Vermin under the kitchen sink

Dantzel and I had been planning on making a compost pile for a while, but you would have no idea how ridiculously hard it is to start your own compost pile when you're in an apartment. I had investigated various websites on how to start an apartment-sized compost pile, and it seems that vermicomposting is the best way to go - basically, a compost pile full of worms.

So Dantzel and I set out to find some worms. Most of the websites said any do-it-yourself store with a gardening section attached to it will have worms, but apparently Utah does not believe in composting with worms (despite the overwhelming advice in Mormon culture to have your own garden and the fact Utah is a desert and could use compost) as we traveled from place to place.

So we ended up buying worms online from a bait shop.

A bit blurry, but you get the point. We bought two pounds of worms, in fact, which came in a little cardboard box in a white bag. After building our compost pile with shredded, soaked newspaper, crushed eggshells and dirt, we dumped the whole lot into our compost bin we rigged up from a plastic bin we bought at Target.










Dantzel, after ordering the worms online, decided to save all of our food scraps and compost-able material into a tupperware bin. Of course, by the time the worms came a couple days later, it was moldy and smelled something rancid. Dantzel then took our worm food and dumped it in, then took her bare hands and mixed it into the compost concoction of dirt, worms, eggshell and wet, soggy newspaper. I stood at the sidelines, horrified, and merely watched.

The compost bin is now tucked neatly under our kitchen sink. We need to leave them alone for about a week to let them adjust, and then we can add about a pound of food scraps a day to keep them healthy. In a couple of months, we will have pure black gold for gardening, and some compost tea to use for our house plants.

If you're interested in starting your own, here's a great resource on where to start. We'll update from time to time on how our compost bin is doing.