Vermicomposting - Basics Of Worm Composting
by John Yazo
Vermicomposting, composting with worms, requires very little work and can produce great organic gardening results for the home gardener. Worm compost is high in nutrients and will improve your gardens soils structure with the organic matter it produces, humus. A fun method of composting that can provide your home gardens with many benefits.
Worm castings have a mucus coating, making it an excellent choice to be used in your garden as a slow release organic fertilizer that will provide a constant feeding of nutrients to your plants. Enzyme in the castings are melt of exoskeletons of many insects that provide a natural pesticide and over time will aid in repelling many pests in your garden, along with having a powerful active population of beneficial bacteria that will guard your plants against harmful bacteria and fungi.
Worms will reproduce very rapidly and will eat cardboard, newspaper, food scraps, coffee grounds, vegetable peelings or skins, and even leftovers that are turning to mold. A pound of compost can be digested and excreted by approximately eighteen hundred worms in a period of about twenty four hours.
Earthworms are a free source of labor, along with being a producer of organic slow release fertilizer. These two factors will benefit your gardens soil structure by aerating and fertilizing at the same time. For composting you want to use redworms, they are more adaptable to warmer temperatures of the worm bin. Earthworms prefer a cooler environment like soils.
Building a worm bin is fairly simple and inexpensive. Just save your food scraps that you produce in a one week period of time. Weigh them and choose or make a container that is one square foot in size for every pound of food scraps that you produce. If you produce five pounds, then make a five square foot container that is no deeper than one foot and drill holes in the bottom for drainage.
Once you have your container built, bed it by mixing together compost, discarded paper, and garden waste or trimmings, keeping this bedding material moist. Now you are ready to let the earth worms start doing there work. If you need to purchase worms, you will need two to three hundred worms to start, adding more as needed when your composting increases.
Keep a close watch on your composting
operation for the first few months, the original organic material will
be consumed by the worms and excreted as worm castings making a humus
that is darker in color and takes up less space. Move this humus
material to one side of the container and add new organic material. In
about two weeks all of the worms will have moved to the new material
and you start using the compost for your gardening needs.
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