Cool technology
A week ago the “great experiment” began for both Diane and I. We live in high snow country. With upwards of five months of snow on the ground a year this makes year round outdoor composting impossible. Our local regional district government encourages indoor composting using red wriggler worm bins so I’ve installed one in each of our homes.
The “Wriggly Wranch” bins are made in Australia out of completely recycled material. They are available from many places.
As I harvested the worms from our outdoor compost trench I don’t know how many I have. I didn’t try and count them. Note that Red Wrigglers are not your common garden earthworm. They tend to be small skinny red worms and they are the ones you usually find just underneath the litter on a forest floor or where there’s been a good leaf fall. If you want to try this yourself and want to get a good idea of how many worms you have then you can do the following:
- Scoop a couple of pitchforks of compost with the greatest concentration of worms into a large-bottomed container or tarp.
- Make a hill out of the material.
- Set out in the sun or bright light.The worms will start to head down and away from the surface
- Simply scoop the worm-free compost away from the top of the pile. The pile will shrink and you will have lots of worms in a small amount of compost.
1000 worms is about 1lb and will fit in your cupped hands.
In the first picture what you see is the base bin that holds any compost tea that filters down (that’s what the spigot is for) and the worm bin on top of it. Compost tea when diluted 10:1 with water (10 parts water to one part tea) is one of the very best fertilizers you can have for your indoor plants.
As the first bin fills up you start a second then a third one (3 come with the kit) by placing the new bin on top of the old one with the bottom (which is a mesh the worms can move through) touching the top of the compost in the old bin thereby giving the worms a path into the new bin. Red Wrigglers do no like to go too deep, so they will make their way though the mesh into the new bin. By the time the first bin reaches the bottom there should be few worms left in it, the compost should be completely done, and you can either just add it to the garden as is or follow the directions above to retrieve any worms that are in there.
Technorati tag: Wriggly Wranch ,Indoor Composting, red wriggler worms, composting
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