If it's on a balcony and you're growing in containers and the balcony is suspended in the air... I think you're pretty safe. Unless of course your unlucky enough to live in an area with the dreaded carnivorous Bolivian jumping worms...then you're in for trouble. They eat eyeballs. Just kidding :)

AAHHHH!!! AAHHHH!!!

I mean, thank you for the reassurance.

All I know about them is that their eggs are very tiny, and tend to turn up where not expected. SO I thought it was worth checking. :)

Layers of dead leaves are one of the natural habitats of red wigglers, a small but especially wriggly kind of worm, so it's possible you might import some, or their eggs, into your bin, unless you leave out the leaves.
Not a weird question! It's not like a fear of soggy bread or anything.

Oh you should be safe off the ground like that your probly talking indoor or balcony plant leaves so they really shouldn't have any worms and if you manage to maintain a hot pile worms really will not like it much over 90 degees

But do other bugs bother you because you are bound to get aome flies, ect

And what about bokashi I know nothing of it but there are some posts about that also

You may want to reevaluate your original premise. Coffee grounds, dead leaves, eggshells and shredded brown paper bags will probably not yield a very suitable container medium.

Al

Oh - I was picturing you collecting leaves from outdoors for your 'browns'. An apartment-dwelling wacko might do that.

Given the list of inputs you have there is not much chance that earthworms would find their way to your third floor balconey. What you will get from that mix, eventually, would not be "dirt" but would be compost, organic matter, a material that is a constituent of "dirt" or better soil.

paulns, yes, I would be picking up mostly maple leaves from around the neighborhood, so you are right; I would probably get some little worms in there by mistake. I have to admit, after reading more posts on the forum, and getting hot flashes over the word 'larvae,' I might have to do some serious thinking about this. I really really hate throwing away so much organic kitchen waste, but on the other hand, little animals with no bones (inside or outside) make me ill.

Al, what would make my container plants more happy in the way of soil amendment? I have a couple of permanent and fairly happy ferns right now, and am mostly planning to grow annuals until I can prove to myself that I can be trusted with perennials. I know I shouldn't fertilize the nasturtiums, and that everybody wants good drainage, but that is the sum total of my knowledge. I don't have anything that is dying for acidic soil, as far as I know.

If you have kitchen waste but don't want to deal with the wigglers, you can do a couple of things. You could give the kitchen waste to a fellow composter in exchange for some of their finished compost (minus the bugs). You can also chop up finely or blend your kitchen waste and just work into your pots as needed, then top with some browns like leaves. Whenever I am starting a new plant in a pot or setting them back outside in the spring, I scratch in some blended kitchen goods and top with shredded leaves.

A worm phobia, huh?? Guess suggesting a vermicompost solution - an excellent process for very urban or small space composting, btw - is not gonna cut it :-)

It's been my experience that when you deal with decomposing organic matter, regardless of location, you will eventually have worms. They are able to make their way into all sorts of unexpected situations and if you are gathering up things like dead/dried leaves, it's pretty much going to be a given that worms or their eggs will hitch a ride in.

For a balcony garden that is limited to containers, composting is really unnecessary. Before all the flak hits, let's understand that container gardening is vastly different from inground gardening and a container soil that is heavily comprised of fast to decompose OM - like compost - is going to create long term drainage and compaction issues for the containers. It is far better to mix (or purchase) a quality potting soil with stable drainage and aeration properties and the vast majority of these will have little to no compost involved. A visit to the Container Gardening forum will provide various 'recipes' you can follow to mix your own. Containers will need frequent fertilizing to supplement nutrients lost by leaching from frequent waterings and the best way to accomplish this is not by 'amending' the potting soil with compost or other OM but by non-organic fertilizers. And non-organic because in a container growing situation, you are lacking the necessary populations of soil organisms (including worms!!) that digest organic matter and convert it into plant-accessible nutrients.

As to what to do with your kitchen waste, find a composting friend that can use it. It's not gonna do anything good for you and if it's gone, no chance of those creepy little worms finding their way to your balcony :-)

Here is a link that might be useful: here's something to get you started on container soils....

A really, really bad worm phobia... don't let small children watch 1970s creature movies, please. :)

Ok, so if I understand correctly; the compost I would be making would be 1. incomplete because of the lack of crawlies and my severely limited ingredient list, and 2. too much/inappropriate for my little containers, in any case. Thank you everybody for the good advice.

Thanks for the link, gardengal48; I will hit that immediately. I'm sure I will thank you all again when I get snapdragons and sweet peas next summer.

Guess you didn't see Kevin Bacon in 'Tremors' then :-) Great movie although I have to admit the giant sand worms creeped me out a bit as well.....and I don't mind worms. Even pick 'em up by hand and relocate them to safety if I encounter them while gardening.

Strangely, I didn't mind those worms... they were less scary because of all the teeth. Whatever sense that makes! Awesome movie. The movie that traumatized me for life was 'Squirm.' Watch the scene with the nightcrawlers coming out of the shower head. Gah!

I don't mind snakes or bees or spiders, but worms and slugs and 'larvae?' (shudder) Worms love me, too. All little crawly things love me. I think they drink terror.

Meet my wormy little friend . . . :)

Your compost would be fine without worms.

What you need to do is make sure that it doesn't get any.

skip the leaves, use shredded paper instead.

Freeze all your kitchen scraps before you compost them.

Make sure your compost container ventilation is well screened so flying bugs can't lay eggs in it.

With a few extra precautions, you can have worm free compost. In general worms don't like an active compost pile with raw materials, they tend to prefer to move in as the compost is finishing.

Earthworms are not major digesters of material in a compost pile and are not needed to make compost. There are many other wee critters that do that for you, but not the earthworms. A properly built compost pile would be too warm for earthworms anyway.

I don't see a small indoor compost bin heating up..

I did a search, and unfortunately there are no vegetarian snakes you could keep in your bin in lieu of worms. There are worm-eating snakes, though. :)

If your fear of worms is anything like my sister's, of snakes, then the animation above may have scared you off your own thread.

Thanks, kimmsr. It looks like I am just going to take a stab at Al's mix and see how everything does.

paulns; I did get kind of sweaty palms when I saw that he posted a picture. But that worm looks less like a worm than a ... not ... a worm. If it had been a real picture, I would have freaked out.

Vegetarian snakies! I love it! I would definitely keep a bin of those. Funny little guys.

See if you can find someone else who can use your scraps.

You could try posting on freecycle, or if you just start asking around your social circles you're bound to find someone who'd be happy to arrange a regular pick-up of scraps.

You could try my brother's advice to me regarding my foreign-objects-under-water-phobia, "Ever consider therapy?"