Worm Bin Problems and Starting Over

Worm castings (which is a nice name for worm poop) is the goal of vermicomposting or composting using worms. You add food scraps and carbon materials (leaves, coco coir, shredded paper, etc), and the microbes and worms in your bin transform these “waste” products into castings that are full of nutrients and teeming with the biology your garden needs. I believe vermicomposting is the easiest way to compost food scraps, especially for city dwellers, who often lack the space to turn large compost piles and keep them at the right temperatures for the right amount of time. I’ve been keeping worm bins for the past seven years, and this past summer, I screwed up. Learn from my mistakes as I reflect on what went wrong with my worm bin, why, and what I am making sure to do as I start over.

Worm Bin strategically placed inside our walk-in cooler, since we don't farm flowers in the summer.

Why keep a worm bin?

If there is one thing I urge all gardeners (or farmers) to do, it’s to keep a worm bin. Growing healthy and thriving plants organically requires getting the soil’s chemistry and the biology right. You can grow the ideal biology you need for your soil and plants right there in a worm’s gut.

In fact, compost that goes through worm’s intestines has more beneficial bacteria, protozoa, fungi, etc. than a compost pile! And that’s because the worm’s gut imparts some of its own microbiology to the finished product. Worm castings (poop) really is the most incredible stuff.

Screwing up

Back in June, I noticed the worm bin didn’t look good. It was starting to smell and the worms weren’t consuming their food very fast– in fact, we kept heaping on larger and larger amounts of food waste from friends and neighbors, but it seemed to be rotting rather than being devoured by them.

A worm bin shouldn’t stink at all– if it does, it's a telltale sign that things are going anaerobic (not enough oxygen) and that the home you’ve built for your worms is quickly becoming inhospitable. When our temperatures started to soar to 90+ degrees and we started having torrential downpours, I knew I was in trouble– I hadn’t moved them to a cooler location that would protect them from the intense heat or all the rain. So it didn’t come as a surprise when one day I discovered they were making a mass exodus from the bin. I’d left the poor creatures with no choice but to leave.

Diagnosing

So what exactly did I do wrong? And what should I have done? Here’s the conclusion I’ve come to:

• Protection from the Heat! I should have moved the worm bin back in April, when temperatures were already over 80+ degrees. I could have moved them into the walk-in cooler or at least to a shaded place.

• Shelter from New Orleans’ Rain: I should have made sure they were in a location where they couldn't get waterlogged. My bin got way too much water from the rain and all the organic matter became compacted. As a remedy, I could have tried to open up air passageways by inserting PVC pipes into the bin for airflow. I also could have added more carbon to try to soak up all that excess water. Or I could have dumped the contents of the whole bin onto a tarp, salvaged the worms and then started over with new food scraps and carbon materials. That would have ensured them a new, drier home.

TIP: If you grab some of the material in a worm bin it should be moist enough to drip just a drop of water, but no more than that! If it’s soaking wet, that’s not good!

These new worms are from Uncle Jim's Worm Farm.

• Matching Worm Eating Patterns: I should have slowed down the food scraps. Worms slow down eating during temperature extremes, so you need to lessen up on what you give them. If they’re not consuming what you give them every three days, don’t keep throwing in more food.

• Carbon to Nitrogen Balance: I should have added enough carbon. Food waste can contain a lot of nitrogen, and you need to balance it out with shredded newspaper, coco coir, or some other high carbon material. If a bin stinks, it’s indicating too much nitrogen and it’s going anaerobic.

• Oxygen: Worms are strictly aerobic organisms– they need oxygen to survive. If your bin looks like a soaked, congealed mess, you’re mostly breeding anaerobic bacteria and fungi– and these are primarily the disease causing ones. DO NOT use this stinking organic matter on your plants– none of the good microorganisms (or your worms) can survive in low oxygen conditions.

My worm bin gone wrong. Learn from my mistakes!

So how do you remedy this?

