How to Compost with Worms

Ed Bruske explains the benefits of composting, and how to compost with worms

Hi, I’m Ed Bruske from DC Urban Gardeners, we’re here today at my back deck in the District of Columbia talking about composting and it wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t talk a little bit about composting with worms or Verma Composting. Some of you have been watching these clips may have thought. It’s a little bit too much work. All that building compost bins, collecting all the compost materials or maybe you live in an apartment in the city and none of that outdoor composting is for you because you don’t have anywhere to put it. Anyway but even if you live in an apartment in the city, you can have a worm composting bin with like this one, and compost all of those kitchen scraps. Like I said before 25% of everything we send to the land fill consists of scraps from our kitchen that could be recycled instead to help the planet help warm, global warming and make soil. Well what would you do with it after you compost it, you ask. Well you could put it in your potted plants. You can give it to your friends that have a garden or your friends that maybe growing a tomato plant out of their balcony or if you have a garden, a vegetable garden, put them on you’re tomato plants. The compost that comes from worms is probably the richest compost, one of the best fertilizers that you can put on your plant. Now, I mentioned before that, Darwin made a real study of earthworm. He believed that all of the earth, all the soil on the planet had passed through an earth worm at one pint or another. The worms you used for composting your kitchen scraps are not the typical earthworms. They’re called Red Wigglers; they’re a little bit different variety, the kind of worm you would get at a bake shop. I happen to get mine online. There are plenty sources, they come like, to a pound of earth worms, an old package of coconut fiber and you let it rust for a little while and you put them to work in your compost, Verma compost or, this one here, I bought online there are several different models. You can also make them yourself. My first compost bin or my first worm-composting bin was made out of a recycling bin, so plastic bin with a lid. Some holes drilled in the sides so that oxygen and you’re ready to go. Then all you do is, you put your worms in here, and cover them up with a nice, thick layer of newspaper, shredded newspaper, moistened, maybe with little water spritzer. Then, every couple of days, as you generate scraps in your kitchen, you have a, some sort of receptacle in your kitchen that you’d be keeping your scraps in, you just pull a newspaper away, you drop the scraps in, cover them over with a newspaper again, and let the worms do the rest of the work. Then when they’re all done, when they fill this up, you simply remove the castings. It’s what it’s called what the worms leave behind. The worm poop if you want to get graphic about it and that is your fertilizer. All you have to do is keep this nice layer of damp newspaper on top of them and your worms will be perfectly happy. They don’t make any smell, they don’t make any noise, you can have this in your, in a closet somewhere and take care from there and they wont bother anybody.