IN TERMS of accidental massacres, the flood that drowned my 1,800 worms was biblical. August’s torrential rains might have kept the roses watered, but with no escape route, no Noah, and definitely no boat, there was just no hope for my composting wigglers in the three-tiered wormery in my garden.
Drowning your worms, while also a serious notch against your karma, is just one of the things that can go wrong with home composting systems. Anyone who’s ever tried to compost and ended up with nothing but soggy lettuce and banana skins, or a Bokashi bin that smells like Freddy Krueger’s underwear, knows that being green isn’t always easy.
But with a bit of know-how, you can avoid some of these pitfalls and reap the benefits you thought were out of your reach. Because home composting, whether it’s a wormery, a Bokashi bin, or saving fruit and veg scraps to put in to your compost bin, doesn’t just give you nice, enriched soil to feed back into your plants.
It also cuts down on your waste, clears our air, and keeps our planet from overheating, says Carl Nichols, head of home composting at Recycle Now.
“When food waste is taken to landfill, it breaks down without oxygen because it’s buried,” explains Carl.
“That means that it decomposes into methane instead of compost, a greenhouse gas that’s damaging our atmosphere.
“One-third of all household waste can be composted at home.
“And 90% of Brits have access to open space – that could be a balcony or a backyard or a garden – so there are lots of different places where you can use the compost and keep your composting system.”
“If you’re trying to eliminate kitchen waste, a wormery or a Bokashi bin would both be good ideas,” says Heather Gorringe, founder of the UK’s first wormery-selling company Wiggly Wigglers (www.wigglywigglers.co.uk, 01981 500 391).
“Wormeries are perfect for someone who produces daily food waste, whereas a Bokashi bin is better for people who don’t want to bother and only have some food scraps sometimes.”
While wormeries and Bokashis can both take cooked food, they differ from compost bins, which can only take raw fruit and veg for food waste. Recycle Now’s website (www.recyclenow.com) has a step-by-step guide to help you figure out how to compost, where to compost, and what kind of home composting system is best for you.
Bokashi is Japanese for ‘fermented organic matter’, and that’s pretty much what’s happening in your Bokashi bin.
You add cooked and uncooked food waste, sprinkle some Bokashi bran (filled with bacteria, yeast and fungi) on it, and watch your food ferment odourlessly.
It will not turn into compost but look like slightly pickled food scraps instead, which can be a bit confusing at first.
“Bokashi is great because you can be completely blase with it,” says Heather.
“You add the waste into your Bokashi bin, it gets fermented, and when you put it out into your garden and compost heap, it breaks down faster than you can say ‘rot’.”
Bokashi bins are good for people with little space (the bins are tiny), small amounts of food, and some outdoor space where they can compost the fermented food waste.
All in all, says Heather, “if you don’t want to put any effort into your home composting system, Bokashi bins are all-forgiving”.
Just keep in mind that the fermented scraps have to be disposed of – usually buried or composted – so some outdoor space is needed.
Wormeries are raised up off the ground and have a few tiers – either square or circular – with a tap on the bottom that lets out excess water and wormcast. You add cooked and uncooked food into the top tier, and the worms (you can get as many as 1,000 to 1,800) work their way up to the food, producing wormcast (liquid fertiliser) and compost as they break down your food – they can eat and digest up to half their own body weight each day.
“Worms are the world’s fastest natural composters,” enthuses Heather.
“They’re incredibly efficient but people generally think things can go too wrong with a wormery.”
I might have drowned mine, but it’s worms’ resilience that makes them such good composters, says Heather.
“Despite the fact that most of your worms drowned,” she says sadly, “they tend to reproduce more when there’s more food and probably left some little worms in there, so by aerating your wormery a bit and replenishing them with some food will help. Even if you have a complete disaster it’ll be very unusual for you to have to replace the worms.”
A bit like a compost bin, wormeries cannot be too dry, or the worms will suffocate, and they can’t be too wet, or they’ll drown. Keeping a good balance of wet food waste – such as fruit scraps, coffee grindings, and veg peelings – with dry waste – such as loo roll cardboard and shredded newspaper, will keep your wormery going strong.
“But,” says Heather, “wormeries are not good when you only have occasional bits of waste – like when you usually eat out and then have a dinner party of 12. It’s a brilliant composter but not a disposal machine, and they do need to be fed regularly.”
The wormery also has to be kept outside, so is ideal for those with a small outdoor or garden space or for those looking for an alternative to a compost bin. The wormcast can be diluted with water (1:10) to produce a plant-enhancing liquid fertiliser.
Unless you’re a raw foodie, it’s unlikely that a compost bin will take care of your kitchen waste. Compost bins can’t take any cooked food, bones, meat, dairy products, diseased plants or weeds, but are perfect for green thumbs with loads of garden waste and lots of raw fruit and veg peelings.
“Compost is incredibly easy,” says Nichols.
“All you do is add brown and green ingredients to it and 9-12 months later you have compost. You don’t have to stir or mix it, but if you add too much of one material, like too much grass, your compost can get soggy, dense and wet.
“So you need to put in a mixture of things: greens, which add nitrogen – like vegetable peelings, flowers, coffee grounds, leaves. And then you add browns, which give your compost some carbon: egg and cereal boxes, prunings, sawdust, loo roll cardboard. By mixing the green mushy with brown dry, your compost will be nice and healthy.”
Compost is a nutrient-rich food for gardens that helps improve soil structure, maintain moisture levels, and keep plant disease in check. Sprinkle it around your plants or mix it with potting soil to keep your plants healthy.
Recycle Now (www.recyclenow.com) has partnered with local authorities across the UK to offer discounted home composting systems. These come with factbooks, guides, and a compost helpline to help newbies get started – an initiative so successful that 96% of people who bought one last year are still composting now.