Worm Bin Composting works. It doesn't stink. Really.
You may be worried that, as a biological system, things will go haywire,
but the WormGin™ design solves a lot of the common problems.
You just need to add some basic knowledge and patience.
My job is to give you the information you need to be successful.
Lesson #1: Things do not happen quickly in a worm bin.
They happen, but you need to be prepared to wait a bit.
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I'm not going to sell you a product and then abandon you to figure it out yourself. This business is about doing the exact opposite. You can find lots of info on the web about setting up an inexpensive worm bin, but what happens next? I am here to remove the mystery for you.
You will find a lot of info on this site, and I host discussion boards where you can learn more, and ask any questions that may come up for you, and be part of a community of people doing the same thing you are. Maintenance is easy, just follow these simple guidelines.
That's pretty much it. Lots more detail below: I'm a strong believer in providing complete information. Worm bins work and WormGin™ bins work great. Please don't let all the info scare you away from becoming one of my valued customers.
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email: bob@worm-gin dot com
(or)
email: bobdew@gmail dot com
Voice: 503 625 ninety-five-sixty-two
US Mail: PO Box 151
Sherwood OR 97140
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THINGS TO KNOW
The WormGin™ is an innovative biology-based system for disposing of family-size amounts of food waste.
Here's the main thing to understand: you need to build up your population of worms before they can process enough food to keep up with you. Once they are fat and sassy, man oh man they go through the food in a hurry. But you have to make an investment and bring the population up to speed.
Perhaps you have asked the question: "What's The Catch?"
My competitors don't tell you this stuff, but I intend to build a base of happy customers and I don't want to start off on the wrong foot with any of them. To be blunt, to make this business work, my potential customers need to know what they're in for. No tricks, no hype.
So here's the low-down, that's part of the deal at worm-gin.com. Just remember that the chances of your success are very very good. If there is one central philosophy at Wormgineering LLC, it's the commitment to remarkably well performing biological machines requiring remarkably low effort to maintain.
Even if you do try to stock up right away, sometimes many worms die as the population adjusts itself to a new food type.
You need to build up your population of worms and let them adapt to the conditions you provide, which they are really good at. It only takes a couple of months or less, and then you're off and rolling.
Worms are cheap at $25 per pound. That's a lot of critters, and they are amazing little machines. In my opinion, we should never complain about the cost of worms, they have high value. Don't forget that they breed like rabbits - worms go from cocoon to breeding in a matter of weeks.
So you need to go into this knowing that your worm population is an investment and that for your investment in a WormGin™ to be satisfying, you need to build up your worm investment until the bin is packed with happy worms. This is true for any worm composting system! The WormGin™ is designed to make sure it happens - it's easy to do, I just think you should be aware of what you're signing up for.
Remember that once you've got the population cranked up, you've got a valuable asset: you can help others get started with some of your worms, and you can transform a lot of food into vermicompost. It's great to have vermicompost in the spring and a huge population of worms to start new bins with when the fall harvest comes in - so get started now and you'll be ready!
No vermicomposting setup is going to produce instant results. Some will be quicker than others, and like any other set up, the WormGin™ does not instantly produce rich vermicompost. It is first and foremost designed for success, meaning reliably getting customer's bins to their desired garbage-reduction capacity without drama and on whatever schedule they and the worms work out. The vermicompost (I will not claim it to be pure worm castings, there is a difference) is produced as quickly as any other system if not faster. I do not make claims without data.
The cool thing is that the WormGin™ produces high quality castings that are easily harvested, and it consistently works great in my testing. The worms do just what I thought they would when I conceived this design. Even when I mess with the system, the castings concentrate around the perimeter. I fully expect your worms will do the same, so let's get started!
It can be done sooner, but you should not expect to begin harvesting castings until four months have gone by. After that, it will continuously produce well-finished castings as long as you keep feeding it without problems.
You will scoop it out with a spoon or by hand from the perimeter of the bin, where it will be concentrated, rich, castings-rich black gold, like crumbly super moist chocolate cake.
Even without any attachments, harvesting is as simple as plopping it on a tray and sorting out the worms to return them. This is not the big deal it is made out to be. You can harvest a quart of compost in less than half an hour. Repeat daily for four days and you have a gallon of vermicompost which will feed a lot of soil and the plants therein. I'll have a forum post and maybe even a video of it well before my first customers will be harvesting. There's a simple trick or two to show you.
Look for worm-gin.com to introduce a very effective and inexpensive castings harvester, as an accessory to the WormGin™ product line. I like user-friendly design, so I need to build prototypes and test it out before selling it. The first prototype was constructed Aug 18 2010, and is being refined.
If you need to get castings sooner, say after at least two months, you can do that. The compost won't be as rich and you will likely have more worms to sort out, but hey it's your worm bin, you can do what you want, right? :D
An underpopulated worm bin will of course be limited in the amount of food that it can process. This is true of any worm bin system! Again, you are building up the asset you've invested in: more worms, more garbage disposal capacity.
The Feeder portion of the WormGin™ has several purposes; one is to help you regulate the amount of food. If it gets backed up, you'll need to stop feeding until it clears. The immediate goal is to always provide plenty of food in the first several months so that they breed like crazy, but without ever over-feeding, which can set back the progress of the population explosion. The baby worms will be adapted to the kinds of foods you are providing; this is the other reason, besides cost, for not buying more than a pound of worms to start with.
The long-term goal is to build up the population enough to keep up with everything you want to put in it. No other home vermicomposting system is designed to keep up with a small family. For maximum capacity, put a Regular size WormGin™, Expanding version, in your home and take care of it and it will crank out buckets of vermicompost.
Of all the basic steps that can be taken to make worm-keeping for maximum garbage-disposal foolproof, keeping the worms at the right temperature is the most important. The easiest way to do that is to keep the WormGin™ inside a building that is at least semi-heated. So a garage or porch would be fine in most parts of the country and during most parts of the year. A spare bedroom or a utility room would be better - best is a fully heated and cooled space, because that way you take seasonal temperature changes out of the picture completely.
Red Wiggler composting worms - Eisenia Fetida - like the same temperatures we like. If you can find room in your home for a WormGin™ , then you're off to a great start. If you keep it outside, and your valuable worms get cooked or frozen, then you cannot expect the WormGin™ to do its job. They slow down in cool weather so they might not be able to keep up with your waste stream.
I've done everything I can think of to prevent weird things from happening. But fruit flies have many food sources and while I can (and do) provide easy-to-follow guidelines, I cannot control the food and bedding and moisture you put in the system, or its location. A normal worm bin does NOT stink! If you have fruit fly problems or rotting-food odors, "you are doing something wrong" and I will be very happy to work with you to get things back on track.
Hey, that's the deal with innovative products. It's not like Hippies haven't been keeping worms for decades. ;-) Even my earliest customers are not the very first people to start one of these up. Check out the forums and you'll see that a community and a company is building that will give you the support you need.
The design is based on a very tried-and-true method of worm composting. Perhaps you've seen the videos online showing you how easy it is to set up a plastic-tote worm bin. What I've done is to apply solid engineering analysis to this method, learning from the experts and casual worm-keepers, letting me design in features to make it almost completely foolproof. Testing to date shows that all these systems work well, even under some adverse conditions that I've intentionally created. I wish I could make guarantees, but I just cannot do that at this point in time. Your success is my success, and worms are super easy to keep up with. Take the plunge!
Quite frankly, at some level, all my 2010 customers will be beta testers. There's no way around it: I cannot simulate and test all the variations in experience WormGin™ units will have. Especially since it takes a full year to really test a worm bin design. Lots of companies use their customers as beta testers but not all of them will directly disclose that to you, but this is the way I do business.
The people who step up and get this company going will always be treated like royalty. This product and my business isn't going away, so why not get in on the ground floor of this deal?
