My Worm Bin -- The Full Report

In a country where somewhere just under forty percent of the food we grow is wasted it is important to consider how as an individual you can begin to reduce this number. Also keep in mind that as college and university students we are on average producing close to 640 pounds of trash annually. This can only mean that as students we are particularly careless about waste. According to The Washington Post reducing food waste and creating better practices is seen as one of the best methods to resolve the current climate crisis. By composting we can reduce nearly 70 billion tons of greenhouse gasses being emitted into our atmosphere.

Considering all this I asked myself, where do I come in. I noticed that in my apartment we were taking out the trash daily, and we were absolutely contributing to this generational problem we face. So to avoid filling our trash with paper towels and food scraps I got my roommates involved with the compost collected by the Ithaca College Ecoreps here on campus. If you are an IC student reading this I highly suggest you get on board with this program, and if not I encourage you to seek one out on your campus or in your community. From this program alone I saw our trash production decrease significantly and it was a quick solution.

Next I began a worm farm.

It was the best way I thought I could observe the process of composting and produce castings I could use in house plants. It presented itself as an opportunity to observe this sustainable cycle of food on a small scale. The best part was, it was incredibly easy, and I hope this is a great example of how any college student could begin this process as an amateur like me.

On the first day I acquired some red wigglers and a small plastic container full of very little castings for them to burrow into. I cut newsprint and made it damp in order to maintain the right amount of moisture in the container. The conditions in which the worms live in are very important to not only their survivability but the speed of their production. There has to be a good balance, pouring too much water into the container has potential to drown them and a dry habitat could dry them out. They need to remain moist. Also consider your temperature. If it gets too cold the worms will slow down to preserve energy, keeping them at somewhere between 50 and 60 degrees keeps them active and healthy. This was the first problem I encountered on my farm, I kept the farm on my balcony where temperatures could drop down to as low as 30 degrees overnight which slowed their production exponentially I figured they would do better with natural air and not the room temperature in my apartment, but it turned out to be quite the contrary. After bringing them inside I noticed they moved a lot more and were producing more castings than before. 

By day four I was confident in my conditions and added food waste to the environment on top of the newsprint. The structure of my farm was in two layers, the bottom being the digested food castings and the top consisting of newsprint mixed in with the waste I added. It is very important to consider what gets placed in the farm as waste, overfeeding is possible and be sure to select food scraps that are easy for the worms to eat quickly. Red Wigglers have tiny mouths so considering this I used skins from apples, and onions that were left over from some dishes I was making. I filled the bin to the point where it was about 50 percent newsprint and 50 percent skins and I was sure to mix them together. To see what would happen I placed two solid apples in the bin as well to see how the worms would interact with it and I did find two holes in one apple, one hole in the other and its stem had been consumed.

Day 6 was the other big turning point on my farm. The activity and movement in the bin was rampant and they responded quite well to the apple and onion skins. It was then I noticed that they were increasing in size growing thicker and some were even growing longer. As the days passed I kept checking to see any size differences or how much food had been digested but they were so active they almost seemed temperamental to my interaction. Instead of just digging they began snapping and wiggling in response to being touched. I decided to wait for a ten day period and then pull apart what was in the bin and record the final results

On day 16, the final day, the first thing I noticed was that most of the skins that I had placed in the bin were gone. I started with about 15 and there were only around five or six left with visible marks on them where they were being eaten. The worms hadn’t increased too much in length now but were starting to look very thick, and the level of movement and activity was stable. Handling these worms before they were usually damp but easy to move but now they were covered in a slimy residue that made it hard to keep them in between my fingers, they were slipping all over the place. This is actually an adaptation they use to avoid predators within the soil and it also supposedly produces a very foul odor. This is actually how these types of worms get their genus species name “Eisenia Fetida”. Fetida meaning “Foul smelling” though I didn’t catch any foul odor when handing them. The amount of castings in the bin was starting to overtake the amount of newsprint paper I was using to maintain moisture, in order to ensure that the contents don’t dry out too much I will have to add more moist newsprint eventually in order to keep the conditions suitable.

With this cycle ending I have already begun strategizing on where to take this farm next. I have some lettuce that went bad and some more apples I could skin and add somewhere down the line but I have already begun to think about upsizing the farm. Though I haven’t been able to spot any eggs, which look like little white and green lemons, I have seen tiny worms show up which leads me to believe there is some reproduction going on but it is not rapid at the moment. However the dirt castings are now dense with worms from the growth alone and spreading them out doesn’t seem like a poor idea.

Throughout my amateur’s attempt at making a worm compost bin this is mostly how I have been working, just observing and adapting to cause and effect. I hope this short report on the two weeks I have recorded on my worm farm can serve as a good beginners guide as my rookie mistakes can inform you to start successfully. It is my hope that in observing the cycle of how organic matter should be naturally reproduced into soil we can begin to become more mindful of how we use food waste. There are more purposeful ways to use organic waste than to simply let it rot in a landfill somewhere. As college and University students I believe that we have a responsibility to learn these processes and carry better habits into the future and begin to rehabilitate our planet by giving back to the soil.