The Cheapest Way To Start Worm Composting. (less than $25!)

These are compost worms, the European night crawlers. They tear apart organic matter and turn it into black gold fertilizer. I'm going to show you how to make a super simple, cheap, composting bin with these guys that'll cost you less than $30. Everybody should have compost worms. They literally recycle all your food scraps into beautiful black gold fertilizer. They're the perfect way to dip your toe into the water of being more self-sufficient, just by a little degree, and you can have them no matter where you live, no matter what your living situation is. I'm going to show you how to harness the power of these worms to make gardening easy, to save you money, to give you an infinite supply of fishing bait, and to keep you from ever throwing out your kitchen waste again. It's cheap to set up your first worm bin. There's many different ways you can do it. So let's get into it. You can make a worm bin out of a variety of different containers. Basically, if it can hold at least a gallon in capacity, then it'll work just fine. I've made them out of Home Depot buckets or plastic totes like this work really well. If you got the money for it, use a wooden planter like this. These are European night crawlers, Mycenae hortensis. So we got 30 in here. So I'm going to pick up four, and that'll give us 40, 60, I'll give us 120 worms to start with. Now over time, those worms will keep reproducing, and within less than a year, that 120 will easily overcome 1,000. This is what we're using today. We got our worms we purchased from Walmart. That was a total of $15, plus the tote was $10. Beyond that, you'll need a drill and a drill bit, and that's to make ventilation holes and drainage holes. Worms breathe through their skin, so they need to have a little bit of air circulation going on. They need a way for excess moisture to be able to drain away. As far as bedding goes, there's a variety of different things you can use. You can use fall leaves, grass clippings, shredded paper, or if you want to spend a little bit of money, you can use a garden soil like this, or coco coir, or peat moss. A plastic bucket from Home Depot works every bit as well as this tote. I'm using a tote because it holds a higher capacity. You can always start with something cheap and upgrade to something nicer if you want, but it couldn't be easier to care for them. They live off of nothing but your kitchen waste and just need a container and bedding. Their bedding can be as simple as shredded paper. That's it. That's all the work you need to do on the bin, so next we're going to start filling it up. I like to line the bottom with a layer of pine shavings or wood chips because that helps keep the worms from escaping through the drainage holes, but this part's totally optional. You can just fill it up with any of the other bedding materials and it'll work just fine. This will condense down a bit, so I'm going to leave a good one inch layer. That will still allow for drainage, but it will keep the worms from getting through those drainage holes. I'm just grabbing a little bit of compost from my chicken yard to use as bedding. Now if you use free bedding, that puts your total cost at less than $25. If you have a container lying around already, that'll work. Then that drops it even lower. You just got to pay for the worms. This is bedding that doubles as worm food as well. Variety in your bedding is a good thing because it introduces lots of different microbes. As you build up your worm population, you also build up a microbial population, and microbes help the composting process just as the worms do. Add enough bedding to fill the tote at least six inches deep. I got the worms from Walmart just from the bait section in their bait fridge. I bought four containers of worms and each container was a little over three dollars. They're pretty cold right now, so that's why they're not moving very well, but as soon as they warm up they're going to be moving all over the place and digging down into that bedding. Now these worms don't like light, so if you ever want them to dive down into the bedding, you can shine a light over top. Each of these containers has 30 worms in it, so four of them equals 120 worms. Over a few months, that population will double, and a few months later it'll double again. Having more worms increases the amount of food you can feed to them on a daily basis. Be sure to wet the material down with filtered water. Tap water works, but it kills a lot of the beneficial microbes because of the chlorine in it, and too much tap water can actually hurt the worms. So filter your water if you can. The worms can eat almost anything from your kitchen, with a few exceptions. They can't have too much citrus fruits, and they can't have too much onions or garlic, and I pretty much never feed them hot peppers. Worms have very sensitive skin, and just like hot peppers burn you, they burn the worms. The other exception would be you don't want to feed them dairy or meat products. I tend to feed my worms lots of banana peels, coffee grounds, spent tea leaves, leftovers, kombucha scobies, pretty much anything that comes from the kitchen. Now if you have animals like I do, the other thing you can do is you can give them a little bit of alfalfa hay. Alfalfa hay has lots of protein in it, and worms need protein to reproduce, so by doing that you'll have a faster reproduction within your worm bin. These worms will multiply to fill the space that they're in. That bin that I made can easily house a thousand worms. Once you have a thousand or more, you can start separating them out into new bins, or you can put them in different parts of your yard and garden. Wherever they are, they just need to be in places with lots of organic matter. I put worms in my blackberry patches and all my raised garden beds, and so pretty soon I'm going to have a ton of worms throughout my entire yard. That means endless fishing worms and endless composting going on. Now that your worm bin is done, be sure to keep it in the shade if it's outdoors. A plastic tote like that in the sun can get really really hot. I've actually accidentally cooked a bunch of worms that way. You might want to bring it in in the winter if you live in a cold region because the bin can actually freeze solid. I learned that the hard way. So now I just bring my worm bins into the garage through the winter and then bring them back out in the spring, and they slow down in production in the winter anyway. So I put them in the garage, don't feed them very much, and they do just fine. It'll take a few months for your worm population to really start exploding, so for now we don't feed as much. A bin of this size with this many worms, I'll definitely give them coffee grounds every single day from my morning coffee and the occasional banana peel. A few months from now I'll be able to give them a lot more food at once and they'll be able to handle it. Pretty soon you'll be harvesting your own worm castings from your own worm bin. You can put those castings in your garden and in your house plants. It has all the nutrients they need, it has beneficial microbes, and it even has compounds that stimulate plant growth, making it the perfect fertilizer for everything. I hope you guys liked this video. My channel is just starting out, so if you could leave a like and please subscribe, that does more than anything else to help my channel out. Now I hope this guide helps you start a successful worm bin. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.