- Mar 2, 2009
- 22
- 0
- 22
Well, I think red wigglers are great - adding them to your household is effective for recycling all sorts of things - whether you have chickens or not!
I do think a good reason to take the extra step of feeding worms some of your kitchen scraps is that the worms provide more protein for your chickens. The worms do a nice conversion from kitchen waste carbs to protein.
....And More Detail Than You Would Likely Want:
I used to work at a lodge where we used red wiggler worms to compost all the food scraps from the kitchen and all the shredded office paper. We had 5 2'x10' tables with 12" deep bins that turned food waste and office paper into worm castings. We also put towels, old mop heads (we didn't use toxic floor cleaners) and our old socks in there.
When starting a bin, we used a big plastic tub and a hose to wet our shredded office paper, then squeezed it out and spread it through the tub. Once the tub was full of fluffed up wet paper, each day, we buried food scraps rotationally through the week. The tables were covered with opened up trash bags - these worms like to feed at big organic material through the whole bed, and don't like light!
Once the paper was pretty well composted (along with all the food scraps over the past month or so) we sifted out the compost, and saved the worms to re-add to a freshly prepared bin.
It's a great, simple system for homes or small businesses! You do need to have a place like a garage or basement that doesn't freeze for this to work best.
I do think a good reason to take the extra step of feeding worms some of your kitchen scraps is that the worms provide more protein for your chickens. The worms do a nice conversion from kitchen waste carbs to protein.
....And More Detail Than You Would Likely Want:
I used to work at a lodge where we used red wiggler worms to compost all the food scraps from the kitchen and all the shredded office paper. We had 5 2'x10' tables with 12" deep bins that turned food waste and office paper into worm castings. We also put towels, old mop heads (we didn't use toxic floor cleaners) and our old socks in there.
When starting a bin, we used a big plastic tub and a hose to wet our shredded office paper, then squeezed it out and spread it through the tub. Once the tub was full of fluffed up wet paper, each day, we buried food scraps rotationally through the week. The tables were covered with opened up trash bags - these worms like to feed at big organic material through the whole bed, and don't like light!
Once the paper was pretty well composted (along with all the food scraps over the past month or so) we sifted out the compost, and saved the worms to re-add to a freshly prepared bin.
It's a great, simple system for homes or small businesses! You do need to have a place like a garage or basement that doesn't freeze for this to work best.
