Indoor Worm Composting

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
November 11th, 2009
Filed in Compost
Tags: composting, indoors, worm composting

This winter, try indoor worm composting to digest your kitchen scraps and create some nutrient-dense soil for your garden. You can generally feed one pound of worms one pound of garbage and they’ll produce one pound of compost a day. (By garbage, we mean “things we don’t need, but that worms will eat.) You can purchase an indoor worm bin, or make your own form a small trash can with holes in it. Either way, you will follow the same procedure for the worm bedding.

Bedding Down the Worms

You can’t just throw a handful of worms and a bunch of food scraps into a trash can with holes in it and expect results. Well, you could try that, but you might end up with a giant mess. Here’s how to do it instead.

• Put about three inches of gravel in the bottom of the can.
• Fill with 1 ½ inches of water.
• Top with a divider that has drainage holes in it.
• Add a mixture of shredded leaves, shredded newspaper and garden soil that has been thoroughly wetted on top.
• Let that mixture sit for 48 hours.
• Add the worms.
• Start slowly feeding the worms vegetable scraps. (Plant material only—no meat or dairy.)
• Give them ¼ of what they can eat in a day (1/4 a pound per pound of worms to start) and gradually work up to one pound of food per day.
• Turn over the bedding material (gently!) after two weeks.
• Add more bedding (leaf/newspaper/soil mix) every month. Eventually you will need to empty the box/compost and start a new worm box.

Worm compost is some of the richest and best compost available to feed your garden. Take advantage of it!