Work composting or vermiculture is easy, affordable, and low-maintenance way of creating compost. It has a lot of advantages. Definitely it requires less work, just let the worms eat up all your scraps and in two months you’ll have rich compost at your disposal.

The worms used in composting are the brown-nose worms or redworms. They work best in containers and on moistened bedding. Those night crawlers or large, soil-burrowing worms are not good for composting purposes. Just stick with the redworms and things will work out well. All you need to do is add food waste to the container and soon enough the worms will eat them up and convert compost together with the bedding.

Before placing your redworms inside containers, place a nice layer of paper to serve as bedding for the worms. Any kind of paper will do, but it has been observed that the worms will consume newspapers, cardboards, paper towels and other coarse papers faster. The worms will eat this layer of bedding together with the scraps of food to convert them in compost. You can also add a bit soil on top of the paper and a few pieces of leaves. If your redworm container is located outside the house, try considering adding livestock manure on it. Redworms love them.

Fruits, grain, or vegetables are great for worm composting. The redworms can even eat egg shells, coffee grounds, and even tea bags. Avoid giving them meat, fish, oil, and other animal products. Like the traditional composting, these materials only attract pests to the composting bin and also produce bad smell.

The proportion of worms to food scraps will be based on how much scrap you like to be composted in a week. For example, if you want 1 pound of food scrap to be composted a week, all you need is also a pound of redworms. You don’t need to add redworms into the container unless you want to increase the amount of food scraps you intend to compost in a weekly basis.

For containers, keep it well ventilated to let the air in and let the excess moisture out. You can use plastic bins, and even wooden boxes for worm composting.

The time to harvest would be when the container is full. Scoop out the undigested food scraps as well as the works which are usually on the top few inches of the material. The remaining material inside the container is your compost. To remove the remaining worms from compost, you can spread the compost under the sunlight.

Leave a few small mounds of compost. As the heat dries the compost, the worms will gather in the mounds. Just be careful not to leave the compost under the sun that long or the worms will die.

As we drove by the plush residential homes, some recently covered with a fresh coating of paint and with the variously landscaped yards displaying their beautiful spired shrubs, flowering gardens and well watered green lawns, it could not be helped but to notice the evenly placed lawn bags filled to the brim with yard waste, just waiting to be carried away by the scheduled garbage pickup. So much labor must have gone into neatly and carefully packing each one of them so they wouldn’t be torn open by a stiff twig or two. Each fall and spring a similar scene is reenacted by most of us who seasonally do our traditional yard cleanup.

Having been a fairly devout organic gardener in the 1980’s and traditionally would save every bit of waste clippings from our yard that would then go into a 4×4 foot by 4 feet high loosely constructed wooden bin for later processing and churning into a fine mulch, it was difficult to see virtually truckloads of “Organic Gold Plant Food” just waiting to be carted away to some landfill, or just possibly be used for fuel in some local utility supplier’s furnace. It is beyond my understanding how this “fuel” for plants can be placed on the discard list.

With this fresh on my mind, I recollect a book written by Ruth Stout, an avid gardener, who appropriately called her book…”The No Work Garden” which showed how she only used bales of hay in the 1950’s and earlier to build her garden, spread the hay in the fall and after being well compressed through the winter, she would then simply place the vegetable seed into a small clump of soil at the proper planting time, pressed it firmly and watered to get the seed to germinate. Thereafter, her garden was never watered again. She did this year after year …for thirty years. The soil was perfectly PH level balanced and so were all the required nutrients to sustain all the plants. Sounds like the perfect scenario, but this example is only to show what can be done with most of anyone’s yard refuse…if properly processed.

Now, to step back to my 4-foot cube of diverse organic refuse and having filled the bin to about the 3/4 mark by eye, placing a shovelful of topsoil in between 3-4 inch layers of the material, we simply add worms, which can be purchased at a local farm store, or mail ordered through a garden supplier. Usually, they come in a few hundred in quantity and are newborns, but you can also use local worms, picked from decayed leaf. Once placed in your compost bin and watered occasionally, they will quickly multiply and digest the organic material aerating your compost in the process. This process is carried out…automatically without energy expended on anyone’s part, except for the original placement of the material and bin construction. After 3 or 4 weeks, given proper rainfall and a little watering, your “pot of gold” should be ready to use. Then, simply place a handful of this composted material in a small hole 6 inches deep, for pre-started tomato plants several inches tall, where you plan to plant your vegetable garden. Pack some of this compost mixed with some topsoil around the sides and also dress around the top of each plant. Given the proper rain, sunshine and warmth, your vegetables will give you a very early harvest, mainly because you did not discard the “hidden gold”.