start a compost heap

Today I was out watering my plants and saw that my previously well-hidden worms were all crawling out of the compost!!! If you’ve never seen this, let me tell you it is a frightening sight! The stuff of nightmares!

Luckily I knew that this only happens when the poor worms’ environment has become inhospitable. After inspecting it, I realized the compost was way too dry.

So I rescued the little guys and put them in a small container with moist soil to “rehabilitate” them. Now I feel really guilty. But I’m glad I was there to spot the worms and save my squishy friends.

Lesson learned the hard way: keep the worms’ environment moist!

It’s not perfect. It’s just a huge planter where I put my kitchen scraps, compostable kitty litter, and such.

I put in red wriggers (composting worms) at some point, but I don’t know that they are still there. I put in quite a bit of scraps and litter on a regular basis, which I later heard is not hospitable to the poor things. I’ll continue to track my progress, but for now, I’ve STARTED it! I love reducing my outgoing waste, so I’m not going to worry about whether I’m doing it “right,” though I do want to learn more.

So, apparently, having ants is normal (makes sense—it’s part of the natural order of things), but it seems I’ve been putting too many kitchen scraps, and according to some sites, this is bad b/c it allows for the food to rot, thereby poisoning the worms…now I’m at a loss.

I do eat peels, so i do reduce the amount of scraps I would otherwise collect, except for oranges, avocados, and bananas, which are all staples in my everyday eating. So these pile up…but I don’t want to have to put my scraps in a plastic bag and add to the dumpsters of the world! And I certainly do not want to kill those worms. So what other options do I have?

I guess multiple composts might be an idea, but in my little apartment, I’ve run out of room. What to do?

Well, at my local farmer’s market, we found a man selling red wrigglers (composting worms) and composting kits (lidded containers with the worms and shredded newspaper already in them). But we were short on cash, and all I really wanted were some worms so that they could start eating up all the compost I’ve accumulated in the big planter on my porch.

So that’s what we got—red wrigglers! We were very excited. This was a couple of weeks ago, and every once in a while I dig around in there, but I don’t see them any more. I hope they didn’t leave because it wasn’t a satisfactory environment.

What I do have is A LOT of ants. IS THAT NORMAL? I eat a lot fruit everyday, and I also compost the kitty’s litter, so it piles up really fast.

So a good while ago, I looked up some information about composting. I live in a small apartment with only a small porch. Anyway, what I found was so overwhelming I can’t remember what it all was that confused me—something about pH levels, earth worms, layers of soil, etc, etc, etc.

My motivation, obviously, is not to have ideal soil for farming or anything (I don’t even have a yard!). It’s just that I find it unacceptable to throw out organic materials in a plastic bag, where they cannot become part of the earth again as nature intended. So, I took a first step: I throw my orange peels, apple cores, banana peels, avocado peels and pits, etc into a planter with some potting soil. Is it proper? I don’t really know. I don’t even know if it will work. It’s been less than a week so far…

But for now, it’s all I can do. I’d like the next step to be procuring a lidded container for my composting. I don’t want to attract feral animals into my porch. I found some compost containers at the Target store, but they’re huge! I remember there being a movement towards office space composting. Where do you get those kinds of containers?

Any ideas?

I moved in with my boyfriend, who already has a compost heap. Easy! haha

very easy, just make sure you have equal parts, green and brown material, brown being leaves, dirt, twigs, straw, (“dead” stuff), and greeen being kitchen scraps, grass clippings, (more recently living stuff) and throw some water in every once in a while, if ur pile is warm inside, ur doing it right. its pretty easy tho, ifit starts to smell tho ur not adding enough “brown”

Last year I built a compost box and now the worms have finally moved in. Took a while, but I’m glad they found their way.

our compost bin got infested and my grandma couldn’t deal with it so I guess this one might have to be given up for a while.

Well, I’m not one to give up on things, but this isn’t going to happen. I’m moving out of my place in a couple of weeks, and there are more important things to be done before then.

But one day, when I live somewhere that doesn’t already have one, and has a place to put one, I’ll do it for sure. Really. It’s just not going to be anytime soon.