LONG TIME NO SEE, FRIENDS! Life has been busy lately, lots of updates to share!
I promised I would tell you all more about our composting projects, and I try to be a woman of my word so here we go. I attended a gardening workshop put on by LA county so that I could learn more about composting and water-wise gardening, AND purchase a worm bin and yard bin for cheap!
What is a worm bin?
This might be my favorite backyard addition yet. It's literally a bin of worms - specifically, red wigglers, which are an African species that are particularly good for composting food waste because they eat their weight in food every day. The other stuff in the bin is coconut coir (the brown hairy stuff on the outside of a coconut), which provides a neutral organic material that can hold water and make a nice comfy home for them.
So what do you do with the worms? Just look at 'em and stuff??
Yes! I love my worms and I check on them frequently. But I also have to feed them about 1/2 pound of food scraps per week. They eat the food scraps, poop it out, and the poop is literally "black gold." Sometimes referred to as "castings," worm poop is an incredibly potent fertilizer and plant food.
You can feed them ANYTHING?
Not exactly. These worms are delicate creatures with very sensitive skin and tummies. They don't like an overabundance of eggshells - which help balance the pH (acidity) in the bin, but also make for very sharp edges that can cut the worms. They also don't like super acidic foods like citrus and tomatoes. We just put all of those scraps in the big compost bin. I've also been told we should be careful with the amount of coffee grounds we add to the bin, so I limit that as well.
There's also a delicate balance that must be kept in order to keep the worms and the whole mini-ecosystem healthy. Whenever I add "green materials" - stuff that has moisture in it, like food scraps, I need to also add some "brown materials" to balance it out. In the photo below, I'm using torn up egg cartons as additional brown material. It's important that the bin doesn't get too wet because the worms breathe through their skin, and they are terrible swimmers.
Anything that I can't feed the worms (which is the bulk of our food waste, since the worms can only eat so much) goes in our big compost bin, which is the "Soil Saver" shown below. It's basically a big plastic box with no bottom that I dump food and yard waste into. It lives outside in a relatively shady area. It has plenty of vent holes for air and microbes to get in and help the decomposition process along. Eventually the stuff that I pull out of the bottom will be super-rich, healthy, black soil. We'll see how that goes!
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