Dealing with food waste via vermicomposting

This post is from my old Eco Urban Dweller blog, but the topic has tons of relevance to how we will deal with food waste for our wedding:

I love composting...but sometimes I am too lazy to separate my food waste from my trash and yet I feel guilty for putting things in the trash can. The idea of vermicomposting (composting organic materials with worms) came about the time I was working at The Food Project, a sustainable agriculture organization and job program for teens. I would bring bag loads of my compost to our urban gardens, which was nice to do but a pain in the butt nonetheless. The Cambridge recycling director had a workshop on building your worm bin and I was enthused to start one right a way. As usual procrastination got the better of me and my boyfriend convinced me to shop around for worm bins.

I found the Can-O-Worms set-up at the Happy D-Ranch site and saw how practical the set-up was. First, it had a stackable tray system that allowed me to dump my compost in and allowed the worms to eat at their own pace. Also it had a spout that can be opened and closed to release the composting tea. Second, it was deemed an environmentally responsible product because it is built from recycled plastic and the packaging material could be used to start the composting bin.

When I got the Can-O-Worms, it was easy to set-up and then I waited for my 1 pound of worms to arrive from Georgia. It was so cute to get a small priority box, marked "Live Worms." Before I put the worms in the bin, I had cut up newspapers and the coir (a compressed block of coconut hairs) to establish the bedding.

Then I carefully cut open the bag of worms and let them settle into the bedding. Worms don't like bright light and so they dived down into the bedding as soon as possible. The moist, shredded newspaper was added to the bin and then another bin layer was added. On this empty level, I added the food scraps I had saved up.

In the first month, I learned that you have to empty the compost tea as often as possible and that egg shells should be dried and crushed before it is added to the bin. Too much moisture creates a sulfurous smell in the bin. My roommates got use composting in the apartment. The nice part about the Can-O-Worms is that all you have to do is lift the lid and dump the food scraps in. The worms take care of the rest.

Two years later, I have rich compost and many gallons of compost tea which I use on my plants. My fiance and I are on our third layer of the Can and I am thinking of getting another because we compost a lot of vegetable matter. This is especially true of the harvest season because we have a Community Support Agriculture (CSA) share with Red Fire Farm. It's a wonderful deal to get our food from a CSA. We pick up our share next to our food co-op. Last year, we had a delivery from Bay End Farm which was a great deal because we god flowers, herbs, and fresh bread from a locally bakery with our veggies. Our worm population has tripled as they consume all our food waste.