Organic Waste
Its reckoned that a third of everything thrown in the bin is “organic waste”. Organic waste is things like scrapings from your plate, veg peelings, teabags, fruit etc. This eventually ends up at a landfill site where, as it rots, it can produce methane gas which is known to be a dangerous greenhouse gas.
If that wasn’t bad enough, if the landfill sites aren’t looked after properly it can also produce other pollution causing chemicals. None of this sounds good!
With such a large amount of organic waste being thrown away, finding someway of re-using it would be a quick way to reduce what goes in our bin and ultimately what ends up at the landfill.
We could compost it, but that's a slow process. It can also take up a lot of space and can be a bit smelly.
Luckily there are other ways of composting and ours is Worm powered.
What's a Wormery?
A Wormery is a container full of special composting worms, Dendra worms in fact.
These worms love nothing better than to munch away on any organic waste you give them. This means you have less to throw away, cos the worms have eaten it instead. In return they leave you with worm poo, a super rich compost, and worm pee (sometimes called worm “tea”) a very strong liquid fertilizer.
It also much quicker than traditional composting methods, allowing you to dispose of more waste, and for some reason we are yet to understand doesn’t smell.
Opening a Can-O-Worms
There are many Wormeries available, we chose the “Can-O-Worms” from Wiggly Wrigglers. This 100% recycled plastic Wormery kit contains about 1000 worms, special bedding, worm “treats”, lime mix to stop it getting too acidy and a booklet on how to use it.
The Can-O-Worms is made up of a base with a tap, three separate trays and a lid. You fill one tray with the bedding and put that tray on top of the base. The worms are set free onto the bedding and, once they have burrowed underground, you put your waste food on the top.
How Does it Work?
Worms eat half their body weight in food every day. Admittedly this isn't much when you first start off, the kit we have has approx 500g of worms. But, worms breed very quickly in fact if things are going well the number of worms could double every 60 to 90 days.
Interestingly worms self-regulate their population depending on the space available and the amount of food there is.
Looking at the Wormery forums on the internet (Yes there are some, go look for yourself) there are reports of these wormeries holding up to 9000 worms. Wormeries that big can eat over 2kg of waste food a day, every day…..blimey!
When the first tray is nearly full you put the next tray on top and start filling that up. The worms will move up through the trays, which have little holes in, to reach the new food.
You keep going until you have used all three trays. The worms will move up from the first tray into to the second and third because that’s where the new food is. You then remove the first tray which is now full of rich worm poo, use the compost for what ever you want to, put the tray back on the top and start the whole thing again.
All the time this is happening, the base is collecting the worm pee, which can be drained off via the tap in the base tray. This stuff is so strong you need to dilute before you can use it as plant food.
What do they eat?
They will eat pretty much anything that was once alive as long as its in small pieces.
The booklet says they will eat plate scrapings, fruit, vegetables, tea bags, shredded paper, egg shells, stale bread, pasta, rice, cheese, cakes and rather unpleasantly vacuum cleaner dust and hair. They cant eat meat, don’t do bones and don’t like onions.
Like humans, worms have different tastes so its all a bit of an experiment to see what our worms actually do and don’t like.
How long does it take?
That seems to all depend on a lot of things, though this isn’t an overnight process. It could, and probably will, take months before we get to “harvest” our first tray of compost. However that’s not really a problem. We did it purely as a way of reducing the amount of waste going into our bin, the fact that we may get something useful out of it is a bit of a bonus.
The good news is that so far it seems to be going well. The worms are feeding near the surface of the bedding which, according to the booklet, is a good sign. The only smell so far when you take the lid off is an earthy one which, again according to the booklet, is another good sign and there are the first signs of worm pee in the base.
We will post further updates as time goes on.