Peasant Fare

On July 6, I went out and bought a 10-gallon Sterilite tub, a gray one, not one of the clear type. I brought it home and put about four holes in the bottom, seven holes on each of the long sides, and five holes in the top. On the morning of the 7th, I filled it about halfway up with wet sawdust. (This is good, clean sawdust from the milling of pine lumber; no plywood or treated wood allowed because of toxins.)

Then I took three quarts of my Worm Bin Starter (see the related page on this site) and gently emptied them into the bin, one in each of two corners, and one at the center of the opposite side (like three points of a triangle). I buried kitchen scraps in the sawdust and in the process covered the Starters with a few inches of damp sawdust. I covered the surface of the sawdust with a couple of sheets of newspaper. Then I left it alone. Within a couple of days there were worms exploring the surface just under the newspaper, which was damp.

Today, July 11, I pulled back the newspaper and added half a dozen crushed eggshells and some coffee grounds. (When I say “add” I mean “bury in the bin and cover with sawdust or other bedding.”)

The next step probably amounts to gilding the lily, but why not speed things up? My cousin Ellen and I had cleaned out a kitchen cupboard earlier this summer and found several boxes of out-of-date cake and brownie mixes, things the teenager liked for nights-in with the girlfriends. Rather than throw them out, we’d left them in the utility room for just this purpose. I added a gallon of rainwater to a package of brownie mix, stirred it up, and used it as a drench for the sawdust in the bin. As I said, this was clearly not necessary, because the worms were already happily exploring their new environment, but the combination of powdery flour and sugar should give the microbial life in the bin a big boost, and encourage more worm movement.

There’s no smell at all. I put the bin outside in a shady place between a fence and a garden shed. I keep the lid on it.

A couple of days later, July 13, I cleaned out the refrigerator and dumped some moldy tomato sauce in a patch that was still all sawdust. There were a number of worms up at the top, right under the newspaper, and there seemed to be pretty good movement all through the bin. I started two more bins of the same size and type, following pretty much the same steps, on the same day.

Since the refrigerator cleanup produced a lot of waste, I had plenty of food scraps to get all three bins fully saturated with food. As a rule of thumb, uncomposted food waste can be about 1/8 of the bin’s contents by volume, or less. In a ten-gallon bin, I have about five gallons of damp sawdust, almost a gallon of worm bin starter, and about the same volume of food. Play it by ear. It shouldn’t stink, and it shouldn’t heat up. (Thermophilic composting in the worm bin is not for rookies.)

One of the reasons I like using sawdust is that it absorbs liquid and odor well, and is so dense with carbon that it puts a brake on quick-to-stink nitrogen-heavy material (like leftovers). So even when I have a lot to dispose of in a small bin, I can do it painlessly in a bin with sawdust bedding.

Some people who are very savvy about the chemistry of soil, compost, and crops are leery of using sawdust as a bedding (promotes too much fungal action as opposed to bacterial, I think they’d say). For those people, I’d suggest using dry leaves or paper or whatever seems most appropriate to your goals, but keep a few handfuls of sawdust around for the day you clean out your refrigerator.

July 15, I checked on the three bins started since July 6. The first bin has about a half-dozen adult worms exploring the surface (under the newspaper) and smaller ones enjoying the eggs shells. The two July 13 bins appear just as I left them. At this point, the bins don’t need any attention at all for a while, and I’d feel perfectly comfortable going on vacation for a couple of weeks. However, since one of the reasons you have a worm bin is you want a place to stash your organic waste, right? So, bearing in mind that the number one reason for worm bin trouble is over-feeding, I’m going to judiciously add vegetable matter to the bins on an every-couple-days schedule.