, most worms normally found in garden soil normally live quite a bit deeper in the soil than the preferred composting type. These garden worms prefer the nutrients found deep in the soil, so that's why they like to habitate there.

Worm farming is actually less expensive and less dangerous than your average farm. After all, you don't need tons of employees and expensive equipment to have a worm farm. You can have your own little worm farm for your own personal benefits. Encourage your kids to join in and use it in class for show-and-tell time.

Healthy and robust roses require only four simple things to flourish and produce beautiful blossoms: good soil, plenty of sun, adequate water, and a balanced feeding routine. Perfect these factors and you are home free.

So how do you start a worm farm? Before you go off and catch some worms here are a couple of basic things you should know about worm farming. First off you need to pick the site of where you want your worm farm to be. Remember that worms don't like the heat so make sure to pick a nice cool and shady spot for your worm farm.

Worm composting is being seen more and more as a way to help our environment and reduce waste. The City of Oakland in California has a recycling program expressly for food waste. (It supplies the bin and you supply the organic garbage.)

Worm fishing becomes as much of an art as fly fishing when a set of gang hooks and ultra light gear are used. So what is a set of gang hooks? A set of gang hooks is simply two small hooks tied in tandem. You see, two small hooks tied in tandem allow the angler to present the worm in a completely natural way.

If you are knowledgeable in the dietary habits of worms a few examples of these include coffee grounds or tea leaves, smashed egg shells, fruit peel, hair, stale cookies and cakes, wood dust, plate scraps, moist cardboard, vacuum cleaner debris and vegetable scraps.

How To Grow Your Own Organic Worms - Your Silent Workforce

The main work worms do in your garden is tilling and aerating the soil. They burrow very deep, leaving channels through the soil that break up clods and allow air to enter and water to penetrate and drain away.
In the process of eating at the surface and eliminating lower down, they introduce organic matter to the deeper levels and steadily increase the depth of topsoil. Their main role is to digest decomposing organic matter, converting it quickly into a form plants can use as nutrients.
It is important to maintain good soil structure when gardening organically. Unlike mechanical tillers, earthworms do not damage the soil by inverting it, creating hardpans or breaking up the crumb structure. They never have mechanical breakdowns, they do not create noise or pollution, and they use garbage for fuel - an excellent way to dispose of your kitchen scraps, especially if you live in an apartment.

DIY Worm Farming

Commercial worm farms are very practical, widely available, easy to use and are quite aesthetically pleasing. You usually buy them with a small supply of worms to get you started. Choose either Red Worms or Tiger Worms. However, if you already have a suitable 'home' for your worms you don't need to spend the extra money.

A pair of old concrete laundry tubs in a shady spot near your kitchen door or close to your propagating area (or both) is ideal. Have the tubs elevated to make collection of the fertilizer easy. Leave the plugs out and put a strainer in the hole so that any excess water can drain.
Fill the first tub with compost and mix in a handful of dolomite or agricultural lime, along with about a half a bucket of soil. Place a bucket under the plug-hole and water this mix with a fine spray until it is quite saturated and starting to drip into your bucket.
Tip in your starter population of worms and cover the surface with an old hessian sack, wet cardboard, old carpet or similar. Worms usually live underground so they thrive in an environment that is cool, dark and moist. You can purchase a tub of 500 - 1000 worms to get started. They are available from professional worm breeders and can be sent through the mail. Many garden supply centres will also have them.
A close-fitting solid lid on your farm will suffocate your worms, so you need to fit a fly-mesh or shade-cloth screened lid to keep out flies and other insects.
For the first month you need do nothing except make sure the farm is kept quite moist, but not awash. Once the farm is settled in you should not need to add extra water. If your farm is exposed to rain, make sure the plug is left out or your worms will drown.
The compost itself will feed the worms for quite a long time, but to get maximum breeding it is best to add some supplementary feed every few days, especially as the population starts to increase. Add a dessert-spoon-full of lime or dolomite to each kilo of food.
You can vary their feed by rotating between:
- a bucket half-filled with water and cow or horse manure, mixed to a slop and poured over the surface;
- a blender filled with household scraps(not citrus or onion peel or meat) blended to a slop and poured over the surface;
- rotten potatoes, pumpkin or fruit, just placed on the surface;
- half a bucketful of new compost, spread over the surface.

