Recycle Leftovers into Fertilizer
Keep Worms to Provide Nature's Best Organic Fertilizer For Free
Composting with worms is an excellent way of reducing kitchen scraps and waste - less rubbish for the dustbin, fewer smelly bins and bags, and free fertilizer.
Everyone is getting good at recycling these days – paper, tins, glass, plastics; there's a container for them all – but there is more. What about the food waste like leftovers, potato peelings and teabags?
How Do You Recycle Wet Garbage?
Some may go to the dog, cat or even chickens or pigs, but what about all those vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, teabags and do on. That's still a fair quantity of waste going in the bins, and it's not only the volume that's the problem, food waste not only begins to rot and stink but attracts dogs and cats into the bins.
So what can be done about all those kitchen scraps? Get some worms, some nice red wrigglers that will chomp through all your food refuse and give you a ready supply of free worms for fishing or selling to local fishermen... and produce nature's best organic fertilizer.
Is this going to be expenisve? Well it can be, but it doesn’t need to be. It all depends on whether you are impatient and want to spend some money to jump-start your wormery by buying a quantity of worms or are instead prepared to collect your intial start-up worms.
What Kind of Worms Are Used in Vermicomposting?
The worms that love to munch through your leftovers aren't normal garden worms but composting worms, which are red. If you look under plant pots after the rain you'll probably see some of these red worms. It's best to get your worm-bed or worm-bin together first ,then you can collect some worms and add them to the prepared container. Once they've settled in and the food is coming along they will start breeding – depending on the quantity of food that needs eating!
When the worms have eaten everything you put in, the only thing you have left is worm poo, which is also called vermicompost – a rich and organic fertilizer for your house plants and garden.
See the worms in the photograph below feeding on moss and kitchen scraps. They are kept in a large sugar bag. Because these are not waterproof they are ideal, as it's impossible for the worms to stay too wet. The bag lasts about two seasons before the bottom rots out, but then it's easy to move the worms and be left with the poo!
The fertizer can be removed and the worms will go on forever eating and breeding if you feed them!
Reference:
- Worms Eat my Garbage by Mary Appelhof, an excellent introduction on keeping and breeding worms.
