Vermacompost

Turning Onion Peels and Coffee Grounds Into Soil

March 2, 2013

Lindsay:

It takes most people that come to Windward several days to learn what to do with various kitchen scraps.

The seive resting on the worm bed

A growing number of people compost the food waste that comes out of their family's kitchen. However, when you have animals such as pigs, it becomes more effective to feed the pigs most of the kitchen scraps, and then later harvest their nutrient rich manure, rather than letting the veggie scraps decompose to create compost.

However, the pigs don't like everything that we create in the kitchen. In particular they are not very fond of onion and garlic peels nor coffee grounds. These are really the only items we produce on a regualar basis that the pigs turn their noses up at and ignore. So, we give them to the worms instead. Or rather, we feed them to the microbes that then the worms feed on.

We add to the worm composting beds regularly and then periodically harvest the vermacompost. At this point, particularly through the winter months, we are not harvesting the worms regularly. However, if maganed differently-- specifically if the worms are fed more than just the coffee grounds and onion peels-- the vermacomposting system could easily produce enough worms to harvest as a nutrient dense feed for chickens or fish.

Sifted Vermacompost

Andrew and I recently built a seive to sift the vermacompost in order to separate out the material still large enough to require further decomposition. We used 1/4 inch wire mesh as the seive. Now that we are in plant seeding season, I wanted to test out the seive to create rich worm compost to add to the grow tubes in Vermadise before seeding the lettuces.

The system worked quite well. I simply would add shovelfuls of well-composted material on top of the seive and move the shovel back and forth until most of the material had either fallen through or decidedly announced itself as in-need of more decomposition. I would repeat this process until enough material had built in the seive to warrant being placed in the active worm bed.

And what I was left with was oh so tender soil!