Vermicomposting: Creating Garden Gold, with Ward Habriel

Worms, Worms, Worms. Some people love ‘em, some people are a little nervous around them and the way they wriggle and squirm. But no matter which kind of person you are, you can rest assured that creating compost with worms is an excellent way to recycle many of your food scraps and a good way to make top-grade fertilizer for your garden. Free. Well, close to free once you set up your worm bin.

I have a good friend from elementary school who has had a smallish worm bin in the cabinet under her kitchen sink for years. Other gardening friends up near Redding in Happy Valley, Alice Wilkinson and Tom O’Mara have a big wooden worm bin built of recycled boards outside in their vegetable garden. You may have read about Alice’s discussion with Doni Greenberg on Anewscafe.com about her worm bin earlier this year.

Last month I attended the first of two workshops offered by The Friends of the Chico State Herbarium on Composting with Worms (or Vermicomposting) presented by Ward Habriel, Master Composter from Paradise. I did a segment with him on standard backyard composting last year. I went to the workshop with interest, but not necessarily with the intention of setting up a worm bin. I have always maintained a healthy, cooking-right-along backyard compost system and this in itself makes as me happy as anything I can think of short of my family. It’s a deep, spiritual kind of happiness. I wasn’t sure I needed a worm bin. As it is, I add all of my vegetable food scraps, my coffee grinds and egg shells to my compost and I love the idea that these food scraps boost the nutrition level of my compost transforming it from mere soil conditioner to soil food.

“And this is true,” Ward said to me when we were discussing why I should take on a new form of composting. “But here’s the thing…” Ward slows almost to a full pause for effect and drama. “If you composted some of your food scraps and vegetable waste with worms - you would have gardening gold, Jennifer….worm castings (the scientific name for worm doo-doo) are pure organic plant food. Much richer than even backyard compost with kitchen scraps because of the additions made by the worms. Vermicomposting is the PERFECT complement to your backyard bin. A tablespoon of highly concentrated, nutrient rich worm castings will feed a plant for months. Added to your standard finished bin compost, you’ve got dynamite. And you can still add the rest of your scraps to your bin, so it will be nutritious as well.” Who could ask for more than this nirvana of composting?



The workshop run by Ward, and which will be repeated on Sept 19th (for more info click here), covered a good deal of in depth information about the life cycle, care and maintenance of a worm bin as well as actually walked us through setting up a bin. Similar workshops are also held by The Worm Farm in Durham. The first key point made by Ward was that you cannot use just any old garden worms. You have to use surface dwelling, vegetation or manure eating worms, not earthworms, which do not like to live in groups and prefer to live beneath the surface of the soil. The best composting worms according to most sources is the Red Wiggler or Manure Worm, or Eisenia fetida. The are relatively small worms and they are communal so enjoy the worm bin environment.

“Worms are not smelly. If it is managed properly, just like a backyard compost, with the right balance of carbon based bedding, soft edible food waste and the right amount of water - your worm bin will not smell bad. Promise,” Ward assured the workshop.

The second point that Ward and his wife Cheryl, also a Master Composter, stressed to the workshop attendees is that you need to have your worm house ready before you bring your worms home. You do not want to stress them out by leaving them to get too hot, too dry, or otherwise distressed. You should also have the location for your worm bin chosen - it should be fairly protected - not in direct sunlight and not in a place where it would freeze solid. If it has a non-porous and protective lid, it can be out in the rain, but if not it should be protected from too much rain as well. Worms like to be relatively cool, slightly damp, have good air circulation and darkness.

Ready-made worm bins are available at many garden supply stores, at the Durham Worm Farm or on-line. Several ready made bins are available and work well. Some have multiple trays to make harvesting your worm castings easier. Some have a spigot and liquid collection area at the bottom of the bin system to make it easier to drain off any extra liquid that has collected at the bottom level. Also known as worm juice, this liquid is very highly concentrated and can mixed with water as a compost tea to water plants or apply a foliar feeding spray.

As Ward demonstrated in the workshop, it is also easy enough to create a bin of your own out of a solid colored, mid-sized plastic storage bin with a snugly fitting lid and holes drilled in the sides for air circulation. As my friends Alice and Tom demonstrated it is also easy enough to build one out of good scrap wood - NOT treated, or too rough or beat up. A wooden bin will lose moisture more quickly and so needs to be dampened a little more often.

