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Vermicompost

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Mr_Yan

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I just harvested my compost bin where all the kitchen scraps from our family have gone this season. We generate about 2 gallons of kitchen scraps (peels, cores, ends, egg shells, etc) per average week. Granted this is a really arbitrary measurement.

I use one of the wooden half barrel planters outside as my composter and put a garbage can lid over it to keep the dog out of it. When I add new kitchen scraps I mix them into the bedding and existing bin material with a hand cultivator fork.

Vermicomposting uses high carbon things as "bedding" and for this I used what I had on hand usually old fall leafs, shredded corrugated cardboard, paper egg cartons and the like.

To collect the compost I sifted the whole bin through two stages of screens. The first stage is typical hexagonal chicken wire and the second stage was 1/4" hardware cloth.

After collecting I was left with about 10 gallons (two large bucket fulls) of compost and the larger stuff when back into the bin with the worms. I spread this over my beds and planters and worked it into the top few inches. Vermicompost tends to be more concentrated and less bulky than traditional compost but like traditional compost it won't burn plants. The texture of this compost was loose and crumbly but still wet and very dark.

There were a few times over the season where I took some trowel fulls of vermicompost and mixed it with water to make a tea. Here all I did was mix it in a bucket and pour that through a screen and sprayed it over my plants.
 
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