Components for Worm Farm

Bin

• Compost worms, typically red wigglers or Eisenia fetida, require a shallow box with a lid so they can tunnel around in darkness. Their bin needs to provide a suitable container to hold their bedding and food. A shallow bin creates more favorable conditions for their habitat since a greater amount of their bedding is exposed to oxygen, which prevents anaerobic conditions from developing and creating an unpleasant odor.

  Hobbyists can buy commercially made plastic and wooden stacking bins or make their own bins out of plywood, Rubbermaid totes, salvaged bathtubs or plastic trash cans, which, though not shallow, can work well with the addition of a window cut at the bottom and a central vertical PVC tube perforated to add air.

Bedding

• Many commercial worm bins come with a starter amount of coconut coir (fiber) bedding. You can also use shredded junk mail and paper or newspapers or cardboard torn into 1-inch strips and soaked for 20 to 30 minutes in a bucket of water. Some hobbyists use peat moss, which, like coconut coir, provide optimal bedding but somewhat defeats the proenvironment usefulness of worm farms in removing salvageable items such as newspaper, junk mail and cardboard from the waste stream.

Food

• Compost worms feed on a combination of kitchen scraps and their bedding. Suitable scraps include vegetable and fruit peelings, eggshells, coffee grounds, tea bags, moldy breads or rice and leftover salad, as long as it does not have oily dressings. Do not feed compost worms meat, dairy or citrus products or rinds. These items may be able to go into a separate outdoor compost pile.

Worms

• Almost all hobbyists use red wigglers, which can flourish in a worm farm unless overfeeding or bedding that becomes too dry present obstacles. You can buy red wigglers from mail-order suppliers (see Resources) or perhaps find them under manure piles at a stable. Regular earthworms found in a garden are likely dew worms or nightcrawlers, which require deep soils to create permanent burrows to survive and are not suitable for a worm farm.

Moisture, pH and Temperature

• Compost worms require that their bedding contain 70 to 80 percent moisture, as determined by a moisture meter or by squeezing the bedding to see if a few drops of water escape. Increase moisture by spritzing the bedding with a water bottle or adding sopping wet new bedding. Decrease moisture by adding dry bedding. Measure pH using a combined moisture-pH meter and check for neutral levels at around 6.0 to 7.0. Add eggshells if the bedding measures on the acid side. Keep the worm bin within a range of 55 to 77 degrees F, ideally around 72 degrees.