With the worms gone from the bin, I was left with a disgusting, congealed mess of putrefied organic matter. We used shovels to empty it out into trash bags. I know, not exactly environmentally friendly, but there was NO WAY I was going to put this anywhere near my plants. It would be chock-full of anaerobic organisms, which is exactly what we are trying to avoid.

Once I cleaned out the bin, I washed it thoroughly with dish soap and water. You don’t want any anaerobic organisms stuck in the corners to start breeding again or to contaminate the new space. I took my time and cleaned things thoroughly.

Then, I ordered new worms. I ordered the composting worm mix from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm, as well as a coco coir brick (to use as their initial bedding). When it all arrived, I made sure to soak the brick in rainwater collected from our cistern. Our city water contains chloramine, and I didn’t want anything that would inhibit the growth of good microorganisms.

Freshly cleaned worm bin, ready for a fresh start.

Next I emptied the worms into their new home and moved the bin to the walk-in cooler. Phew, finally I knew I could set a temperature that would be favorable to them. I set the air conditioner to the mid-70’s.

Next week, a friend is going to give me some of his red wiggler worms. He’s had his bin for years; so I know the worms are well acclimated to our climate. Worms are born with microbes already in their guts. Their gut microbiology is unique, determined by the microorganisms in your area. Essentially, I want to add some of these “local” worms to the bin to inoculate the bin and to breed with those that I ordered.

Follow along as we’ll post updates on this and more urban farming lessons on Instagram: @babyt_rexfarms. Questions about worm composting? Shoot me a message!

Life, Poop, and Compost

Our New Orleans Compost Bioreactor Journey

Written by Nat Kearney

Bioreactor Composting System built and ready to be filled.

On February 1st, 2024 at Baby T-Rex Farms in Mid-City, New Orleans, four sweaty, smiley, and poop-stained people gathered together to enjoy lunch after successfully filling a homemade, six foot tall cylindrical structure with an assortment of scavenged composting materials.

To understand how we arrived at this scene, we have to go back several months to July 2023. Megan, the founder and farmer behind Baby T-Rex Farms, had approached me several months into my flower farming apprenticeship about the possibility of starting to research how this special kind of compost pile, called the Johnson-Su Bioreactor, functions - and if it would be a possibility to sustain one in our hot and humid New Orleans climate. To begin my research, she suggested I read the book What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health by David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé. In it, the authors outline a handful of radically innovative techniques that have been developed to promote diverse and healthy soil that organic plants can thrive in. One of these techniques was the Johnson-Su Bioreactor, named after its developers Dr. David Johnson and Hui-Chun Su Johnson.

Using bricks to set up the foundation for the Bioreactor Composting System

Reading the book, I began to learn that unlike traditional compost piles, which need to be regularly turned (laboriously by hand or expensively by specialist equipment), the Johnson-Su Bioreactor is an entirely aerated (therefore aerobic) composting system, so it doesn’t need to be turned. This is accomplished due to the addition of perforated tubing throughout the compost structure. (Without this addition, an unturned compost pile can quickly descend into an anaerobic environment which yields the bad kind of bacteria, like mold on rotting food.) Furthermore, the book detailed how creating one of these Johnson-Su bioreactors results in a biologically diverse, fungal-dominated compost which is proven to improve soil health. I was inspired and ready to get to work adapting the structure to thrive in a New Orleans urban environment, and got to planning with Megan about where we would source our key ingredient: poop.

A Water Buffalo from Bayou Sarah Farms in St. Francisville, Louisiana

Calling upon Megan’s extensive network of cool farmer friends, just one month later myself, Megan, Baby T-Rex prodigy Caroline, and globetrotting WWOOFER Ash were piling into Megan’s big blue pickup truck and heading to St. Francisville, Louisiana to meet Sarah of Bayou Sarah Farms. Sarah has an incredibly beautiful and only slightly scary herd of water buffalo that she lovingly raises, providing a source of organic, local meat and dairy products along the way. Her herd also provides an invaluable asset in the form of soil regeneration, utilizing a grid system to evenly graze across her land and deposit some nutrient-dense manure in the process. This manure is what we were traveling for. Sarah equipped us all with shovels and took us for a ride to a grid of her farm with the Goldilocks selection of poop: not too dry and not too wet. After collecting, we got to have some fun riding the water buffalo, touring her land, and trying some delicious water buffalo milk ice cream.

