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Adding your food waste to a compost pail as a part of your daily routine makes home composting a snap. Once a week add dump the pail into your home composter and before you know it, you’ll have nutrient-rich compost. It’s a great way to reduce the amount of trash you add to the landfill and the amount of water that you flush down the kitchen sink when using the garbage disposer.

If you are looking for plans for how to make your own backyard compost tumbler without spending a lot of money, check out this video that was posted on YouTube.com. It’s not as small as the Envirocycle Compost Tumbler, but not much larger than the pickle barrel that is used to make it and if you can get someone to paint something clever or attractive on the barrel, it would probably add an element of interest to your backyard.  If you find more than one pickle barrel, you can use the second one as a rain barrel! Often you can find barrels for around $10 from drum and barrel suppliers.

Have you seen the Norpro bamboo kitchen compost container? I don’t see any reviews on it yet, but it looks gorgeous. It has two charcoal filters, is made of natural sustainable bamboo and hopefully it will measure up to other Norpro kitchen compost containers that we have seen. I could definitely live with one of these on my kitchen countertop.

An indoor composter solves several common problems for many home composters. For one thing, winter is not conducive to composting. Cold temperatures and snow don’t do much for a hot composting heap and who wants to haul waste out into the cold anyway. An indoor composter also adds a convenience to composting that encourages less enthusiastic family members to participate. “If it’s easy, I’ll do it!” For apartment and urban composters, an indoor composter may be the only option, as many have little or no outdoor space. Fortunately, there are several options for indoor composting, including worm bins, Naturemill’s Automatic Composter and for those with basement space, one or two Envirocycle Compost Tumblers might work very well. The All Seasons Bokashi method does require finishing in the ground, so it’s not going to work for everyone, but some people love it.

This week, I’ve been learning from my worm bins. Maybe I should say I’ve been learning from my worms through trial and error (nah, let’s call it trial and improvement). I added the second worm bin to my Worm Factory 360 about five days ago with the intention of layering the “ingredients” in the tray a little differently than I did in the first tray. Each time I added food to my original tray, I was lifting up the shredded paper and placing the food below it. I added damp shredded paper on top when I added food, but seldom did I see worms crawling around in the three inches of shredded paper. Worm castings were building up and both food and paper wasted seemed to disappear, but I am so far happier with my layering system on my new tray. I started it with food waste in the bottom to attract worms to climb up from below. Then I added dry leaves and then about an inch or less of damp shredded paper. Now each time I add food waste, I add dry leaves if they are available and shredded paper. (Tip: I actually add dry shredded paper and then use the mist setting on my hose nozzle to dampen it.) The result is that many worms have climbed up and seem to be thriving in the new tray. I open the lid and see worms squirming around in the shredded paper and in the food waste below. I feel like I will be able to add food more often this way and have a better grip on how much the worms are eating.

It is strange, now that I have a second tray, to not be able to look below at the first tray and see how things are going. I could lift up the second tray, but am afraid I might squish a worm when I put it back down, so I’ll try to refrain!

• Cutting down waste over Christmas

December 2, 2009
- During the holidays more than ever, we tend to overdo everything from food to gifts and wrapping paper. This article is a good reminder to reduce, reuse and recycle during the holidays.

• From the Table to the Trash – WDIO-TV

December 2, 2009
- One good way to reduce food waste over the holidays is to prepare the right amount of food in the first place. Sure it’s okay to have leftovers if you’re likely to eat them, but try not to fix so much that you end up filling the home composter when the food has gone bad.

I can see that at least a few worms are moving into the new worm tray that I added two days ago in my Worm Factory 360. Out of curiosity, I lifted the tray up and saw quite a few Red Wigglers at the top of the lower tray, where I never saw them before. I assume they are also headed for the new tray and “fresh” food. The simplicity of the upward migration system of a unit like the Worm Factory 360 is great for someone like me, who does not really want to interact with the worms too much. Eventually, my lower tray will be full of worm castings and most of the worms will have moved up to another tray. When that happens, I’ll take the lower tray and put it on as the top tray and leave the lid off during one day of daylight to get any remaining worms to climb back down to the lower trays. At that point, I can easily harvest a tray full of worm castings. Hopefully, I’m on track to harvest the first tray at 3 months and then one tray a month after that.

Today I am adding a worm tray to my Worm Factory 360. The first tray (now the bottom tray) is quite full with a mix of worm castings, food and paper waste and of course Red Wigglers. I’m not so sure I did the layering quite right on the first tray, but despite my inexperience, I think the worms are doing just fine. I’m paying very close attention to the instruction manual that came with the Worm Factory and in the new empty tray, I am adding a layer of food waste, followed by a layer of dead leaves and then damp paper and cardboard. My expectation is that some of the worms will climb up to the new tray and start working on it, while others will stay below until there is nothing left to eat. It will probably take a couple of months before they get all the way through the bottom tray. After that, I’m hoping for one tray per month full of worm castings.

Remember a few weeks ago when I had a couple of little frogs in my worm bins? Well, I thought they were long gone, but yesterday, I decided to lift the bottom Worm Factory tray off to see if there was some reason that I haven’t gotten any leachate (worm tea) out of the spigot. Well besides the excitement of seeing a fair amount of worm castings, there was the surprise to both me and several tiny frogs who began jumping out of the tray to get as far from me as possible. I don’t know why they like the worm bins, but until I bothered them, they must have been living quite happily there… or maybe they had gotten in, but couldn’t get out. I don’t know, but after I removed all the worm castings, I looked around the porch and didn’t see a single frog. It’s not a big deal, since the bins are outside… and if the bins were inside the house, the frogs never would have gotten in.