SHOP PRODUCTS
Houzz Logo Print
jon_biddenback

Should I seed my compost heaps from my worm bin?

Jon Biddenback
8 years ago

I'm trying to put my organic household waste to use, and reclaim some hard-packed clay soil for vegetable gardens. I've started a worm bin under the kitchen sink, and I've been working on building a pair of compost heaps - one binned in the back yard for general use, and one loosely fenced in a raised bed out front, to prepare that bed the lazy way for planting next year.

My memory keeps turning to my grandmother's compost bin, a two-section cinder block job. On the left or New side, she dumps yard waste, kitchen scraps, any organic construction surplus that turns up for disposal, and anything else dead that was once a plant. The right or Aged side is only added to at the beginning of the planting season, when she empties finished product from it, and shifts the contents of the New side into it to start over with an empty left side. The divider is permeable and allows air, water, and small creatures to travel back and forth freely.

Grandmother's bin is chock full of earthworms, larvae, sow bugs, and (in the aged section) the best soil improvement I have ever seen. I'm not sure what's going on in there from a thermal or microbial standpoint, but I do know that beast of a bin has been evolving on its own for a few decades after construction, eats everything plant-based including old 4x8s, feels warm when opened, doesn't smell at all, and the only manual aeration it gets is the annual side rotation.

I suspect the sow bugs and other chitinous critters are chewing down the hard stuff like pine cones into smaller chunks for her, and the movement of the worms is providing the aeration. I keep reading that worms can't function at the temperatures found in an aerobically active compost bin, but from the warmth and absence of odor, her setup seems to be making it work... Maybe it's hit the sweet spot between hot and cold.

Here where I'm gardening, thousands of miles from my grandmother's old bin, there seems to be a dire lack of critters in the soil. Earthworm activity is close to zero, and there aren't even tunnels suggesting they're there in hiding. While I'd prefer some Alabama jumpers to dig deep and hard, one works with what one has, and what I have is a small but growing population of red wigglers.

I'm seriously considering dumping some casts, cocoons, and adult specimens from the indoor worm bin into the outdoor compost heaps, in order to seed them with beneficial microbes and some tireless little turners. I hope this will speed up decomposition, and incorporation of the material into the soil below. Would I be just wasting my casts and my worms if I did this? Is there anything I can do to to help the temperature stay near the high end of the worms' comfort zone, and get benefits of both them and (somewhat) hot composting?

Comments (17)