Worm Composting...Underground?! Subpod Review

Hello, cutie pie. We all know that worm composting is a powerful way to add organic matter to your garden. But what happens if you worm compost in your garden? Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening. Let's grow some greener thumbs, my friends, with this. You guys have asked me to review this for over a year, I would say. And I've had it and I've been testing it for quite some time. And so this is the Subpod. It's out of Australia. It is an in-garden bed composting system, primarily using worms. So we're going to take a look at this one. And then halfway through the video, I actually have a little surprise for you. So stay tuned for that. But cultivate that Like button and I will bless you with 2,000 extra worms in every single garden bed that you have. And let's get into this breakdown. So this system here, as well as this garden bed, came from Subpod, which I'll talk about the bed in a second. But this is the real meat and potatoes of the product. It's the Subpod, the submerged pod, I guess is the name for that. But what it is is it's a left to right worm composting system instead of a top to bottom. I did an old video where you took some Rubbermaid totes and you could stack them on top of one another. And basically you're just migrating worms from below on the lower totes upwards towards the food. In this situation, you're going to load up one side of this with your worms and your bedding. And you even get these little jute cloths that protect the worms. And they're going to feed, feed, feed until they're mostly are castings down here in the bottom of the bed. And then at the top, it's mostly going to be food scraps. But even that will get exhausted at some point. What will then happen is you'll start feeding this chamber and the worms will start to migrate over this way. And you kind of go back and forth. So when you've moved them over here, you then take all of these worm castings and distribute them into various beds or even this bed. But there's something that makes this product kind of unique. So the Subpod of course is buried into a garden bed. This is below the soil surface. And you'll notice all of these little holes here. Why would those be there? Well, it's so that the worms are able to travel into the bed and then back to the food source to help break up the soil that of course is in the beds like this stuff right here. So that's the real magic of this system, why it's so unique. Something I particularly like about this system is if you don't know how to worm compost, the instructions are just right here for you the entire time. So you have a feeding guide. It's really basic worm composting, but it never hurts to have a reminder. Don't put in things like metal or plastic. Don't put in things like bones, like just be careful about that kind of stuff. And then here's some stuff that you should pretty much always add. So let's take a look at the system as I have it set up right now. This side is the side I'm filling with most of my material. I have this little cloth, protects them from any sort of heat or cold, a little insulation. So I have this mixture of shredded paper and shredded straw. This is sort of my bedding mixture. And then as you go down, you can see what we've got here is a couple old cucumbers, just some food. And then you have the worm layer. So this is the casting and worm layer. So let's take a big scoop of this and take a look at what we have. We should have some worms showing up somewhere in here. There's one right there. So the worms are pretty happy in this setup. I've noticed throughout the season, as long as you keep them well bedded and well fed as well as protected. So this is going to protect, the soil is going to buffer a little bit of the temperature and then you keep this nice and closed, you're in a good spot. Another small little thing you can do, especially as this gets more full, it comes with this little twisty turny device, which I actually find really helpful for mixing all sorts of stuff. But if you throw a bunch of food scraps in, you can just quickly go like that and then pull it up and it easily aerates. You can see it kind of breaks things up a little bit. So it's a good way to make sure that there's no anaerobic pockets down here. So like I said, this actually came with this garden bed right here. And this leads me to one of the things that confused me a little bit when I first got the product, because you'll notice that the subpod is buried in the garden bed that's provided. But I would say it takes up about 40% of the effective space here. Now the trade-off is of course that the soil is going to be supercharged with worm castings and should do a lot better. And actually I did find that to be the case. This bed in particular throughout the spring and summer, because I kept feeding the worms and the worms were making their way through the system, was much more vigorous than the rest of the raised beds in my front yard. However, I also did have a couple of weird nutrient issues in the raised beds, if you guys remember those videos. But the thing that particularly confused me is why would I waste so much space in the bed to develop a composting system when I could maybe just compost using something like the Urban Worm Bag or a composting system of my own making outside of the bed and just bring the castings in. So the way I mitigated that with this system is I threw a trellis here. I grew vertically right here. I grew things off the side to kind of get a little more effective space. But still in my particular use case, given all the space that I have here at the new homestead, I probably wouldn't buy this and put the big bed into it. And when I told that to Subpod, they actually sent me something special. So that was the original Subpod. And as you can see, I had a couple of issues with it that I actually talked to Subpod about. I said, you know what guys, for my use case, that large one isn't quite something that I would be using in my garden, especially cause I have a lot of space. I can build my own separated composting systems. And then they sent me this, which is the Subpod Mini, which I think solves most of my gripes about the original. So let's unpack this real quick. So here's the footprint of the Mini. I believe it's somewhere around 65% of the size as the original. So even in that bed that they provide with the metal edges, this is going to take up significantly less space. But if you put this in a large bed like my wooden herb bed that I have in the garden, or even just in the ground, it's going to take up a lot less space. So let's construct this. Right out of the gate, I have to say this is far easier to assemble than the original, probably cause there's no split partition in the middle. And then these little locking pins, I think are just design-wise better than whatever we use to construct the original Subpod. I actually forgot, but I know these are way easier than the other one. Construction is done. Let's go ahead and bury this in a different bed and see how it looks. For the Subpod Mini, I've decided to actually bury it in the ground. So you can see it's about 12 inches deep. So the first thing I need is a shovel. Awesome. Got that. Now it wouldn't hurt to have a little help. So I'm going to summon the garden hermit really quickly. Oh, there he is. Okay. All right. Well, let's go, let's go ahead and get to this Jacques. By the way, Jacques has its own YouTube channel that you guys can check out, Jacques in the Garden. We just released his first full tour. So we need to go about 12 inches deep here, Jacques. Which way do we want to face it? I think we want to face it opening up like this. Just so, because for this example, we're going to want to open it up easy access from the side of the bed. We just finished tilling this garden. And so the soil is nice and loose, nice and rich. So what I noticed from the original Subpod is that while you do have to maintain, let's say you had like five of these, right? You would have to maintain them all separately. So you're kind of creating multiple separate ecosystems. But we both noticed that the fertility and the plant performance in the front yard with the Subpod was better than the just native raised bed stuff that we had. We did have some problems with our raised bed mix. So you do have to take that into account. It's not a hundred percent because of the Subpod, but having those worms cycling through the system really did help. Yeah. It's also pretty fun to just pick stuff off and throw it in there. Yeah. If you're doing some plant trimming, it's really easy to just come in, make some cuttings, some snipping, some pruning, and then just pop it right into the Subpod. All right, now we just have to bury it back in and we'll show you how this one gets set up. We have the Subpod Mini in here and because the other one was already set up, let's show you how you would set this up. If you've watched my other worm composting videos, no real change. So you can always refer to those. But what we'll do is we'll just pop open the top and your worms are going to need some kind of bedding material, which we've prepared some coconut coir here. So you can see, we've talked about coconut coir here on the channel before as well. Shredded up coconut husks, we rinsed them just in case there was any salt buildup. We have good quality coir, probably didn't have it, but still it's a good idea to do that. So Jacques, why don't you jump in a couple handfuls, if not a little bit more. And then I have a bag of red wiggler worms that I picked up from the local nursery. So this actually comes if we grab a handful of it with its own bit of corn castings in here. So there's quite a bit of bedding material in here already. And whenever you're setting up a worm bin from the start, whether it's a Subpod Mini or anything else, you really want to just get worms in. Let me dump those in real quick. And then get them in a position where they can start to cycle through some of the nutrients. You don't want to overload it with food right away because they simply don't need it. Actually they need microbial activity to start breaking that food down a little bit so it's small enough for them to actually process. So we're going to do this. We'll move these around just a little bit here. Nice. I can already see them moving around. Yeah, there's a ton of them. And I wouldn't stress if your worms are looking a little slow or a little thin, it's probably just because they're slightly dehydrated. If you buy them in a bag like this. So you can water it in slightly. Or we have a nice moist amount of coconut coir. We'll cover it up with a little bit more of that. That should be fine. And then you get this nice little burlap or jute type of warmth protector. Cause worms really are somewhat cold sensitive, below about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. They have a bad time. And so let's do that for now Jacques. I think we're probably okay. And we can just cover it like this. And we have now started the cycling process on the Subpod Mini. I kind of like that this one has these little snaps too. Keeps it closed in case you have some sort of weird raccoon or skunk, which we definitely had that before. So at this point, I'm just chilling. I'm waiting for these worms to kind of get acclimated. And then what I'll do is I'll slowly start to introduce a little bit of food here and there, going one-to-one, layer of food, layer of bedding, roughly the same volume. And the beauty is that there are holes in the side of the system. So they will start to cycle their way through the soil, hopefully congregating around the food when they're hungry. Cause this is where the biggest source of it will be. I noticed in the other beds sometimes they tended to go out for a while and there was just a lower population, but we'll see if that happens again. But nevertheless, this is how you set up a Subpod, whether it be the Mini or the large one. The Subpod is a pretty unique approach to worm composting. I love seeing all these different types of systems. For me, my take on it is at the scale that I'm gardening right now here at the Epic Homestead, this larger model is not a fit for me because it's too big relative to how much space it takes up in the bed, especially the included bed. Maybe if I had a really large wooden raised bed or a huge birdies raised bed, it would make a little bit more sense. I love the Subpod Mini though, cause it's about, I would say, this big. So it cuts off 35% of the space. And let's say you had a really large wooden bed or in-ground bed, you could put it right in the center and you really wouldn't be able to reach that for tending to plants anyways. So you might as well put a little fertility center in there. Now the thing you have to keep in mind is if you, let's say, get a few of these, you're going to have to run different systems and maintain different ecosystems. So that might be a little bit of a downside. But I think if you're a small home gardener, I especially love the Subpod Mini and I'm all for all these different types of systems that are coming out. You can see them in the background here. I love testing all this stuff out. So hopefully this was a helpful breakdown. Until next time, good luck in the garden, keep composting and I'll see you on the next one.