Home Composting Series
One of the best things you can do to reduce your environmental footprint is to start home composting, so let’s get cracking!
Firstly, if you don’t have an organics waste bin, by composting your food waste at home, you’re taking it out of landfill. This is great because food doesn’t biodegrade properly in landfill, instead the lack of oxygen means it undergoes a different process (anaerobic) and releases methane. This isn’t good and some Googling will tell you all about the relationship between food waste, methane and climate change.
Secondly, if you’re in one of the one of areas that now has a organics bin, great, but many seem to be having odour issues. This is an easy fix, from using your green waste, especially grass clippings at the bottom of your bin to absorb liquids, using your green waste again to cover and layer each time you add organic waste to the bin and if you’re a coffee drinker like me, using your coffee grounds to cover your food waste. Coffee grounds are an excellent odour neutralizer, so there’ never been a better time to buy an espresso machine. But I digress, home composting, when done correctly, completely takes these odour issues out of play. I say done correctly because things can still go wrong, but that’s the point of this guide.
Thanks to Wormlovers, we’ve gotten ourselves two Hungry Bin worm farms and Reln Composter. We’re a family of three with a medium-sized garden, so the worm farms will accommodate the majority of our food waste and the composter will handle our green waste, as well as any extra food waste we might have. I’ve used a variety of worm farms and find the Hungry Bins to be the best. Why? Well, their design encourages the worms to surface, resulting in greater efficiency, they’re super easy to empty, you simply unclip the bottom and you’re vermicompost drops down into the tray, they drain very easily and they’re at a good height, meaning less bending. Then there’s the wheels that make them easy to move and the fact that they’re fantastic quality. They’re definitely highly recommended and super easy to assemble. As for the Reln Composter, well, I found the tumblers get a bit too heavy to…well, tumble and so opted for a stock standard bin, meaning I’ll need to do the aerating myself.
So let’s get right too it.
Assembly & location
Setting up the Hungry Bins is easy, with only a few parts to put together. They’ll need as much shade as they can get, especially in summer. Make sure you keep all the cardboard packaging as worms love unwaxed cardboards, so one of the first things you can do is close the loop on waste product. It’s definitely a very cool feeling.
As for the Reln Composter, it’s almost as easy, only you’ll need a screwdriver. Whereas you’ll want to shade your worm farms, I put my composter in the sun. More sun means more heat, and that’s good for our compost. We’ll come back to the composter in a later post, so for now we’re going to focus on our worms.
Let there be worms!
Welcome, little friends and thank you!
So, once your worm farms are setup and in the shade, you’ll want to add half a bag of organic compost. You can use worm bedding that you’ve bought and soaked, but I find compost works just fine. A box of 1000 worms is a good starter, but we went with 2000 to give them a bit of a head start. Empty these into your worm farms and leave them for a few days to settle in.
It’s Feeding Time
Once your worms have had a few days to settle into their new neighbourhood, then it’s time to start feeding them. Worms thrive on a diet of half nitrogen and half carbon, our nitrogen is our food scraps and our carbon is our cardboard and paper. Let’s look at that a different way (see what I did there…)
50% Food Scraps (Nitrogen)
All fruit and vegetables (except garlic, onion, citrus and spicy foods), coffee grounds, tea leaves and herbs, eggs shells
No meat, dairy or processed foods
50% Cardboard & Paper (Carbon)
Unwaxed cardboard, non-glassy paper, newspaper, egg trays
They like their food small, so dice up their food scraps and shred your paper and cardboard. We used a cross-hatch shredder that can shred 7 pages at once. In the beginning, cover them with a layer of nitrogen and carbon 2-3 cm thick and dig it in slightly. Once they’ve eaten roughly half of this, they’re ready for more. After a few weeks, you can feed them a layer 5 cm thick following the same principles throughout, half eaten, then time for more. Each time you feed them, give them a spray of water from the hose or watering can. When you’re done, cover them with some newspaper of whatever paper you have handy. You can buy them one of those worm blankets but I find that they just get manky, whereas you can dig the newspaper in each time that you feed them. Worms don’t like light, so covering them ensures that they come to the surface.
