Getting started with worms

...d! Worm bins vs. compost piles While vegetable scraps can also be put into compost bins, not everyone has the space or the time or the physical strength to maintain a compost pile. Worm bins, though, are easy to maintain and can fit into every lifestyle, from a single person living in an apartment to a big family on a rural compound. It needn’t be an either/or choice. Many people have both compost piles and worm bins. We find it useful to have a w...

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Maintaining a Worm Bin

...Worms like materials that provide some fluff or air to the texture of the bin. I like to use a combination of materials, whatever I have on hand. Shredded newspaper is a standard bedding material, but we don’t take a paper. Today I used rotted straw, wet pieces of cardboard, lots of dead leaves, a few wood shavings and a little bit of garden dirt for grit. Note regarding paper: I wouldn’t use anything bleached or anything printed with shiny inks....

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Maggots!

...itation which hosts informative workshops where you can purchase a plastic compost bin for half price. The workshops are held at the Griffith Park Composting Education Facility. The compost bin should be easily accessible from the kitchen, but far enough away so that compost problems, like smells and rodents don’t migrate to living quarters. Our pile is located too far from the kitchen, so in our laziness stinky piles of rotting fruits and vegetab...

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The Wonder of Worms

...times here already, so I won’t repeat myself, just point to the links: For beginners, see Getting Started with Worms See our worm bin here: My Big Fat Worm Bin A post on harvesting and managing our bin: Maintaining a Worm Bin Erik and I talk about worms in this episode of our podcast: 015 Worm Composting and Skunks And last but not least, The Fine Art of Worm Grunting...

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Matching Your Waste Stream to Your Composting Method

...ep adding to it. For this reason we have a kind of “disposal” pile. It’s a compost bin that gets the materials that can’t go into the other two. Advantages: reduces the biomass of all the stuff that can’t go either in the worm bin or the big compost pile. Disadvantages: produces a low quality compost. Alternatives The labor involved in building a big compost pile for a conventional vegetable garden speaks to the advantages of what I think of as al...

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