Worm Bins Made Easy by Herb Tracy

Recently at the Spring Plant Sale, Herb Tracy gave a demo on how to create a simple worm bed to not only "eat your garbage" but to create castings (worm poop) to use as fertilizer in your soil.  He's an advocate of the book, "Worms Eat My Garbage"  which details everything you need to know including the "cubic" footage of space required when building your bin.

Herb is seen here showing the difference between small/Red Wigglers and "fishing" worms. The Red Wigglers are full size and not baby worms. He brought with him a demo-bin with holes in the lid to let fresh air in and holes in the bottom to let excess water out. To get started he suggests using finely shredded newspaper that's been soaked and wrung out and mixed with soil, garbage and of course Red Wigglers. Red Wigglers are voracious eaters and reproduce with abandon. To get your own, make friends with someone who already has a bin and grab a handful, or you can buy them online and have them shipped to you.

A good working worm bin doesn't smell and can take care of food waste when you don't have room for a compost bin. It keeps food waste out of our trash system while also making great (and FREE) fertilizer for house plants or outdoor gardens.

Thanks Herb, every family needs a worm bed for the kids to keep feeding and being grossed out over red wigglers. At the same time it provides a living science project of how to keep a system in balance with the proper amount of air, water, food, and population. Soon they'll be the ones giving out worms so that their friends can start their own family garbage eating machine.