Worms also like:
• soaked and ripped pizza boxes
• shredded and soaked cardboard, paper
• leaves, dirt, hair, egg shells

Worms do not have teeth, so scraps should be cut into small pieces - waste from a vegetable juicer is ideal.
Plants from the onion family (including garlic, leeks and shallots) and citrus fruits contain volatile oils. If any of these are included in the food scraps the worms will climb out of their housing to get away from the smell.
Within a few months the tub should be filled with a writhing mass of worms, and it's time to colonise the second tub.

Half-fill the second tub with the same mixture of compost, lime and soil. Put a strainer in the plug-hole and water the mixture until saturated.
Burrow down to the plug-hole in the first tub and put in the plug. Set a hose to just dribbling into the first tub until it is half-full, being VERY careful not to forget it and fill it right up. Leave the hessian on top to exclude light. The worms in your first tub will all migrate into the top half to avoid drowning.
Scoop them out and, reserving some to put in the garden, transfer them to the second tub. Let the plug out of the first tub and drain into a bucket. You are left with a bucket full of very, very rich liquid fertilizer and a tub half full of worm castings.
From now on you should be able to repeat this process every month or so, transferring about a third of the worms out into your garden or feeding them to the chooks each time. This will also ensure that you always have a supply of excellent liquid fertilizer available as well as the rich worm castings. Your plants will thrive!

Compost Tea - The Tea Of Worms Explained

It is perfectly a very simple process with a couple of not so simple steps if you have never done it before. Basically, the vermicast is entrench leisure activity a bleed like a nylon and added to a jug of water and oxygenated in order to encourage microbes within the mixture to flourish and grow. Some additional ingredients to enter to this tea include molasses or sea kelp. The oxygenation process will continue through about a day or sometimes longer.

So the eventual time that you turn up about a personal social that can enhance the growth of your crops, make your fodder grace better, and increase your overall yields, you will not conclude about the kind of tea that you sip quietly at the scullery table, but of natures key that is habituated to us by burning worms to succour full organic gardeners evolve more vast crops called compost tear.

A Worm Farm Business Explained

Worm farming, Worm tea and vermiculture are fast becoming the most popular home and garden hobby of all time. (Vermiculture = a worm breeding farm)

Economic factors combined with the simple fact that the awareness of the health of this planet has led the mass movement towards an overall healthier way of living. A lot of people are looking at organic living in all its different forms. Worm farming has fallen directly within that category. The very simplicity of the system allows everybody to keep their own small or large worm farm running in their own homes.

Worm tea is simply the watered down fluids that run through the farming system that allows the "tea" or liquid compost to be so powerful. An average worm farm would produce at the very least 2 liters of tea per week. People are doing this farming idea for a number of reasons, and the two most popular reasons are either for profit or to produce better and better healthy crops in their own gardens.

The profit side is obvious as the worms duplicate themselves very quickly and the more you have the more "tea" you will produce and be able to sell. Naturally you would be making money from the sale of the worms themselves too.
From the other side of it all you would be able to produce bumper crops of specific fruits and vegetables almost at will. From my own personal experience I can absolutely promise you that correctly done compost grown vegetables will grow faster, bigger and longer that if you simply made a feeble effort.

What you then do is to grow a collection of organically grown fruits and vegetables that are in demand.
All of these benefits from a worm business? Yes. And a resounding yes - at that. The worm business will run with very little maintenance and low costs. Anyone can do it, and there are no problems like smelly things. (The worm farm in fact has a pleasant forest smell if any smell at all.)

Now for the bad news

There are some basic rules that you will need to follow as the balance of the worms' environment is important. There are certain waste materials that you can feed the worms without any worry at all and others that will kill all your worms quickly. I heard of one place that put an old pair of pants in a worm farm and only the buttons and zips remained. However on the other end of the scale things like pineapple are extremely bad for your worm farm.
So to end I would highly suggest that you get yourself involved in the joys of setting up and running your own worm farm. Do it for fun or as a business. For whichever reasons that you use the environment will be an added winner in your planning.

Stacked Tire Worm Farm

Have you ever given a thought to what it must be like to be a child sitting in a dusty drab schoolroom, trying desperately to concentrate, while hunger gnaws continually at your belly. This is the daily reality for many African children, both in remote rural communities and also in the ghastly shack-towns that surround the major cities. Jobs are a rarity, families are under stress and there just is never any money, period! Worst of all, this situation is not going to change anytime soon. Probably not in our lifetime!

