vermicomposting – Page 16 – Crazy About Compost

Checking In with the Worm Inn

I'm a proud Worm Inn owner that doesn't have a stand kit. If you saw my original video for this, I hung it underneath my steps pretty easily. Then the wintertime came, and somehow the mice found their way into the house. I've spent so much time shoring up the perimeter of my house, but there's one section underneath the backyard decking that I can't reach very easily and they must be getting in that way somehow. I guess they found the Worm Inn quickly, since it's in the basement and it has plenty of food scraps in it. One day I came downstairs and noticed some tiny rough spots in the mesh lid. It appears I've gotten lucky and they haven't ripped a hole. Now I have to hang…

Winter Composting: Should I Just Scrap It? (article)

By Ginny Figlar Colon, originally found here. Nice … half-frozen veggie scraps molded together in a solid mass. Not exactly what I want to see in my compost bin. With at least five more months of cold weather before warmth and sunshine reappear, why do I even bother keeping the pile going? Well, I guess I do know why. Diverting even a handful of potato skins from the trash gives me an unexplainable sense of satisfaction. (If you aren’t yet a composter, you just can’t relate to this strange obsession with vegetable scraps.) So after filling my compost bin with a big batch of freshly raked leaves this weekend, I did a little online research to see what I could do to make it a wee bit more productive this…

How to Screen Worm Compost (video)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtEIYdDmyZQ Here's a neat video on how to screen worm compost. Cassandra keeps it simple in this video and has some nice results. I do pretty much the same thing, except my screen is a repurposed basket with a piece of wire mesh placed in the bottom. She makes mention of running a fan over the top of the castings when you first harvest them...it's true- when you first remove your castings and put the worms back, the stuff is so gooey that a screen doesn't work so well. Drying them out just a bit will help, although I wouldn't want to dry them too much and risk losing some of their benefit.