I live in a first floor flat in London with no garden. My flatmates and I are very aware of the environmental issues that the world is facing and are pretty conscientous about recycling our waste and have tried to maintain lifestyles which do not worsen our ecological footprints. The one area of recycling which we were not doing very well on was organic food waste. We get rid of about 1kg of organic food waste a week and it goes straight into landfill. Thinking about this element of our lifestyle and the project that I am undertaking at university I looked into finding a way in which I could (a) solve our organic waste problem and (b) find a pet for my research. My investigations lead me to finding out about red worms (
Eisenia Fetida). These worms are very good at decomposing organic waste and are best suited to the kind temperatures that we have in our houses. With this in mind I decided that I would build a worm composting bin or
'vermicomposter' which would house the red worms and would be in our kitchen where it would be easy to transfer the organic waste to the bin. Eventually the bin will be harvested and the product of the worms' work - worm castings will be used as a fertiliser for aiding the growth of more food to complete the vermiculture cycle. This blog will become a diary and bank of information about the vermicomposting process.
I looked into the designs of a lot of 'worm bins' and decided that I would make my own based on the structure used in most commercial bins (see right).