Concerned people, both local and outsiders realize that international food aid can only go so far and often dries up, just when it is most needed, as in the current international financial crisis. To survive, the communities have to find a way to help themselves. Intervention at a local level is needed. One solution to the problem is to promote food gardens at the schools themselves - run jointly by the community, the parents , the teachers and mostly by the children themselves. Labor is freely available and skills can be taught, but the problem is that what little money that can be collected must go towards buying tools, seeds and fertilizer. The tools would be unsophisticated and can be donated or borrowed. Some seed would have to be bought, but in part it can be collected from the last crop. Fertilizer is always the main problem. In many areas soils are very impoverished and would yield little.

This is where worm composting can lend a hand. Vermiculture produces high quality organic fertilizer that can be 20 times higher in nutriments than natural soil and brings trace elements and beneficial micro organisms to the roots of the crops, while simultaneously improving the disease resistance and moisture retention of poor soils. Crops grown using vermicompost will be fully organic and organic food is far healthier than any commercially grown products. Providing fodder for the worms is no problem, there are always organic wastes to be collected, in the form of animal dung, crop trash, paper or fallen leaves. Of the many types of vermiculture systems available , the stacked tire worm farm, which costs nothing to set up, is the most appropriate solution . We have described the setting up and operation of this simple system in detail on our web site at http://www.working-worms.com/

In brief, all the children need to do, is to collect discarded old tires and stack them upon a drainage board, as described in the article, and then begin feeding in organic waste from the top. The compost worms, will naturally migrate upwards towards the food, leaving their faeces (worm castings) behind them. The vermicompost is harvested by pulling out the lower tire from the bottom. The tire is emptied of compost and then it goes back to the top of the stack again and so on. The beauty of this system is that it costs nothing to set up and can be replicated many times over, to create multiple sets of individual worm farms to whatever scale is appropriate. All that is needed is a small amount of training and a supply of suitable compost worms - usually eisinia fetida (red wigglers), which can be donated from other schools, already on the programme, or from concerned individuals.

Stacked Tire Worm Composting is an appropriate low tech solution to a widespread Third World problem. It is a technology that does not require constant cash injections and can be fully run by the communities themselves. Besides everything else, the children will have a great deal of fun worm farming and will learn something useful. Best of all they will be doing something positive to improve their own lot, without relying on any handouts. This builds up human dignity. "Give a man a fish and you feed him today , teach him to fish and you feed him always".

Think about it - maybe there is something you can do to help.

Compost Tea

Compost tea or worm tea is made by steeping vermicompost (or other compost) in water for a period of time. The resulting liquid (or compost tea) is then used as a fertilizer for plants or as a prevention against plant disease. Compost tea is just another powerful outcome from having a worm farm.

Worm castings and vermicompost are an amazing product of worms. Worms eat, then produce this vermicompost; also referred to as worm castings (worm poop!). Therefore, this is a the end product of worms breaking down organic matter which is very nutrient rich.

Compost tea is typically used as a fertilizer. The use of this fertilizer requires a great amount of knowledge and skill. If used on edible plants one should avoid spraying directly on edible parts of the plant. In fact, the US National Organic Program has very strict guidelines on the use of compost tea for USDA certified organic farming. In addition, it takes some trial and error before you are able to find the proper amounts of compost tea to use. Composting is a complex process and in particular compost tea is not fully understood by everyone.

In addition to fertilizer; compost tea has also been used as a way to prevent plant disease. The use of it to prevent disease in plants is an extremely complex biological process. Steven Scheuerell and Walter Mahaffee of the Department of Horticluture at Oregon State University have given a more detailed presentation on: Compost Tea for Plant Disease Control: Production, Application, and Results.

It is possible to build your own machine or "brewing barrel". Many "do-it-yourselfers" have taken this route. In addition, there are lots of barrels produced commercially as well.

The process of actually making this product depends on its purpose. There are several kinds of compost tea all of which are processed differently. Some of the variables are the amount of Vermicompost, amount of water, amount of time allowed to steep, amount of aeration, method of aeration, application, and other ingredients.