How to Make and Love your own Compost

"Do you wanna live in my compost pile?"

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that about 24% of Americans' waste is compostable, but according to the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) only 8% of Americans compost. Composting is an easy way to speed up the decomposition of our food waste, and if you garden it will give you some of the most nutritious soil that money can buy.

I have a worm composting bin (also called a vermicompost bin), and I use it every day. Below you'll find the process I followed to make my bins. Let me know if you try to do this yourself, and what your results were!

My compost bin system

What you'll need:

• Red wiggler worms: I purchased my worms from Uncle Jim's Worm Farm. For my first compost pile I tried using Nighttime Crawlers, but they do not eat nearly as much as the big red wigglers from Uncle Jim's. The worms cost about $20 for 1000 worms, and the worms double in population every 3 months. So, if you want to pull some worms out of my compost pile for free, I probably have about 16,000 by now. This also means that the longer you have a compost pile, the faster your pile will break down what you put into it.
• 2 plastic storage containers and 3 lids: 2 bins with lids will be used to hold your worms and compostable waste, and I use an extra lid on the bottom of the bin system to catch any excess liquid that would otherwise leak all over my balcony.
• non-glossy paper: To start your pile, you'll need a nice bed of paper for your worms to begin eating on their first day in the bin.

Easy steps to making your own bin:

1. Cut out holes on the top and bottom of each bin, making sure that the holes on the bottom of one bin line up with the holes on the top of the other. 
2. Shred your non-glossy paper and put it down as the base inside of your first (bottom) bin.
3. Toss your worms onto the paper bed inside your bin. They will immediately begin chomping away at your paper! (When I first got my worms I watched them eat for about 30 minutes because I was so fascinated... is that weird?) 
4. Leave the lid of your bin off for the first day that you have your worms. The worms do not like the light so it will force them to burrow down into your paper bed. 
5. You can now begin tossing your compostable waste on top of the worms. That's it! The worms will do the rest of the work for you. 
6. (Optional) If you want your waste to degrade a little faster, then mixing your pile every couple of weeks will speed up the process by forcing your worms to stray from their central "hive."
7. Once you fill up your bottom bin with waste, simply start filling the top bin with waste. When your worms run out of waste to eat in the bottom bin, they will naturally migrate to the top bin in search of food, leaving you with a bin full of extremely nutritious compost for your garden. 
8.  Dump your bin of compost in your backyard. Place the empty bin back on top of your now-active worm bin
9. Repeat steps 5-8 for as long as you like.

You can also purchase commercial composters like the Worm Factory 360, which accomplishes essentially the same thing for about $100. My compost bin system costed me about $40 altogether.

Inside my top composting bin

All fruit and vegetable scraps can be composted, and non-glossy paper or cardboard. Some more surprising things can also be composted including dryer lint, stale bread, and hair. If your compost is kept correctly, you should be able to keep it indoors without developing a strong odor. However, if you accidentally add any meat or dairy your pile can quickly become absolutely putrid.  I keep mine outside on the balcony just in case. :)