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…

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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.

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