By: Casey Coke

There is no need to let kitchen waste go to waste! Gardeners can spend lots of money buying good soil or compost to make the garden grow. There is, however, no need to do that if you eat at home more than once a week! Composting kitchen waste solves several problems simultaneously by converting kitchen scraps that would otherwise be thrown away into rich, organic soil for the garden. Incorporating compost into the soil helps keep the soil alive and life-sustaining. Creating your own compost saves money and helps the environment.

Composting 101 There are a few things that every new composter needs to know: · Kitchen compost can include any vegetable matter or paper. Do not add oils, meats or fats to your kitchen compost, as it will cause your compost to smell and attract animals. Additionally, you need certain conditions of heat and bacterial activity to properly compost these materials. · Shred your scraps or tear them up into the smallest pieces possible. This will help the scraps break down faster. · Compost operations need green and brown materials. Kitchen waste falls into the category of green materials. In addition to the kitchen waste, you will need to add dried shredded leaves or other brown matter. · One of the most efficient ways to compost kitchen waste is to use worms. Vermicomposting can be done outside or under the sink, depending upon the space available and the winter climates. (Worms cannot sustain chilling temperatures.)

Kitchen Composting Many successful gardeners make all of their compost in the kitchen! You can compost in the space under your kitchen sink, especially if you employ worms to help. This is how you build an under the sink worm bin: 1. Get a Tupperware or a small trash can and poke holes in the top for air. 2. In a separate container, soak a mix of grass clippings and dry shredded leaves overnight. 3. Put about two inches of gravel in the bottom of the container and fill with water up to ½ inches below the rock line. 4. Drain the grass/leaves mix and place it in the container. Let it sit for 48 hours. Once the temperature has stabilized to 100 degrees or lower for at least 24 hours, you can add the worms. 5. Let the worms become acquainted with their new space for about a week. At that point, you can begin adding food for the worms. 6. One pound of worms can consume about one pound of kitchen scraps per day. After about two months, you can remove some of the composted material and continue to add food.

Composting Kitchen Scraps Outside

If you have plenty of space outside in a part sun/part shade area, consider a compost pile to compost your kitchen waste outside in the garden. You can decide whether you want to maintain a hot compost pile or a cold compost pile. Hot compost cooks faster, but you do have to turn it and monitor it. With cold compost, you can employ worms to help break down your kitchen scraps. With either type of pile you will need a combination of green materials and brown materials to start your pile. If you are composting cold and not using a container, build a bottom framework of larger twigs and materials. Alternate layers of green materials (kitchen scraps and freshly cut grass) and brown materials (shredded leaves and straw). You can continue to add layers to the pile, occasionally building in a layer of sticks. The layer made of sticks allows oxygen into the pile that helps the bacteria and other soil organisms that will eventually break down the kitchen waste in the pile. Composting kitchen waste is a simple and rewarding way to recycle your green kitchen scraps and have rich, fertile soil for your garden.

Carey asked:


What is your favorite brand or type of worm compost bin and why? What do you like/not like about it? Thank you

By: Vicki Duong

If you’re thinking about starting up a family-friendly composting project, why not consider doing one that involves worms? That’s right, worm composting, also known as vermicomposting, is a fun-filled way to get the compost you desire for your garden. All you and your kids have to do is keep the worms happy by feeding them and they’ll do all the work for you. Here’s how you get started:

All you need is a plastic 10 gallon worm bin with drainage holes on the bottom (home made or store bought is just fine), a tight fitting lid to keep the worms in the dark, moist bedding made out of one inch newspaper strips or sawdust, a pound of red wiggler worms that you can get from your local fish bait shop or from internet retailer sites like Composters.com, and some food waste like banana peels, fruit rinds and vegetable stalks. Be sure to keep in mind that this will get a bit messy, so it might be best to do this outside especially if you’re children are going to be involved. If it gets messy, it’s okay!

Start by halfway filling the worm bin with the newspaper strips; moisten the strips once you’ve reached the halfway mark. Once the newspaper is damp, push it to one side of the bin and repeat the process until the bin is full but not entirely packed and make sure there are no standing puddles collecting at the bottom. Add half a cup of sawdust or soil so that the worms have some grit to work with. Go ahead and add your pound of worms and watch as they wiggle their way down into the soil and newspaper. Next, bury your food waste into the bedding a few inches deep and cover the bedding with a five page blanket of damp newspapers.

After a few days you should notice some positive results – the worms are digging in and out of the bedding, eating the food waste, soil and newspaper, digesting it and leaving behind worm castings (explain to your kids that it’s poop!). It’s the worm castings that you really want for your garden. To keep your worms happy keep adding food wastes every few days or so and they’ll keep producing that rich black gold for you. Have fun and don’t be afraid to get down and dirty!