Fruits of your labour
You’ll find that the tray beneath your worm farm steadily fills with liquid and you can increase the amount by putting a few litres of water through the system each week. This is a wonderful tonic for the garden, rich in microbes and humic acid that stimulates plant growth and promotes disease resistance. It’s especially good as a foliar spray, so is great way to improve the health of cuttings or seedlings when their root system is not very developed. Whether you’re using the tonic to water the roots or as a spray, I recommend that you dilute it 1:10 with water.
Then about every 6 - 8 weeks, your worms will provide you with the world’s best compost. Simply unlatch the bottom and your vermicompost will drop into the tray below, just make sure it’s empty or you’ll get splashed. The results should be very fine, almost like spent coffee grounds, so if they’re not, wait a little longer before you empty them next time. To use on the garden, simply mix it 1:4 with potting soil and it’s especially great with those fruit and vegetable plants. Although vermicompost has modest amounts of key nutrients, it’s strength lies it’s microbe content, which enables plants to use nutrients more efficiently. It also has a host of other benefits, from promoting water retention to facilitating root growth.
Secrets for Success
There are two things that most people tend to struggle with when it comes to worm farms. The first is not enough carbon (paper, cardboard) which manifests in a variety of ways from an odour to the worm farm operating inefficiently, and the second is heat. Australia is a very hot country and worm start to struggle when the temperature gets above 30 degrees. So let’s look at how to combat both of these…
Carbon is a funny one because when you first get a worm farm, you think where am I going to get my carbon from? You’ve got plenty of food scraps, but seemingly not much usable carbon. The difference is that whereas food scraps are being much ready to go, carbon needs to be prepared. I use the two most popular sources of carbon, namely paper and cardboard, and find that I switch between the two depending on what’s more available. When I was teaching more, I had an abundance of paper, so I bought a shredder and could shred on demand. Paper is very light in comparison to food scraps however, so the best thing to do is weigh your food waste and then put in the corresponding weight of shredded paper. You’ll be very surprised that the ratio here! But even I struggle to do that sometimes, so I always make sure that I put in at least 2 - 3 times more paper and then feed the worms exclusively on it for a week if the farms starts to smell. So if you have a lot of paper, then start using it as the carbon source in your worm farm. Bring some home from work, get some from your kids’ school, wherever! But it must be matte and not glossy and preferably just black ink.
Cardboard can be even trickier to use, but it’s obviously more readily available in our homes because it’s used as packaging for so many things. The cardboard we’re looking for is unwaxed cardboard, especially the kind that bigger items like microwaves, TV’s are packaged in. Waxed cardboards like cereal boxes, etc aren’t suitable because that sheen is a thin plastic layer and worms don’t like that obviously. Now disclaimer here, because how you prepare your cardboard is up to you, but I began by soaking mine, which was more labour intensive and less efficient because it took longer to get the pieces smaller, so now I just shred it. Our paper shredder isn’t obviously designed to shred cardboard, but it is designed to shred 7 pieces of paper at once and I find it gets on just fine. I find cardboard is a little easier to use than paper because it’s got more weight to it, so the ratio of food scraps to cardboard is around 1:2.
And so onto heat. You’ll find that in temperatures above 30 degrees, your worms will come to the surface and congregate on the underside of the lid. No, they’re not trying to escape, or maybe they are, I’m not fluent in worm, but they are trying to cool down. There are a variety of methods for cooling down your worms, from using ice packs, to filling and freezing water in 2L bottles, but the most effective and least labour intensive method I’ve found is to drape some fabric over your worm farm/s and saturate it. We use a thin rug, but anything that isn’t overly thick and cover the top and sides will do fine. When water evaporates from the fabric, it cools the worm farm, leaving them happy all summer long. You’ll need to wet it three to four times a day on those scorchers, but it’s just an easy hose-down. If you’re not home all day, then Bunnings sells cheap misting kits that are easy to setup and when paired with a timer, you’ve got yourself one efficient worm cooling system. What you’ll find happening is that you’re joining them under there on those super hot days. Does make you wonder who has it best? Just remember when the weather cools down to take the fabric off.
Good luck and long may your worms live!
Next, we’ll focus on getting the best out of your compost bin…
