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Recently, I made a worm bin and have begun to raise some worms in it. Specifically, I’m raising red wiggler worms (eisenia fetida). I’m planning on feeding the worms to the chickens (a project that will start in spring of 2010, keep an eye out for the future chicken-blog), compost our kitchen scraps (vermicomposting), fortifying our garden soil with the resulting vermicompost material (worm castings or vermicompost), selling them to the local fishers, and perhaps selling them for vermiculture and vermicomposting purposes.

I made the bin by digging a square hole in the ground, about 18 inches deep (down to the clay where the moles don’t burrow), and about four and a half feet square. The walls of the hole were then lined with plastic bread trays that used to be in a bread delivery truck. The trays were tied together with plastic zip-ties. Next, I built a wooden frame on the ground surrounding the hole, and attached a piece of plywood on top of it with a few hinges. Finally, I added some 2″x4″ framing to the top side of the plywood to support some corrugated metal roofing at a slant so that it sheds rainwater quickly. 2 1/2″ and 3″ star-drive outdoor wood screws were used to fasten everything together. The roof-door is so heavy that there will be no problem keeping out rodents looking for food scraps. I will post some pictures soon so you can see exactly what I did.

The bin was created almost completely out of recycled materials, and most of them pieces or leftovers from old projects. Plastic zip ties are the only things I bought as they are, but they were originally bought for a similar project last year when I made a giant potato bin in the ground. Everything else was either scraps from other projects or given to me by people who were reusing the materials. The bread trays came from a friend who used to do a lot of indoor gardening. The 2″x4″ scraps, plywood, and screws came from a home-made bed frame that I recently dismantled (from our old trailer which is turning into a chicken coop). The metal roofing — which has many holes in it — has been sitting around on the land for several years and I am completely unaware of its origins.

Note: I plan on getting some caulk to seal up the holes in the metal roofing to keep the framing and plywood from rotting because of the rain. Also, I’m planning on adding a gutter to the roof and directing the outflow away from the walking area surrounding the bin.

Once the bin structure was complete, I made bedding for the worms. I dumped in several wheelbarrow loads full of newly fallen alder leaves mixed with rotting leaf material from the past few years. Additionally, I tore up about 10 bulk-food paper sacks into random shapes and sizes and mixed them into the leaf matter. The bedding was ultimately about 12 inches deep.

I was in town a few weeks ago (about 40 miles away) and called a few people about buying a pound of worms to start off the bin with a lot of momentum, but had no success in getting them.  I don’t know when I’ll be back in town again, so I’ve been collecting worms I find under carpet scraps and boards laying on the ground around the garden shed. For a couple days, I collected the worms in a 1/2 gallon plastic tub that contained a few handfuls of composted garden material, and a handful or so of rotting kitchen scraps (banana peels and coffee grounds). After a cold evening that had dipped below 40°F (the worms really don’t like to go below 50°), I checked on them and noticed that most if not all of them (about 10 or so) were all snuggled together, tucked into the corner near the bottom; they just seemed cold and miserable. I didn’t want my friends to suffer, so I placed them into the worm bin by digging a small hole in the middle of the bedding material, placing the worms and the other contents of the tub into the hole, and covering them with a few inches of the bedding.

Every day or so, I take the daily coffee grounds down to the worm bin, uncover that same hole I dug in the middle of the bedding, toss them in, and cover it all back up. Since there aren’t a lot of worms in the bin yet, I’ve only been feeding them a few tablespoons of coffee grounds a day so that I don’t overwhelm them with more rotting food than they can manage, as I don’t care to cultivate flies in the worm bin. I think I will start feeding them about twice the amount, though, since it’s been about a week since I put the worms in there. If the population does not increase to my satisfaction by the time I manage to go to town again, I will most likely try again to get a pound of worms to expedite the process. A pound of worms, from what I’ve read, will process a pound of food a day, so that will take care of most of my family’s kitchen scraps at least while I wait for the population to grow.

As this project continues, I will post more articles and pictures detailing its evolution.