Vermicomposting: Getting Started

One of my goals for this year was to start a vermicomposting bin. This is the technical term for composting with worms. I have been researching this for a while, after seeing a classmate's worm bin in the fall. Last week, I got the bins and started collecting food waste. This week, my worms arrived in the mail! I've only been doing this for a couple days, but I've already managed to make several mistakes!

If you haven't started vermicomposting, read this to avoid my mistakes. If you have a lot of experience, please read this anyway, and maybe let me know any helpful tips or tricks!

My bin set up is a medium-sized bin inside of a larger bin (to catch drainage). The worm bin has holes drilled in the sides, bottom, and lid. They are dark gray so they don't let in light. About a week before my worms arrived, I started collecting food waste and adding it to bin, between layers of damp newspaper for bedding.

The two-bin, lidded system -- with tons of ventilation holes.

The problem I believe is that I added too much food waste, and it was too compacted and dry when the worms arrived.

As soon as I added the worms, instead of burrowing into the bin, they all started crawling up and out of the bin. This was obviously a problem since my bin is indoors, and I had about 1,000 worms. Yikes.

I went into troubleshooting mode. I drilled some more ventilation holes in the lid, added a lot more bedding, sprayed it until all layers were damp, and fluffed the old, compacted layers with some tongs. This allowed the food waste to get aerated, and it also reduced the smell after some time. Win-win.

One of the luckier escapees being rescued from the floor.

However, even with these changes, every time I checked there were always between 10 and 20 worms crawling up the sides. We lost about 30 worms on the garage floor during the first night. Not nearly as many escape attempts as there were during the first few hours however!

I think at this point, since they are new to their environment they are restless and just wandering about. The majority of worms have burrowed to the bottom happily, and have started working on the food scraps.

So far, I have added several banana peels, an apple core, some bags and coffee grounds, mushroom stems, lots of strawberry tops, and a couple kale stems. I added a tiny bit of an orange peel, probably about one square inch. I doubt this is causing a problem, but I might try fishing it out if the worms don't calm down since I've heard citrus can be really bad in high quantity.

For bedding, I'm using shredded newspaper and paper towels rolls, and a few shredded wet/food-stained napkins and paper towels.

In order to encourage the worms to burrow down, I sprayed down the bin again, shoved all the crawlers back down the sides, and put a bunch of dry shredded newspaper on top. I'm going to leave the lid off for a while, which I've heard is okay as long as there is protection from light in the form of a layer of bedding. The whole deal is probably about a foot deep at this point so they should be able to get out of the light.

The lidless system has successfully discouraged escape attempts.

Damp bedding (and worms!) underneath the dry layer.

Then I will try to leave them alone for a while so they can situated now that I think I've troubleshooted well enough. I've collected quite a bit more food waste, but I popped it in the freezer so I can store it for later. I don't want to overwhelm them, especially since I'm sure I added too much food to begin with. Plus, freezing will aid in the break down of the food, and kill any pests in the food. I don't want a fruit fly infestation!

(I'm already worried about flies, since I've left the bin outside for a few hours and there were some flies buzzing around when I checked on it.)

If there are any experienced vermicomposters out there with suggestions, or you've noticed something I'm doing is seriously wrong, please let me know! I've done a lot of research on this over the past several months, but doing something firsthand is always a lot different than just reading about it or watching YouTube videos.