Today I am harvesting my first batch of compost from the worm bin. It’s surprisingly fun to dump in a bunch of fruit and veg scraps and come back a week later to find rich, useful compost!

I’m harvesting by the single bin method. After not feeding the worms for more than a week, I pushed all the worms and the compost to one side of my bin. Then on the other side I put in fresh bedding (newspaper torn into strips) and new food scraps that have been sitting in my freezer for a while. I took them out last night to thaw them. I read that if you freeze your scraps before you give them to the worms, it cuts down on fruit flies in the bin and I have definitely found this to be the case.

So, now the worms will wriggle into the fresh bedding and food and I will be left with several pounds of compost which I will spread around my garden and use to top-dress my houseplants. There may be a few worms left in there, so I will probably spread it on the ground for a day or two to give them a chance to get out. There’s also some eggshells in there—the worms don’t seem to break those down as quickly as the other scraps—but I will just crush them up a bit and put them back in the bin.

I probably could have harvested earlier, but life got in the way. It’s really nice that, within certain parameters, the worms will wait for me. As long as I don’t give them too many scraps and I keep putting fresh bedding in when the old gets wet, they seem to be pretty happy. I’m positive that my 1 pound colony of worms has at least doubled in size—there are tons of them in there! And they are very cute.

Vermicomposting is a lot easier than I thought it would be. I feared that it would be gross and stinky, but the process is remarkably simple and self-contained. I got started after an hour’s research on the internet, and was able to quickly troubleshoot the one problem I had (bin got too wet—compost got stinky—little white worms appeared) with the help of my trusty friend Google. Here’s a few of the sites that seemed to have the best information:

• The Lower East Side Ecology Center sold me my bin and my worms. I paid $45 for the whole set up, but if you attend one of their workshops, you can get it for $10. Their pamphlet and website describe the harvesting method I am using, which seems much less elaborate than many other methods described online.
• Red Worm Composting is easily the most comprehensive site on the web for vermicomposting. The site’s owner also does fun experiments like making a composter out of an old pair of jeans. This is a great site for troubleshooting
• Nomad Needles on Etsy makes “Worm Inns” that are more attractive than bins and specifically designed for composting. Neat-o.
• Worm Girl Montreal is a fun blog by an urban composter and gardener. Her Vermicomposting 101 post has everything you need to know to get started and I have to say it’s a lot of fun seeing the whole composting/growing cycle working in her life. She even sells worms and bins to folks in her area! Very cool.
• Vermicomposters.com lets folks who have bins put themselves on a map. There are only a few in my neighborhood, which surprises me since this is eco-central. The coolest thing is the data collected at the top—only 465 people are on the map, but that adds up to more than a ton of food scraps diverted from landfills every week! I love seeing how our drops in the bucket add up.

Happy worming!

(image by mckaysavage via flickr)