Vermicomposting: Fascinatingly Icky
Tuesday, April 5, 2011 at 6:16PM 
Not for those with a weak stomach...Last year, I tried my hand at an outdoor compost pile. Food didn't break down quickly (or at all) and I ended up shoving most of the scraps into a remote corner where they were useless. Animals stole pieces and left them strewn throughout my yard, and the rest just sat, breaking down so slowly that I still had in tact food remnants I'd placed outside in Winter, around the following Fall. Following the growing season, I attended a presentation by one of my school's prominent compost advocates, who discussed a new trend in organic composting: indoor worm boxes. Worms are composts' best friend; they munch on food scraps, aerating it as they go, and they digest it into broken down organic material with help from the enzymes in their digestive tract. This speeds up the breakdown of the food to as little as a month's time.
I decided to try my hand at vermicomposting this year. An indoor worm box is perfect for a tiny NYC apartment, and can be kept anywhere, from closets to under the sink. I keep mine in the hall next to my seed starting station.
Assembling the box is really easy. I found a plastic box with a snap on lid, about 8"x14", which I'd picked up at a dollar store for $6. Worms need adequate oxygen circulation or they'll die, so using pliars, I heated a nail over my stove's burner and used it to melt holes into the sides of the box. I made a small hole every inch, but you can make larger holes and place wire screen over them to prevent escapes, though that's unlikely; their environment inside the box is ideal to where they want to be.
To the box, I added layers of moistened paper, supplied by old phone bills. Worms need a wet environment or they'll dry out. Too much water and the worms will drown, so the best way to add moisture is to dip paper in water first, then wring out and add to the box. The bedding is key, worms lay their eggs in it and eat it along with the food scraps. Make sure about half to three quarters of the worm box is filled with bedding.
Next, add food. You can add almost any organic material: vegetable and fruit scraps and rinds, coffee grounds, egg shells (crushed), tea bags, even paper towels, which help to proide new bedding. Do not add dairy or meat. I work at a restaurant known for it's organic fair-trade coffee, and saved the rich grounds and filters to add to my box. For each layer of food scraps, I added a layer of coffee grounds to cover them. This reduces the smell and helps prevent fruit flies. Ideally, you should bury all food scraps under the bedding. Covering them is key to preventing odor and encouraging the worms to eat the food. I got a little overenthusiastic and added too much food before I realized this, but the worms seem to be happy, and I'm now adding used wet paper towels on top of the coffee to provide new bedding.
For worms, the best are red wigglers (small red earthworms). If you want to try finding them on your own, put a pile of compost on some open soil and cover with dry leaves. In the next day or so, you should have attracted red wigglers. I decided to buy my red wigglers from the Lower East Side Ecology Center, responsible for the compost exchange in Union Square. You can call and set up a meeting time, then pick up either a half pound ($11) or pound ($22) of worms, along with "worm condos" ($55), fresh composted soil ($1.50-$12), and other composting products such as compost cranks ($42) to aerate your compost.
Add your worms to the food scraps covered in bedding, and within a few days, they should settle in. They hate light and enjoy the warm moisture of the worm box, so they tend to stay put. I was a nervous new mom when I first brought them home, and kept opening the box to see if they were alive, but they seem to be doing quite well.
When it's time to harvest the compost, you're supposed to move the dirt to one side, then line the other side with new bedding and food scraps. Within a few weeks, the worms should completely migrate over to the new bedding (the old worm leavings will poison them, so it's important for them to have new food and bedding).
Indoor, compost, vermiculture, worm box in Compost 
Reader Comments (4)
Hello Kate and Jen!
I just stumbled over your blog. Unfortunately I couldn’t find an email address, so I’ll give this a try! Leon, my boyfriend and I, we’re both photo students from Germany, I’m currently living in doing an internship in New York and we’re working on a photo essay about urban agriculture. It would be great to talk to you or even take a look at your little farm, if that is somehow possible. I wanted to send you a brief overview of the pictures we’ve done so far (we’ve been to Roberta’s, BK Farmyards, Red Hook and Automotive Highschool and we’ll go to see Goodyoga in Greenpoint now, as they have a small rooftop farm as well), so if you leave me you’re email address or any way it would be nice to hear from you!
Thank you,
Leon and Maria