It is really hot and humid in the Netherlands and that means that tossing away old fruit and veggie greens is the equivalent of having a swarm of little flies in the house. Next to that, I have been fumbeling around with my allotment which was not really successfull to the slug plague but also the soil feels like it is having a rough time in the nutrients in the soil.
Time to make a DIY solution for this. I need something to compost for better nutrients in the soil, but also getting rid of the greens without having to wait until they are picked up by the garbage has to be shortened.
The solution to all of this is a worm hotel. A what?? Yes, a worm hotel
How did I come up with this then?
A while back I was visiting a friend and he was tossing his green inside the house in a container. When I tossed my greens in there I saw movement and I asked him if he knew he had creepy crawlies in the bin. His reply was that he was very aware of this and this was his compost solution.
You toss in the green. The worms eat the green. They digest it and crap it out and prestooo...you have fresh nutrient rich compost. I was flabbergasted and disgusted and curious all at the same time.
So I went on a little search
And the interwebz is full of suggestion on how to buy these kinds of things, but also on how to make them yourself. Because these companies on selling them, damn they have good profit and good marketing. In other words, these things are expensive as hell!
Amazon knows what's up here.
Sorry but more than 80 buck on an experiment? I will start my experiment outside just to be sure and then make it myself. Luckily the interwebz also has some good suggestions on how to do this if you give it a search youself.
You start by getting a couple of containers of the same size, and only one has to have a lid on it. I took three containers. The bottom one you leave it as it is. The middle and the top one you just take out a drill and drill some centimeter wide holes in the sides for air for the compost and for the worms.
In the bottom you also drill holes with that same drill, just a lot more. These will be the openings for the worms to crawl through moving up for them to the next container.
So the idea is that the worms intially live in the middle container as their housing. In the top container you toss in your greens and eventually they will be attracted to the top container and will start eating your greens there.
But the time the crap reaches the middle container this will be nicely composted. The bottom container is for catching the fluids from this whole process. Apparently this is the most rich fluid there is and you can mix it with water to add to your plants to give them a nice boost.
On to the worms!
Now ofcourse you need worms in there as well to get the process flowing. And these are not regular worms that you find below the gras, these have to be specific compost worms called Eisenia Fetidia. You can recognize them on their way more red colour than normal worms which are more gray.
So where do you get these guys? You can buy them online as I had a local farmer that had a option to buy a little cup of these guys. I also made a little compost bin here in the woods where you dig a hole and through in some food greens. A week later you can find some worms here and there. But that is not the amount you need. You need some serious worm numbers to get going.
Stupid easy, but in a normal composting bin, that is where you find them. So we went to check in an already existing compost bin which we though it had only composting process in there, but it actually also had a lot of worms in there.
Take some of these worms along with some of the compost and some leaves from the woods and that means they have good house to start in.
These worms can eat their body weight everyday which means if you have 500 grams of worms in your container, they can eat 500 grams of greens of waste per day. That is a lot!!
According to all of these articles you should not overfeed your worms in the beginning because they have to settle into their new house and get used to it for like two weeks. But impatient as I am I have already starting tossing in some greens and those are fermenting way too fast now due to the hot weather. But might be something that they like? I'm not sure.
I have checked into the middle container every now and then under the leaves and there is a lot of movement going on, which is good!! These guys multiple every couple of weeks so I think my start has been good for now.
Let's see over the next couple of weeks/months if greens are heading into compost are their new circular destination.