Worm Bin

Eric and I built a worm bin today. Just one more thing we're doing to save the world ;-) Seriously, though, it is a great way to minimize the amount of food waste we're putting into our trashcans. Eric says he likes to just eat a lot to minimize how much food we throw away, but I thought we could decrease it even more by owning worms. The worms live in the bin and we put our food scraps in there - no dairy or meats, but lots of veggies, bread, etc. They also love paper! We haven't started the bin yet, but I will be picking up some worms from Island Seed and Feed in Goleta on Monday. It's very exciting. I mean, as exciting as worms can get.



Here you can see the bottom bin with its holes for ventilation. The top bin rests in the bottom bin. The worms will live in the top bin until it becomes full. At that point, we will put another small bin on top and the worms will crawl into the new bin through holes in the bottom. We will then harvest all their poo, which is technically called "castings", but poo is much more fun to say. The poo is used for fertilizer.





Here you can see the holes we drilled in the bottom of the top bin.

The lid is a ventilated lid made of two lids attached together. The bottom lid has a hole in the middle. The top lid is attached to the bottom lid with spacers in between to keep them separated a bit. This keeps it dark in the bin, but allows air to circulate.

We decided to make the bins out of some Rubbermaid storage containers that we already had but didn't need. Using these helped us reduce waste by not buying new containers.

Go here to see the plans that we followed. Thanks to the Solid Waste Department of Klickitat County, WA for their slightly confusing, but excellent plans.