Great Green Idea: Green Products: Reduce Your Waste and Liven Up Your Garden With Vermicomposting

Reduce Your Waste and Liven Up Your Garden With Vermicomposting

Many of us now recycle as we know this is a great way to keep re-usable material out of the waste stream. With a growing concern over the health of the environment, many want to learn what more they can do to reduce their impact further. Many of the things that we currently dispose of, that are not recyclable, are actually still candidates for removal from the waste stream. Not only can we reduce our waste further, but we can even gain a valuable resource as a result.

We've all heard of composting - the process by which we turn lawn and other waste scraps into nutrient rich ground cover and fertilizer for our garden. But how many have heard of vermicomposting - or composting with worms - and how many would even be willing to give what at first glance seems like a very nasty chore a chance?

The short answer is probably not many. There shouldn't be the reluctance to incorporate such an easy and environmentally-conscious activity to our lives. Vermicomposting is a system by which we can compost almost any of our food waste. That means any scraps from cutting or prepping product, leftovers, rotten food long forgotten in the fridge, even coffee grounds, egg shells, tea bags, you name it, and the worms can eat it!

The process of vermicomposting is a very simple one. You set up a composting box (often comprised of trays), create a layer of fibrous bedding (you can use paper shreds, newspapers, any kind of paper you have on hand), adding red wiggler worms to the mix, and then placing your food scraps in the composting box to allow the worms to "do their magic". This does, of course, sound pretty nasty, as many of these systems are kept right in the kitchen. Doesn't that sound like an unsanitary recipe for a smelly and unpleasant home environment? Well believe it or not, it isn't messy, nor is it smelly.

Red wiggler worms are burrowers, they have no desire to come above ground, and so many people's fears about their "escaping" the worm bin are unfounded. If well fed, they will have no reason to ever leave their boxy little home. A simple way to give yourself an extra big of added peace of mind, is to leave a nightlight or even the little light most of us have over our sinks on. Red wigglers do not like sunlight (even artificial sunlight) and this will further ensure that there are no escapees.

These worms are powerhouses when it comes to processing food. An average system (such as one you can buy online via Amazon or other online retailer) containing the standard 1,000 worms, can eat as much as a pound of food scraps a day. Just think about how much that reduces the amount of garbage you will have for the waste system.

And red wigglers are surprisingly clean creatures. Look, the process of turning food into fertilizer is not a pleasant process to think about. It involves the decomposition and further recycling of nutrients, waste products, and other "lovelies", but it is vital to the recycling of nutrients on our planet. Because of this natural process, if your bin is kept at the appropriate moisture level (this is easy to mitigate by adding more fiber to an over moist environment), unless you are offended by the smell of fresh top soil, these little guys shouldn't offend your olfactory senses one bit!

After the worms go to town on your garbage, you are left with a highly nutrient rich, but gentle fertilizer that makes for an amazingly lush garden. This fertilizer provides plants (including food crops) with all the vital nutrients they need, in a medium that is so non-harmful, that the plants could be planted directly into the worm-based fertilizer (often called castings).

Now that you know the basics of a vermicomposting system, you should definitely give it a chance. It is an excellent and very affordable way to reduce your impact on the environment, by keeping recyclable products out of the waste stream. This could save you money on garbage collection, but more importantly it is reducing the amount of garbage you produce. It is easy to see how our food scraps and like waste are actually valuable resources, not trash, and we can use our little worm friends to turn our trash into treasure - a highly nutrient rich, super planting and fertilizing material!