Ready to reduce your food waste, give back to your school garden andgive students an opportunity to observe a thriving ecosystem? Why not bring a vermin-compost bin (a.k.a. a worm bin) into your classroom and open up a world of hands-on, experiential learning!
Before you begin, you’ll need to calculate your ideal worm herd (ie. how many worms do you need to take care of all of your food waste). You can even calculate how many worms you would need for the entire school or student’s household!
First, you will need to track the average amount of veggie waste in your family, classroom or school. Collect a days worth of food waste, place it in Ziploc bags and weigh. Record this weight.
Repeat this for one week.
2. Add all of the weight
Next add all the weights collected and divide by the number of days to calculated the average daily food waste!
After you’ve calculated the daily food waste of your household, school or classroom, you can calculate the ideal worm herd size you would need to compost all of your food waste.
3. Calculate your herd. Calculate your herd
Generally, a red wiggler will eat roughly half their weight every day. We use this fact to create our formula for optimal worm herd.
Formula for optimal worm herd size:
Average daily food waste (by weight) x 2 = amount of red wigglers needed by weight.
If there are roughly 2000 mature worms in 1KG of worms. Based on that, how many worms do you need?
Generally, you can use 1/2KG (or 1000) worms to start one worm bin, using a 35-40L storage container. If you wanted to divert ALL of the food waste your classroom is creating, how many worm bins would you need?
You'll need approximately 1 cubic foot of bin space and 1 pound of food waste for each pound of worms you maintain. (There are about 1,000 worms per pound.) Be sure to follow this rule to avoid an overloaded or undernourished system.
It really depends on the size of the worm bin. For most average sized domestic worm bins, we would suggest you start with 1 lb.(approximately 800 - 1000) mixed sized worms. If the worm bin is larger, or you are composting food scraps for four or more adult persons, we would recommend 2 lbs.
The risk is that they may hate their new surroundings and try to leave the premises. Worms aren't cheap, so I'd much rather see a newbie start a new worm bin with about 1/2 lb per square foot. For Red Wigglers, this is 2 lbs, or about 1600-2000 worms.
A good benchmark for how much to feed your compost worms is 1/3 to 1/2 of their weight, so if you have 1 lb of red wigglers feed them 5-8 ounces of food per feeding. Another good rule is to only feed your red wigglers after they have completed all or most of the food from the last feeding.
Worms can eat roughly half their weight everyday. You can use this fact to calculate how much you should be feeding your worms. When you start your bin you will usually start with 1 pound of worms. So, they will be able to eat roughly ½ a pound of food scraps per day assuming ideal bin conditions.
Introduction: My name is Aracelis Kilback, I am a nice, gentle, agreeable, joyous, attractive, combative, gifted person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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