Why Worms?
An Introduction
Or, "Why can't you just get a goldfish like everyone else?"
Or, "Why can't you just get a goldfish like everyone else?"
I grew up composting at my parent's home in Wisconsin in the 70s. Food co-ops and farmers' markets were all the rage, the OPEC embargo was on, and Kool and the Gang and corduroy bell-bottoms were what the cool kids were in to (or so I'm told). We pile-composted all of our yard waste and food scraps for use in our garden, which was (and is) gorgeous and productive. As soon as I was old enough to begin hefting the shovel, I was fascinated by the number of worms that we had in our compost pile and garden. Much of my young passion for fishing grew from how much I loved going out to dig worms for the day's trip! Through my childhood I loved things like ant farms, raising Monarch caterpillars, rearing tadpoles in a tub, fishing and learning about natural systems in general, and I am blessed to have parents who shared these passions and supported my love of learning.
But in hindsight, I kind of took the composting for granted. Once I went to college it broke my heart to scrape our food into the trash in the cafeteria, it felt like such a waste to sentence all that organic material to a lifeless landfill somewhere instead of making gorgeous compost. But when I moved into my first apartments our landlords wouldn't permit composting in the yard, so I immediately started searching for creative solutions. When I heard about "Vermicomposting", using composting worms in a container to compost food scraps and produce worm castings, I was elated! How cool, an in-home biology experiment that can save my scraps from the trash bin!
And so I began to experiment with vermicomposting. This was in about 1990 and my first resource is still one of the best for the beginner, Mary Appelhoff's Worms Eat My Garbage. For most of my life since then I've vermicomposted in one way or another, diverting organic wastes from the landfill and creating gorgeous, living vermicast (the proper term for the castings we get from worm bins) for my gardens and horticultural projects.
Interestingly, that same period was around when issues like sustainability, climate change and the locavore movement also began to get traction. Vermicomposting as a science has grown a lot since then, and we've learned a lot more about the complexity of soil ecosystems. We learned to let go of the linear "food chain" diagram and embraced the concept of the "food web", and have woken up to the impact of our waste on our world. Home vermicomposting as an art and science has also progressed, from simple piles and plastic bins to stacking systems, "continuous flow through" systems that self-harvest, on up to large commercial "reactors" that are marvels of harmony between the composting ecosystem and industrial efficiency.
The real beauty for me in vermicomposting is how close it keeps everything to home. Our food scraps and other organic wastes would normally go to the trash. There they are trucked away to a landfill, where they break down under piles of other trash. The rotting process in the absence of oxygen causes huge amounts of methane to be released into the atmosphere, a potent greenhouse gas, and the resulting sludge is lost forever from the natural cycle of replenishment of our soil systems.
By vermicomposting:
Truly a miraculous process! I genuinely think that composting and especially vermicomposting is one of the easiest of the highly impactful things we can do to lighten our footprint as Americans. I make this information (and starter kits) available to share my passion for vermicomposting both because I love it and because I believe in it.
So I've prepared some brief (well, brief by my long-winded standards) articles to cover some of the basics, and I definitely recommend finding a good book like Worms Eat My Garbage to get you started and cover vermicomposting in more detail.
Click here to start learning about home vermicomposting! Click here to learn about my castings and tea kits!