Are you trying to give your home garden a little extra oomf? Then you might think about creating a worm compost bucket, all from items you can find at home or your local Ace Hardware.
How to Create a Worm Compost Bucket
Vermicomposting, or worm composting produces a nutrient rich soil amendment that is perfect to add into your garden.
How to Set It Up
Red Wigglers are the best type of worm for vermicomposting. They can be purchased at a Bait shop or at your local garden center.
Make sure you’re drilling enough holes on the side of your bucket, as well as on the bottom. You only need to drill on the sides and bottom of one of your buckets. On the bottom is where we’re going to need the drainage. Remember that the top is covered with a lid, so let’s put some holes in the lid as well. All of these holes are used to give the worms the oxygen that they’ll need. The holes on the bottom will come into play when we need the drainage to get rid of the water if it gets moist.
After the holes are drilled into your buckets, you’re going to want to prepare the bedding for the worms. To do this, just wet some old newspaper, shred it up, and layer it on the bottom of your bucket. After you put the shredded newspaper in there, you’ll want to add some food waste. Strawberry seeds, watermelons, coffee grounds will all work great. Any organic matter is perfect, and this ends up being the worms’ food. On top of the food waste you’re going to layer more wet newspaper so that the worms can’t escape from the top and they have a dark, moist home. Once you have the wet newspaper inside the buckets, the worms are in there, and you have the food waste/worm food, you want to stack your buckets on top of each other, put your lid on, and store the buckets in a dark place.
Don’t expect much for the first few weeks, the process is going to be complete when you see fresh organic vermicompost in the buckets. It’ll kind of look like soil and coffee grounds mixed together. Scoop out the vermicompost with your hands, making sure to leave the worms in the bucket to continue to do their thing. Remember to continue to feed your worms more food waste regularly.
This isn’t 100% necessary for your home garden, but we thought this was a cool thing to interduce you to a cool way to use your Ace bucket. It’s a way you can go from garden to table, then table back to garden, and then back around again. We hope you have some fun with this, and it is a low maintenance pet to have around the house. So have some fun and get your worms going.
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