It’s always fun poking through my worm bin and seeing how everyone is doing. Good news is: they’re doing well! Great news is: they’re eating away at a lot of kitchen scraps and I’m seeing a lot of real dirt, which is truly known as vermicompost. Seems vermiculture is the term for the technical using of worms for making compost.

I think it’s good to go in every once in a while and stir in the shredded newspaper and not eaten kitchen scraps and move the dirt on to the top. First it’ll get rid of some of the fruit flies, second it allows the microbes of the soil to touch more of the stuff I still want to break down.

I went ahead and touched some of the materials I thought were too dry, but they had a wet spongy feel to them which is exactly what you want to be feeling on your compost. I think I may have watered my simple-style composter a little too much. When I do that it starts to smell and is “no bueno”. I’ve had to leave the lid off for awhile now to get it back to a normal state.

Oooh, I almost forgot, one of my new projects is to add one more step to the simple-style composter. Clothes hangers through some of the holes to help with breaking up the clumps. Clumping is no fun, and what happens when you try to hydrate your pile too much.

Posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 11:52 am under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.