By: Chris Dailey

If you have been gardening for very long, and especially if you are an organic gardener, you know one of the best mulches or soil amendments that you can add to your garden is natural compost. One particularly good kind of compost is created in worm bin where red worms are added to a mixture of bedding and organic waste. One of the best ways to do this is with what is called a composting bin. Here are a few tips on how to use these special bins in order to get top quality compost every time.

Throughout history, it is common knowledge that any gardeners that use dark, earthy soil as a base for their garden is going to create a healthy harvest in just a few months based upon the nutritional content and texture of the soil. If you’re soil is not so lucky as to appear in this way, one of the best ways to improve its quality, soil fertility, and also to stimulate the health of the roots of your plants that you are growing is to add vermicomposting material created in a worm bin.

Although modern technology is a mainstay for most of us including cell phones, places to live that are interconnected with civilization, and of course the Internet, this modernistic focus has led to farming means that are not natural and can damage the soil that we are using. Using commercial fertilizers and adding inorganic salt based nutrients with inorganic forms of potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen, are ways that most commercial farmers ensure that their crops will grow. This practice has been shown to create runoff with excessive salts and nutrient depleted soils.

With this in mind, it is probably time based upon the amazing amount of organic waste that our modern society produces that we find a way to take all of this back to the farms and our own homes and start creating food that is better for us and more nutritious on not only an individual scale but a global scale. One of these ways is educating people on the use of compost bins.

They are actually very easy to acquire and also economical. Within the soil itself, you would add worms but these are not the only organisms that will be in the dirt aiding the composting process. Organisms such as worms are helps by fungi, bacteria, mites, arthropods, and even insects that will love to live in this dark, moist habitat. The breaking down of organic waste will be accentuated and what will be left is a soil that is light, crumbly and moist and ready to interject into the soil that you currently have.

If you live near a large growth of trees, you can use the leaves as long as you shred them to a size that will compost very quickly. These will provide a natural source of carbon that the worms it is need in the bedding of the soil in order to do their job. Make sure that you do not use live oak trees or even magnolia trees because of the acidic value with in this carbon base that can be poisonous to the worms. If the worms die, so does your composting process.

One other thing to consider with composting bins is where you put the organic material for the worms and how far the worms should be beneath the soil compost mixture when you start out. As a rule of thumb, and most average compost containers, you should place a bout a thousand worms or 1 pound of worms about 6-8 inches beneath the soil, place your organic material on top, and then place the lid on top of the container to begin the process. After a period of two to three days depending upon how many worms you started with and also the amount of organic material that they have to process, this should be a fine start toward the creation of your compost as well as a great breeding environment for your worms.

Although this is common sense, but the more worms you have the better and the more compost you will inevitably make. By taking the profits that you will receive from selling excess worms or possibly excess compost, you can then invest into another container and start the whole process over again with no additional out-of-pocket expense.

So go out and do your due diligence and find yourself an affordable compost bin that will allow you to begin the vermicomposting process. We must all do our part in order to protect ourselves from food that is contaminated by modernistic processes and go back to growing some ourselves which will make us healthier and happier.

By: Vicki Duong

Composting is easy so long as you have the right materials and equipment necessary, but did you know that even the worms are your best friends in this process? Vermicomposting or vermiculture is essentially the process of composting with the use of worms and their castings (i.e., worm waste). An easy and fun way to compost for your garden or house plants, vermicomposting can be done both indoors or out, and requires very little space.

Red worms or red wiggler worms, which are different from earthworms, are the best worms to use for your composting process. You want to stay away from using earthworms because they weren’t made to be composting worms; red worms will take your food scraps, eat and digest them, making worm castings full of nutrients for your soil. Earthworms on the other hand, are burrowing worms; they’ll aerate the soil and take everything on the surface down with it. Therefore, they’ll be absolutely useless for what you want to do, which is compost!

In order to have a successful vermicomposting experience, always remember to feed your worms! Worms need food too, and they love food scraps, another reason why vermicomposting is so easy. Readily available, food scraps like wilted vegetables, fruit rinds, bread and coffee grounds are great sources of food for your worms. Just be sure to never, ever add scraps like meats, fats, oils, or dairy products because the worms will not be able to eat and digest these items properly. Additionally, they smell bad and attract rodents and other animals to your compost bin or heap.

Be sure to bury your food scraps in the dirt about a few inches deep underneath the dirt. This will keep the annoying fruit flies away, not to mention leaving some wiggle room for your little worms. It’s always a good idea to bury your food scraps in different areas of your worm bin so that the worms don’t get too used to convening in the same spot and so that all areas of the bin receives its fair share amount of worm castings.

After a few months you’ll notice that in place of the dirt bedding you laid out for the worms earlier, you have what we composters like to call black gold, rich fine worm castings that are ready to go into your garden. After that you’re ready to start over! A fun process that students, young children and adults will surely enjoy, vermicomposting is a terrific and acceptable way to get down and dirty with worms!