The easy process of letting worms eat our garbage!

When my baby daddy and I started dating he talked about composting indoors when we graduated from college. I was like “yeah right on! That’s awesome!” Then he mentioned it would be with worms….

“I don’t want to know about worms in my house. Yuck! You can do it, but I don’t want to think about that.”

So, with my hesitant but kind support, Baby Daddy ended up composting when we moved in together. And our trash has reduced considerably. We might even be trash free soon and that would be a dream come true. The worms aren’t fishing worms, like I originally thought. At first we had a few fruit flies issues in the apartment, but that only lasted a week or two. I think that was the only downside to doing this project.  Once Baby Daddy realized that he wasn’t burying the food deep enough in the compost the problem went away! It hasn’t returned. Our place doesn’t smell like rotting food and we can easily “hide” our compost in a closet or the basement if need be! Not to mention with the extra dirt that the compost makes our houseplants are thriving!

I decided to go through a few of our steps on how to compost to show how easy it is! It wasn't with out help from Baby Daddy since usually I am just the enjoyer of our wonderful house plants. You can purchase the book for more concise directions or comment on this post with questions and I will try to answer them for you! 

Sometimes, drilling is fun!

First, prepare a “habitat” for the worms to come home to. What we did was get a plastic tub from our local target with two lids! Then we drilled a few holes in it. Baby Daddy got drill happy at this step and drilled way too many holes in it, so we ended up covering it up with electrical tape.

You can you use a wood container if you are okay with a little more odor in your home; we will definitely be moving to a wood container eventually.

Our Worm's Habitat!

Then you fill the container with cut up damp cardboard, some garden dirt, and some leftover food scraps. We started with two plastic walmart bags of finely shredded cardboard, two cups of dirt and two weeks worth of food scraps. Your food scraps can be basically anything, but not dairy or meat products! At first, we “finely” shredded our cardboard, but we found out that it didn’t need to be that small of pieces. We ripped up cardboard for months before this project started to prepare!

our worms arrived!

After two to three weeks of checking on it weekly and stirring it, it was time to add the worms. We got the pound of worms from redwormcomposting.com. We did have an issue with our first order but it was resolved in a kind and friendly matter, and because of that wonderful customer service this site is definitely recommended!  You just sprinkle the worms on top and put them under a light so they can nestle in to their new home.  Then you put the lid on until the next day!

spreading out the worms!

For the first week or two, check on your worm habitat once a day to check for signs of problems. If there is a problem, a large amount of the worms will be trying to escape by running up the walls. It is normal for a few of them to do that. We did not have an issue. A few problems that the worms could be hinting at: they could be out of food, they could not like the food (introduce onion and citrus food slowly to avoid this problem), or the moisture could be wrong.

Since there was not a problem for us, our compost was ready! We only add scraps once a week (we have a container in the kitchen for leftover scraps!) and Baby Daddy only needs to stir it once a month! If we notice the cardboard is low, we add more cardboard cutups.

After awhile, we noticed that there were two to three inches of worm poop at the bottom. Do not be alarmed. Worm poop is dirt! That’s when we cleaned it out! Baby Daddy recommends doing this part on a quarterly basis.

Look at all that new dirt!

We put the dirt in the middle of the floor. Yes, we did this in the kitchen. After a few hours of spreading the mound out to separate the worms, we then added the worms to their new home, which was the same habitat as before with new cardboard and new food scraps! Prepare this before separation of the dirt and the worms.

We know have plenty of worm poop (again, it’s just dirt) to put in our house plants and to make “tea” to water our plants! We even got two bottles of wine from our neighbor for sharing!