As for the size of the box, it can pretty much be as big or little as the space you would like to put the bin in. A small bin for under an apartment sink, an enormous dumpster sized bin for the food waste coming out of the UC Davis cafeteria (and yes there is one). For a family of four who eat a fair amount of fruit and vegetables, Ward recommends a bin between 10″ - 16″ deep and 2′ square.

Once you have your bin, and you know where it is going, the worms need bedding. The simplest and most cost effective bedding in Ward’s opinion is simply shredded newspaper. Not shredded too small, but ripped into long 1 inch strips. “It’s therapeutic ripping the bedding for your new pets,” says Ward. Rip enough to produce a nice fluffy pile of the paper, and then dampen it with a water sprayer until it is moist - not wet - not with dry spots - but evenly moist. “The worms will eat their bedding and so it is important to just use newsprint. The black dye in newspapers in soy based and so is fine for the worms to eat. The paper is an off white, without too much added chlorine or bromide, and soft. Please avoid bright white, glossy or coated papers in the worm bin.” Bedding can also be damped coir, Sphagnum moss, peat moss or even dried leaves well dampened.

Once your bedding is in, you are ready for your worms. For a small under-counter bin you might want 1/2 pound. For a 2′ x 2′ bin you’ll want a good pound. Both The Durham Worm Farm, which Ward recommends highly, and the Gas Point Worm Farm in Anderson sell composting worms by the pound on site or ship them. Ward has also used and been pleased by the worms from the Sonoma Valley Worm Farm. After you put your worms into their new home, you’ll want to put a handful or two of soft fruit or vegetables in one corner of the bin. The Durham Worm Farm recommends getting your worms warmed up with watermelon “which they love!” Then add another good fluffy damp layer of bedding on top of them and close them up for a few days. Another friend, Hal Mackey, told me “do be sure your worm bin has a snug top or you might wake up to worms all over your garage floor.”

As for food, in general worms like soft or rotting fruit or vegetable trimmings. “Because they have no teeth - it takes them longer to work through harder foods,” explains Ward. Coffee grounds, coffee filters, chopped up citrus rinds, rinsed and crushed egg shells, tea bags (no staples), chopped up flowers are all good food sources. Sources are mixed on whether or not to feed them pastas, grains or breads, but people who say not to are primarily concerned about attracting other creatures to outdoor bins, so starches within reason are fine. Most people do not recommend meat, bones or moldy food in the worm bin. Do not put fresh mown grass into your bin as it heats quickly and this heat can hurt your worms.

A few days after the first feeding, open up the bin to make sure it is still nice and damp - not too wet - and that the worms are working in and around the food. “If they have made a good dent in it, you can add some more. Again,” Ward tells me, “add it to one corner and then cover the new food with a good layer of bedding. The best way to avoid smell or flies is to cover your fresh food with a lot of bedding and to not overfeed the worms. Only add new food once the previous food has been worked through - one to two times a week or less.” Ward and Cheryl have gone away for several weeks without having anyone come to feed their worms. They made sure to feed them normally before leaving and to leave the worms with plenty of damp bedding and the worms were fine.

Just as I once wrote that Ward preaches the gospel of compost, he also preaches the gospel of worm composting and I am now a believer. After the workshop, my children and I spent one morning recently setting up our worm bin. After some initial misgivings on the children’s part, they are feeling quite proprietary about their new pets. Ward tells me that within a few months we can start to harvest castings, and that within a year we could be harvesting every month. My children, my garden and I can hardly wait.

Post script: One of the many reasons that Ward and Cheryl Habriel believe and spread the word of composting so passionately is their firm belief that we as culture need to reduce our inordinate amount of waste. Besides composting, they work tirelessly to reduce the waste stream throughout our communities most recently by organizing and spear-heading a solid block styrofoam (such as that found in packaging boxes around new refrigerators, washing machines, microwaves and coffee pots - not peanuts, not take-out food containers) recycling campaign. Ward brings a large trailer to pre-designated sites and leaves it for several days so that near-by residents can drop their styrofoam. He then delivers that styrofoam to a storage facility in Oroville before going to the reprocessor in Stockton that manufactures it into new white interior trim (baseboards and moldings) for houses - much like MDF.