Vermicomposting – A Cat-Food Bag Vermicomposter

Sunday, April 24, 2011

A day on which I can venture out onto the balcony. Hooray!

The tub of spider plants has sat atop the bookshelf all winter, giving me a luxurious (luxuriant?) display of leaf-green leaves all winter.

I notice that several stalks have died on account of the heat rising from the electric heaters embedded in the wall.

Time for a spruce-up!

I spend a pleasant twenty minutes teasing out dead shoots and leaves, and using a pair of kitchen shears to trim dead ends at an angle. I saw that in a book once and it looked like a good way to retain some leaf with a pointed end rather than clipping the entire leaf off at the stem.

The dead material and trimmed ends drop into a plastic pail.

I found that I’ve been over-watering the poor thing by tipping the remainder of the cat’s water bowl each morning prior to rinsing and re-filling.

So, from now on, once each three days.

Here is a poor view of the pail. It is about half-full of loose dry leaves.

I will transfer the dry leaves to the empty 8Kg (20 lb) Medi-Calc bag that once held the special dietary food for the cats.

I’ll keep adding small scraps of paper such as labels that soak off jars, until the bag is brimming.

Then I’ll transfer a surplus of worms and some material to it and it will kick off yet-another-kitchen-vermicomposter!

The bag is plastic-coated heavy-duty aluminium, not the plastic-coated paper that arrives via the supermarket.

So it ought to be leak-proof and light-proof.

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