Reconnecting with nature at home through vermi-composting 🪱
My fondest memory as a 7 year old kid in Taiwan was sprinting out the classroom as soon as the class bell rang, to dig through soil and catching worms with friends. The debate I’d have with my friends in the hallway was: should we spend our allowance of 10NTD on silk worms or a bag of chips today? Worms were almost always the winner, they were our proudest possessions! In hindsight, I’m thankful my mom loved insects too and had the patience of taking in all the silkworms, phasmatodea, beetles and the random insects I brought home.
When I moved to the Philippines, playing with insects and worms just weren’t a thing for my classmates in my new school and I quickly learned to play with garters and koosh balls instead. I started to get more and more detached from insects and worms as time passed and the idea of touching them became a yicky thought for me.
Of course, as I found solitude in nature and escaping to the mountains and oceans every chance I get, I’ve gotten a lot better at it but I never thought of having worms at home. “What if they all escape?!” was my worst nightmare because that’s what happened to my precious phasmatodeas back in the day. My family and I lived on the edge everyday, praying we wouldn’t accidentally sit on them!
Why I started (and stopped) composting?
I started to compost in 2018 when I began navigating a zero-waste lifestyle. Composting not only saved a ton of space in my trash but also kept my trash from smelling. Conveniently, where I lived in North Carolina and Taipei both had great community and government compost programs and it was quite easy to bring my compost to a service point. So composting was a part of my weekly routine for a few years, until I moved to Italy in 2022.
A lot of the apartment complexes in Turin has a compost bin but unfortunately ours does not. On top of struggling to find community compost places in Turin, I tried taking the bus 30mins away to compost in my friend’s apartment complex. However, traveling an hour to dispose of compost just wasn’t realistic, as my partner and I cook almost every day (and Italian fridges are tiny, in a good way!). At the end of the day, we succumbed to tossing our veggie scraps in landfill.
What I learned about food waste in land fill and decided to re-start!
Back then, I started to try out the zero-waste lifestyle simply because I wanted to decrease my footprint on the planet but I didn’t comprehend the full picture of climate change. As I went through the Terra.do 12 week-long fellowship in 2023, I continued to learn about the negative impacts of food in landfill. I learnt that as organic mass decomposes in landfill, methane gas is released. Even more, methane is 84x deadlier than CO2 (source: Colorado U). This is just the tip of the iceberg, the creation of landfills lead to loss of biodiversity, means potential contamination in surrounding areas and marginalizes communities.
Knowing this, it started to hurt each time as I tossed my scraps into trash. I then began to seriously re-think on composting- maybe it’s worth the commute or maybe there’s another way? At the perfect timing, I crossed paths with Melody, a Terra.do fellow and master composter, who debunked a lot of composting myths for me and showed me it is possible to have a small composting station in a tiny apartment, without needing a yard. The only catch is it could mean having worms at home but I was ready to brave it and saw it as a great opportunity to reconnect with nature!
Vermi-composting was best suited for my household
Between the two suggested compost solutions for apartment dwellers (vermi-composting and bokashi), we went with vermi-composting because it best matched our lifestyle:
No dairy, no meat diet: worms don’t like dairy or meat products; so as a vegetarian household, who don’t consume dairy products but do eat eggs, this was a great fit for us. The only scraps from our diet that we haven’t been able to toss into our vermi-compost are citrus peels, garlic and green onion. As an alternative, I try to reuse citrus peels for cleaning and regrow green onions.
Low maintenance: my partner and I tend to travel quite often and sometimes it could be weeks at a time. Thankfully the worms are happy if I leave enough cardboards or scraps beforehand.
No smell: with the right amount of food and humidity, the compost box generally doesn’t smell. It was an important criteria for us as we live in a small apartment.
The added bonus is that red wigglers were chosen for vermi-compost because they are quite happy staying in their environment (= no escapees!), if they are well fed and hydrated. Note that bokashi is also a great option, especially for apartment dwellers who have meat and dairy in their diet.
Our compost bin system
We went with Solana Center’s two-bin system, my partner followed the instructions on this file to build our bin. We got two compost/trash cans from IKEA and drilled holes at home. I ordered 400g of red wigglers online from a nearby farm, which were shipped to us healthily and quickly. We went with 400g or worms as we have around 200g of food scraps every day.
After a month in, the Solana Center’s system seems to be doing well and no major issues. We are still learning new things as we go, like tweaking the environment if it seems too wet or if there is mold coming out or trying to understand if I’m feeding too much.
Starting our vermi-compost has been one of the best experiences. The ability to see nature at work and to close the loop on a household waste are great sources of joy on a daily basis! It’s also helping me conquer my fear of holding worms and bringing me back to my childhood times, where interacting with worms made me feel so alive.
Now I am back to being that girl who treats her worms as her proudest possession and showing my worm babies to all the guests I welcome to our apartment! 🪱