How to Get Earthworms to Eat Your Kitchen Garbage

You can have worms dispose of your garbage. Everyone has potato peelings, banana peels, lettuce leaves, and other organic waste streaming from their kitchen. These are things that worms thrive on and they thoughtfully convert it into rich soil for houseplants and gardens. Under the right circumstances, one pound of worms will eat a half pound of food waste daily, a discard which you can remove from the waste stream.

SCHOOLS USE IT

Increasingly, schools are setting up vermicomposting operations to rid themselves of organic kitchen waste while at the same time offering an object lesson in ecology and biology as well as environmental responsibility.

The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity reports that organic waste, not including paper, comprises 11%-13% of all landfill material.

CONTAINER

It isn't hard to do. I had a worm bed in my kitchen some years ago. I ordered a thousand red wigglers by mail (best for vermicomposting, nightcrawlers are not as good). Red wigglers live 2-4 years and mature in 10 weeks, at which time they can begin reproducing, turning out up to three cocoons a week. The worms don't smell and if you keep them in the window, with a damp burlap bag over the surface of the container but not overlapping the edge of the container, there should be no problem with a prison break.

A Rubbermaid box was my container. I cut a hole in the bottom and lined it inside with a patch of window screening which I secured with melted wax from a candle. This provides drainage.

Stryrofoam picnic coolers are very cheap and would work well, but any container can be used, even an old refrigerator. There is no standard requirement, except for a rule of thumb relating to productivity....for every pound of waste you wish to dispose of weekly, provide one square foot in depth and one square foot of surface area, 1'X1'x1'.