Most households get a LOT of junkmail and have to deal with a LOT of waste paper. A worm bin is for getting rid of food waste, and you put paper in for bedding. The paper is consumed, but at a much lower rate because the waste food has a lot more nutrition. Glossy paper takes even longer, so it is not recommended.
Most people have access to paper recycling, and that is a more ecologically sensible way to deal with your waste paper: paper mills make more paper with it, this is smart. But you absolutely can stuff your waste paper into the WormGin™ . The less glossy, less colorful and the browner the paper the better. It should always be torn into strips.
If you add envelopes with the plastic windows to your worm bin, you will end up with vermicompost that has those bits of plastic in it. It is entirely up to you if that's OK. The good news is that it is surprisingly easy to pull those pieces out when you harvest the castings.
So what I recommend is to recycle by normal methods the windowed envelopes and other less-than-ideal papers. Get a cheap paper shredder (no crosscut - strips are MUCH better) and run your good-for-worms paper (less glossy and browner) thru that and stuff it into the top of the worm bin or keep it in a box for regular maintenance. Paper towels and napkins don't need to be shredded, maybe torn up a bit is good but no biggie. A food-soaked paper napkin is pretty darn close to ideal worm food.
Here are the ways that worms can die:
Red Wiggler worms do not sleep and they do not catch diseases. In fact, pathogens usually die from passing through the gut of an earthworm.
Here are the things that can go wrong in a worm bin:
The WormGin™ is what happens when an innovative engineer decides to pimp up standard plastic worm bin systems and sell them to make a living. Plastic worm bins have been used successfully by a lot of people for a while now. Red Wigglers are very adaptable, and if the set up is good enough and the worm keeper is in touch with the zen of worms, they do fantatsic. They can also fail, which is where I come in. The first design priority was to build in features that will help prevent failure. (Just behind that was user-friendliness, followed by low cost.)
The moisture content can be one of the tricky things for a beginner. The solution is to provide good drainage (and some retention of water as a reserve) so that even if you let it get too soggy, you still wont drown the whole little eco-system. This requires a tray and perhaps a liquid collection system.
Each WormGin™ model has the tray to catch liquid. You can also order your WormGin™ with an optional collection system to drain from the center of the tray to collect "worm extract".
Honestly, for any beginner I recommend the simple tray without collection. The tray is for collecting excess liquid. But other features of the WormGin™ let us control the moisture level and there is no reason why you have to have excess moisture. So it turns out that it is quite likely that you will only need the tray no more than a few times, maybe never. Even then, you can just usually ignore a small puddle and let it evaporate. Seriously: it likely won't stink and it is no health hazard AFAIK.
So each WormGin™ model has the tray to catch liquid. You gotta have it so it can't make a big mess, but you may never actually need it because a normal worm bin does not drain unless you flood it.
Dealing with liquid in the tray is not something that you have to typically deal with, but the option to extract liquid directly from the bin is there if you add the liquid collection option. The liquid comes out a small hose you can insert into your bucket. You'll want to set the WormGin™ on a short stand or table for this operation.
Just know that true "Worm Tea" is actively brewed in a bucket of water, and that no vermicomposting system can directly dispense the real deal. What you get is either "leachate" from a young worm bin or "worm extract" from a mature bin. That spigot on the bottom of a stacking tray system cannot deliver true worm tea.
The feeder system deals with the 'too much food' problem, and the ventilation holes are strategically placed to work with the rest of the design to defeat the fruit flies. Keep the bad foods out, and you've got a system that's pretty gosh darn foolproof. The stacking tray systems are OK I guess, but the WormGin™ is designed to just sit there and work with absolutely minimal intervention.
Actual operation of the WormGin™ is as easy as I say on the home page, but the "catch" if you will is that there are some Maintenance things you need to do from time to time. Maintenance is minimal and user-friendly.
