The worm bin is so active that you can hear the worms. It also smells amazing. Tech bros want to sell you stupid contraptions for composting but all you need is worms. 🪱
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Important caveat: worms are not native to the upper Midwest and if you order worms for your compost your local forester will be mad at you. Ask me how I know!
“Composting” gadgets are pretty bleak. Will we ever learn that reengineering natural processes to make them “cleaner” is wasteful and usually misses things? Anyhow, catch me chucking a bad apple off my balcony trying to hit the compost bin, feeding the soil and a micro game, no excess energy used
Mine has survived fine outside, though I keep it in a sheltered spot close to the house and cover it with bubble wrap to protect it from the frost. The worms do slow down their activities when it's cold.
Yes, they’re definitely more sluggish right now. Although if there’s one thing you should never tell a worm, it’s that they’re sluggish. Terrible insult.
I don’t even use a bin! Just blend all my uncooked fruit and veg scraps together and pour onto my planters. Worms arrived, lots of slaters and the butcher birds love all the creatures that are attracted. From no worms, to soil covered in worm casts.
I will say, I dump my kitchen compost into a tumbler outside and the tumbler does speed up the process, and if the worms are bothered by the occasional spinning of their world, they haven't lodged a complaint.
Been composing our food scraps for 2 years now and the system basically runs itself without any need of additional equipment. Plus it improves the yield of our veg patch.
As long as you get the greens / browns ratio and moisture right, you can compost without worms in plastic storage bins with holes drilled into them. It takes longer, but we did it in our 3rd floor apartment for a while.
I compost in buckets on my patio. Somehow worms crossed mulch, EFIS, a metal coping cover thing, concrete, and got into the plastic buckets. I am in awe.
I might well have fallen for the tech in spite of having great horse manure compost, for my kitchen materials, but I see that all I really need is my blender, which will minimize the size of the kitchen pile and make materials easier to integrate with the loam.
Thanks for your thoroughness. Because I have horses, my compost is mostly their manure, digested grass, which turns by itself into rich loam over the course of a year. I add it to other compost pile from the kitchen, which helps that turn, slowly, into good dirt.
The machines are for people that don't want to or can't do compost. Personally I grew up on a composting household but find compost revolting, and even if I didn't, my wife would never allow it.
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I used to have a worm farm.
We still have a compost bin and a the city collects compost too. We’ll probably go old school again at our next home.
https://linktr.ee/humbleservantsofworm
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/worm-composting/
My take on worm composting: grind up the food waste to speed up the process and use buried metal garbage cans to house the worms so they can overwinter.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OyC4VQl--pT9nPmmYqvwxFZlBRD797EL/view?usp=sharing
Which reminded me of @internetofshit.bsky.social .... Also made it over to BlueSky!? Niiiiiice. 😀
Different strokes for different folks.