Worm Composting
Give your garbage disposal and wallet a rest. Convert kitchen scraps into a nutritious soil additive for your garden while raising bait for your next fishing trip. All you need is a container with drainage holes, shredded paper, red worms and of course kitchen scraps.
A recycling bin with several small holes drilled in the bottom works great. Fill with shredded paper and lightly moisten. Add a handful of soil – it helps the worms grind and digest the fool scraps, and kitchen scraps. Use plant wastes only, no meat, dairy or eggs, as the worms are vegans.
Place kitchen scraps into the shredded paper and cover to keep away fruit flies. Add about twice as many redworms as kitchen scraps. Keep your worm bin in an area about 55 to 75 degrees.
In less than a month you’ll have even more redworms and great worm castings to use a soil amendment or organic fertilizer for your landscape, houseplants and container gardens.
A bit more information: Convert some of your worm compost into compost tea, a liquid fertilizer for container gardens, houseplants and your landscape. Place one or two shovelfuls of compost into a permeable bag made from burlap or cheesecloth. Place the compost filled bag into a 5 gallon bucket of water. You can either let it “brew” for several days or stir daily to add oxygen to the mix. By the end of the week remove the bag of compost and dump the damp compost to your compost pile. Add water to the compost tea until it is the color of weak tea. Use this to fertilizer your garden and landscape plants.
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