Starting your garden or just want to perk up your houseplants while helping the environment? Composting is a green, free way to provide great nutrition for your plants while putting less garbage into our growing landfills. And vermicomposting takes standard composting to a whole new level. For this year’s Earth Day, how about setting up a worm composting bin of your own?
I’m no expert on vermicomposting, but I have been maintaining my own worm composting bins for nearly a year and I’ve gotten great results. Since starting my own bin last year with a pound of worms, I’ve had to expand to a second bin to handle the population growth and bought an extra two pounds this Spring (from Bentley at Red Worm Composting) to help us process more wastes even faster.
In the past year, we have not thrown away any banana peels, coffee grounds, tea bags, or nearly any other non-meat organic waste. Instead, we’ve fed our worms every bit of it. And, boy do they devour it fast! Before long, you’ll see a nice layer of rich, black material building up in the bottom of your bin. This, folks, is the real black gold.
Once your worms have produced enough castings to collect, it’s time to harvest. (And there are many ways to accomplish this.) My first harvest last fall brought in about 10 pounds of castings and they’ll go in my garden as soon as I’ve finished constructing it. When it comes to natural fertilizers, you can’t get much better than fresh worm castings. I suspect my tomatoes will be better than ever – even without using MiracleGro!
But what if you don’t want to mess with worms but still want the benefit of worm castings? With the growing popularity of using worm castings for fertilizer, there are companies popping up all over willing to sell you fresh compost for immediate use. You can either search at your local landscaping company or search the internet using resources such as the Worm Composing Business Directory.
Happy composting and happy Earth Day!
Photo by: jeffschuler
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }