Dear Rick:

You are quite the romancer, giving your true love the Worm Bin Of Her Dreams!
And you are taking a practical, low-maintenance approach to composting when space is an issue. Vermicomposting – using a compact, indoor bin with red wiggler worms as your decomposing workforce – will quietly turn your kitchen and house plant scraps into super-charged plant food, with minimal demands on you.

Worm bin for a kitchen: Your BEST BET is the Can-O-Worms. There are a bunch of options for price, shipping, new/used bins etc. The Can looks like a round black plastic coffee table on legs, about 24” in diameter.

We keep ours in the EarthWays Center kitchen between the back porch door and the refrigerator. It’s handy to set stuff on when unloading groceries into the fridge.

It’s easiest to harvest castings (worm poop, the fertilizer produced as your worms digest your food scraps) from this type of multi-tray model, compared to a single-level do-it-yourself box. In a a stacking-tray model like the Can O’ Worms, finished castings drop through holes molded in each tray.

Other multi-tray models are available with a smaller footprint, a square tower, not on legs, etc. Google “worm bins” and you’ll quickly find several options. Aesthetics and floor space are factors in choosing a specific model for your kitchen worm bin.

Along with this, give your best beloved a copy of “Worms Eat My Garbage” by Mary Applehof, available locally at Missouri Botanical Garden’s Garden Gate Shop. This is THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE to worm composting. No worm woman should be without it.

And give your honey an old phone book with her worm bin. This is the ideal source of carbon (the fuel for decomposition) and bedding (which makes the bin cozy for worms and covers fresh food scraps to keep out pest populations of fruit flies). If you really love your wife, shred up a big section of that phone book into a colorful bag she can hang in the pantry, so she can easily grab out a handful of nicely-shredded bedding whenever she feeds kitchen scraps into that bin.

The best part: pick up a pound or two of Red Wiggler Worms at your local bait shop. The closest one to EarthWays Center is Paul’s Bait & Tackle on Chippewa in south St. Louis. These worms are small enough to comfortably populate the compact space of an indoor compost bin, and they are well-suited to life in a worm bin. Red Wigglers (Eisenia foetida) are surface-dwelling worms, able to thrive in shallow depths of decomposing organic matter, compared to their much larger, deep-dwelling cousins Lumbricus terrestris aka Night Crawlers or Earthworms.

Which is sweeter for Your Green Girl, a pound of chocolates or a pound of Red Wigglers?

Now this advice only covers selection and stocking of a kitchen worm bin, to facilitate your St. Valentine’s shopping. There’s more to share about maintaining a worm bin, but that’s another question.

With Affectionate Wiggles
– Green Jean

P.S. You know you can’t keep a worm bin outdoors, not even in the garage. Worms thrive in a temp range of 55-70 F – trapped in a black plastic box in direct sunlight, they will fry. If the indoor worm bin gets tiring, you can always donate it to a school (or to EarthWays Center).

And our favorite source for Red Wigglers, the workhorse of the compost bin: Paul’s Bait & Tackle on Chippewa between Kingshighway and Morganford.

Mary Applehof’s book gives you the calculations for how many worms you need, based on an assessment of the amount of scraps your household will generate. That’s all part of the setting-up process. And WHAT FUN to take the kids to the bait shop to give a pound or two of worms some Green Collar Jobs!