Composting

Several people have asked me how we manage a very productive vegetable garden; so I’ve written this post as a brief description of one aspect our our approach - vermiculture.

One of our overarching family goals is sustainable living. It’s basically about leaving a small footprint. A practical component of this philosophical stance is dealing with food waste. We deal with kitchen waste with a combination of bokashi composting and vermicomposting (also known as vermiculture) It’s not for the faint-of-heart and some are horrified to learn that I keep thousands - possibly hundreds of thousands - of worms in our basement. But some have asked me to describe our process; so this article is meant just to document it. There is a lot of art and science to vermiculture and this is not meant to be a definitive guide to vermiculture.

When I was a kid, I remember my dad piling leaves and grass clippings into an area in the back of the yard. Eventually, the pile would yield a loamy substance called compost. As time went on, he began to use one of those compost tumblers, a large plastic vessel with a crank. Into the tumbler went leaves and grass clippings again, but the results were more rapid. The increased heat and mixing seemed to yield compost much faster.