Vermicomposting in the cold-climate apartment – Shredded Paper and Coffee

Last August I built a Broom Closet Vermicomposter , and it has worked well, never more than half full.

I built a second Broom Closet Vermicomposter to serve as a receptacle for the output of my office cross-cut shredder. This provided me with a surfeit of large bales of shredded paper.

My apartment is a Carry-In Carry-Out apartment, so I built a Balcony Vermicomposter and charged it with about four gallons of material from the Broom Closet, complete with worms and eggs, and then spent the winter piling shredded paper in it.

Last weekend I opened it, and found to my delight a healthy colony of worms!

We have had a mild winter, and the worms survived.

I am now in the process of emptying the large (four square feet) balcony vermicomposter into the small (one square foot) vermicomposter to free up space on the balcony. I transfer about eight gallons a day, aerating and mixing as I go, and the material settles down in the smaller vermicomposter.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

The third vermicomposter is filled and primed solely with shredded paper and a week’s coffee grounds.

Unlike the second vermicomposter, primed with a mixture of paper, coffee grounds and some partly-processed material from the Broom Closet Vermicomposter, this third device is going to try to do its job on paper and coffee alone.

You might think of it as a odorless office device.

I have harvested some rather wet sludge from the base of the other vermicomposters. The material is thronged with healthy worms, so I am thrilled. I place the material in my red wire waste-paper basket:

I have about a gallon of sludge and worms.

I place the basket in the third bin (paper and coffee only) and leave it for a day or so.

The worms will migrate away from the light into the wet paper. As the sludge/soil dries it will become inhospitable, and give the worms another reason to migrate.

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