Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Making A Worm Bin

Sometimes Mom gets crazy ideas and decides to run with them.  

I've been reading about worm composting bins for a while now and finally made up my mind to give it a try.  We followed these directions to make our bin, and it was actually fairly simple.  The conversation I had with my father-in-law was pretty funny though: 

Me: "Can I borrow your drill?"
Him:  pause... "You want to borrow my power drill?" 
Me: "Yeah, I'm making a worm bin."
Him:  another pause... "Ok..."


The girls were excited when I told them we were getting some new pets and would have to make them a home.  I figured if nothing else it will be a fun school experiment.  The worms are staying in our garage for now, and if they survive a few months and don't stink too much we'll bring them into the basement for the winter.


We are starting out with just a few worms from someone else's worm bin, so I can't feed them too much yet.  Supposedly they multiply fairly quickly, so we'll see what happens.  Right now I just give them some veggie scraps once a week and be sure their bedding is still damp.


Stay tuned for an update in a couple months!  You can read more about worm bins here if you're interested.

It works for me.  At least I think it does...

6 comments:

  1. We have one too. The worms keep trying to escape from it.

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  2. I used to have a worm bin in my basement but the tea started to leak out of the spout. So, I moved the worms outside and placed a compost bin on top of their spot (one made for outside). Those worms have made it through two MI winters now! They must dig down and hibernate and those red wigglers pop back up in the Spring. That amazes me. Happy composting!

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  3. Cool! I do my composting outdoors, and so does my brother now, but when he lived in an efficiency apartment he had a worm bin that doubled as seating in his breakfast nook! There was no smell as long as he controlled the moisture carefully.

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  4. JDaniel4's Mom, I think I read somewhere that means they are getting too hot? Escaping worms are no good! :)

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  5. I'm curious, what do you use the worms for? Sorry, don't mean to sound silly, just never heard of it before.

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  6. That's ok, not a silly question! There is more about worm composting in the links that I included in the post, but basically its composting with worms. :) We have a dog who would get into a compost bin outdoors and we've never gone to the effort to make a regular compost bin. Worm composting is great for people living in an apartment or wanting to compost and not able to make a big outdoor bin. The worms create compost you can use in gardening/ potted plants/ etc. :)

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