MICA Sustainable Worm Project

This is a silly little tutorial video I made about giving my dad a worm bin for his birthday, and the reactions of my parents to my composting hobby. It basically shows you how to build a plastic worm bin with a little lining in the top.

ps. I’ve helped a few people harvest their bins lately, banana peels seem like the most preferred spot for worms reproduce.

The worm exhibition was two weeks ago. I think it went really well, thanks to everyone who participated or contributed. The following was the video projected on the the wall during the show.

And these are some of the photos.

this huge pizza from hamden was not compostable

I was just at a friends house in my home town of Charlotte, NC. where a friend’s mother pulled out her worm bin to show me. She didn’t know that it was a hobby of mine, she was just proud of hers. It seems like worm bins are gaining popularity. The waiting list for free worms is growing, and everywhere I turn, I hear about people already doing it. I’m actually going to give my dad one for his birthday in two days.

That said, it seems the most problematic part of keeping worms in your house is the potential presence of fruit flies. The traps are good, the fly tape works for Joanna, but these problems are less likely to become problems if handled early on. Bury your food to make it harder for the flies, and keep a healthy layer of newsprint/leaves atop the bin.

I’m currently working on a new form of bin that would involve fabric to even further keep the flies out, but still allow the worms to breathe. More on that later.

-miranda

December 16th, 6-8 pm, come to Leidy Atrium in the Brown Center at MICA to see [and touch] live worms and active worm bins, learn about composting, and hear first time worm bin-users describe their experiences. Also in Leidy Atrium: exhibits on Oyster Health in the Chesapeake Bay, and Do It Yourself energy.

I write this from home in Pennsylvania, where I grew up. After dinner last night, as my younger (but taller) brother and I were cleaning the kitchen, something subconscious in me motioned to toss a handful of compostable kitchen scraps in a worm bin–in this household a nonexistent furnishing. Without my boxed pets to feed I walked outside into the chilly backyard of my childhood and instead performed the strange old ritual of hurling the scraps into the euonymus hedge that forms the ‘natural’ fence between yards.

It could be that I had thought of the burning bush, as its also known, as the site of decomposition in the scrambled puzzle of the suburban ecosystem–I had seen my father do the same many times with browning banana peels, apple cores, and carrot skins, his tongue pushed against the inside of his cheek as he side-armed the scraps into the long hedge. Or was it rather a more persistent charactaristic of suburban life that drove the practice? Apathy? It might be useful to modify the negative connotation of the word. Better: “distraction.” There wasn’t time, we always felt, for seeing through the life cycle of our food, really. Better toss it haphazardly in the yard. It followed what we did with all our other waste: send it away. Other things were to be attended to by the boys: TV, games, walks, runs, hikes, bikes, wrestling, sports….It was my mother who, with her garden, patiently introduced the family to composting.

The kidney-shaped vegetable and flower garden that each year encroached on the lawn like a growing paramecium was the previously absent answer to the equation that we boys needed for our life of logics. Composting had never made sense. Before, the bush had been the perfect place for food scraps to disappear without a trace–a zero sum proposition. But after a few seasons of gathering the kitchen scraps carefully in a passive compost bin–a few wooden pallets nailed together forming a cube–my mother showed that all those tossed away foods could be used to produce the rich black soil that made her (our) corn, beans, and squash grow large and colorful.

We could see and taste the results of all our work–and this is something that I believe is terribly important for any kind of composter, particularly an urban one. The act may begin as a curiosity, or as an attempt at a less wasteful lifestyle, or maybe as a way to help a friend out with a project of hers….but in the end the lifelong composter will be the one who sees his or her food turn not just into soil, but into food again. Then, of course, you ought to find someone who can teach you to cook it. But maybe I’ll leave that for another blog…

-Patrick

The first trap is an open bowl of half water, half vinegar, dish soap and a touch of alcohol. The flies come for the alcohol, but get stuck in the soap.

The second trap is a plastic bottle cut in half and inverted. Put something sweet like apple juice in the bottle. The flies go in but don’t have enough room to fly out.

Week Two:

1. This week, what did you eat? What did the worms eat? I have again, been running around quite a bit so lots of carbohydrates for me. My worms this week got four eggshells from the baking that my roommate and I have done at different intervals, as well as some of banana peels. Also, I have accidently been buying apples with textures I don’t like, so they have gotten some of those remains. This thanksgiving I am at home, but my roommate will be around to continue to feed them.

This past week the worms ate:

1/8 apple and its core

4 egg shells

2 banana peels

2. What’s going on in your bin? I am still amazed at how well the smell is kept inside the box. (Good job Miranda on the construction). Additionally, the smell of the box has changed from rotting ugliness to a more natural decomposition smell. That was exciting to discover as it reminds me of a farm or forest, not my urban apartment setting. It also was a relief because it seemed like the bin was working the way it should.

3. What if any problems are you facing? My one question is about cereal: if I have extra of something that is sweet, like Honey Nut Cheerios, can I put that in the bin? Will the artificial sugar be harmful to the worms?

Happy Thanksgiving!

-Katherine

The worms are doing well. This week I fed them quite a bit of apple cores and tea bags. I noticed that a large white chunk of mushroom that i put in last week was gone. There are still flies, but the worm bin health wise is doing very well. The dirt is dark and damp and smells earthy and rich.

-joanna

This is a photo of the bin I keep in the hallway of my apartment building. Most of the time, I think my neighbors are too shy to contribute, but the other day I found a bunch of leaves in there. For some reason, the bin also accumulates a lot of teabags and eggshells. The bin is doing pretty well, other than adding some more water to it this week. I had some early fears that the worms would escape and cause all kinds of problems with my relationship to the other tenants, but no such problems yet. I worry that I’m not feeding these guys enough, but I think they’re doing fine. I wonder how I can get more people to contribute.

-miranda

These bricks are maybe the size of three normal bricks. Seen outside the station building.

photo by zach genin.