The Feeder Pipe and Feed Shelf, along with properly maintained bedding, means the WormGin™ automatically places the food under the bedding layer in the center of the bin. The Feed Pipe can be used to move the food outward if required to help spread the food away from the center of the bin. This will help speed up the process. The food material will flow downward from there.
The user can optionally pop the lid off and bury food scraps under the bedding the old fashioned way: lift up bedding with one hand, drop food, replace bedding. "Ooh cool" say some and "oooh icky poo" say others, but almost all go wash their hands. Myself, almost nothing in nature grosses me out. But the WormGin™ was designed for my opposite, thus the ability to just drop food into the pipe without even opening the bin, let alone touching things.
Maintenance is minimal and user-friendly. You're going to want to peek under the lid and lift up the bedding every once in a while to see how it looks, unless you really don't want to. You can skip it if you are grossed out, that was one of the main design ideas from the beginning.
The bedding needs to be replenished often, at least monthly, there is no way around that, but it's a clean and easy job. Plus it can be fun: this is where you get rid of some of your junk mail by shredding it for bedding. You don't have to ever remove the bedding, just replenish it.
You'll need to get a spray bottle for water and keep that handy to moisten the bedding after you put it in. Storing water in the bottle will help prevent using water from the tap with chlorine in it, chlorine is nasty stuff to any ecosystem. Home Depot's standard spray bottle works well, maybe a dozen squeezes and you're done. After filling the bottle with tapwater, leave the lid off for 24 hours to let the chlorine escape.
The volume reduction from food to compost is huge: you will put a LOT of food in before the thing fills up.
It is entirely possible that, if your curiosity is not a factor, you will only do the monthly thing and no more. Monthly maintenance is simply making sure the WormGin™ is topped off with newspaper strips and checking the base bedding to make sure it isn't too dry (a rare problem) - both of these are things you should be doing anyway, but if you really are mostly ignoring the worms except for dropping food in, make it a monthly habit to add bedding and check the moisture.
If you have the Expanding option, the worm's habitat volume grows every time you remove a pair of wooden blocks the WormGin™ sits on. So you would add that simple block removal task to the monthly list.
If your worm bin stinks, any worm bin, "you are doing it wrong". One of the first things you learn - and it is very hard to believe this until you smell it for yourself - is that certain kinds of rotting food do not actually stink. Well, it stinks if you put in meat or dairy or lots of oils, but fruits and vegetables do not stink when they "rot", as long as they are exposed to the oxygen in the air. That's because what we see as "rotting" is actually the active consumption of the food by microscopic creatures that don't stink. Stinky rotting produce is always the result of lack of oxygen (often wrapped or sealed up in the back of your fridge).
Aerobic (with oxygen) decomposition doesn't stink, anaerobic (without oxygen) decomposition (typically in a sealed container) certainly does.
Of course, with the WormGin™ , the rotting food is sealed away from you anyway, and I'm selling you this product on the basis of "throw it away and forget it, you don't have to mess around with it". But it can't hurt to have a basic understanding of what is going on inside the system. I and many others have provided a wealth of material for your learning pleasure, and remember the forums!
Remember that the worms don't just eat the food waste - they are at the top of a complex food chain and they are also eating the critters that are eating the food. So what you are doing is giving the worms a ranch for growing those critters that "rot" the food, keeping the worms fat and sassy. This is not "gross", it's Nature At Work!
Oh one more quick thing: You want to cut or tear or chop up your food waste enough to make sure it doesn't plug up the feeder. It's not easy to plug, but it can be done with big leafy stuff that's not cut up first. Smaller stuff also becomes compost faster.
With the Expanding option, the worm's habitat grows each time you remove a pair of blocks, so as the population grows into the size of its local food-rich environment - something these worms have been doing for millions of years - the environment itself gets bigger and there's never a lack of food for the critter farm. Eisenia Fetida LOVES that! My understanding is that this is the way to bring the size of a given population up as fast as possible, but hey I'm still learning. One thing I know for sure is that there are many correct answers to the question of how to set a vermicomposting system up, and the WormGin™ is one of them.
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