Water Buffalo Poop - a key ingredient for the Bioreactor Composting System

Once back home in New Orleans, the task turned to drying out the manure and procuring the other materials we would need for assemblage. We gathered the necessary building materials second-hand wherever we could: wire, pipes, and a pallet were all collected from The Green Project in the St. Roch neighborhood and hauled back to the farm. These materials were the bones of what would become a six-foot-tall compost bioreactor. We collected chicken manure from another friend of Megan’s, picked up some dried wood chips from Schmelly’s Dirt Farm, and collected various other yard waste materials like dried leaves from our own productive Baby T-Rex inventory.

Drilling holes PVC Pipes for aeration. PVC pipes are sourced from The Green Project

The plan was to dry all the materials by laying them out like a bizarre tapestry under the sun, and then after a few short weeks, building would commence. However, due to an unusually wet Autumn and Winter, the transition from collection to construction took longer than anticipated: waiting for poop to dry in wet New Orleans weather is not the most fruitful task, and the building plans unfortunately kept getting pushed back. In early Spring of 2024, enter Juan and Lydia, two WWOOFERs from Detroit, who brought the readiness and enthusiasm to get this project completed right when we needed it most. They successfully assembled the six foot tall structure in just a day.

Bioreactor materials laid out to dry in the sun

And just like that, the stage was set for filling. The process of filling a bioreactor is definitely a humbling one. We packed plastic crates full of filling materials (leaves, grass, mulch, poop, or some combination of all the above) and dunked them in a wheelbarrow of water, sufficiently wetting them to be packed in the reactor structure. We then hauled the crates across the garden to the reactor, up one of the two ladders propped against it, and dumped all the contents. Along with this slurry of potential life, we added pipes perforated with holes at equal distances allowing the even distribution of air throughout the whole structure. Nothing can compare to the feeling of satisfaction of climbing up the ladder and looking into the tower’s opening to dump more materials, only to realize that we had finally done it: it was full, and after only a few short hours! We successfully filled the interior of the bioreactor with this poop mixture - our soggy clothes a testament to this feat - and now we were free to change and enjoy a communal post-build meal.

Filling the Bioreactor

Not only was there the gratification of a hard day’s manual labor successfully completed, but the knowledge that we had set the stage and created the conditions for a thriving microorganism environment. Once all the materials were combined into the cylindrical reactor structure, the thermodynamic process of breakdown began, setting the stage for a slow metamorphosis over the course of a year. By leaving the bioreactor’s contents alone for this much time, the materials will dramatically shrink down, metamorphosing into maybe 60cm of a concentrated, soil-like putty at the bottom. This end product will be microbially diverse and active compost, teeming with the good minerals and micronutrients necessary for robust plant growth. Once diluted with water, it will become what’s called a “compost tea”, an enriching elixir which will nourish our soil by introducing beneficial fungi and bacteria. We can expect some pretty extraordinary results:

• increased ability for soil to capture carbon,

• increased crop yield,

• increased soil nutrient availability, and increased soil water-retention capacity.

It will improve our seed germination and growth rates, saving money and stretching our seed supplies further.

A look inside the Bioreactor

It is worth noting that composting does not have to be as complicated as this! The classic hand turned pile works wonders as well. But as a group of people fascinated with enriching our urban environment with complex microscopic life, it was definitely an interesting and worthwhile exercise. According to the scholars that developed this system, at the end of this process we will be able to reduce our water usage by up to six times, and reduce our total composting labor time by 66%. We won’t have to turn it at all, and if we ever wanted to refill the bioreactor after this batch of compost is ready for use, we can refill it with a diverse array of compost materials. The aerated thermodynamic reaction that takes place in the bioreactor produces no odors or associated insects, and all in all our materials for the whole project cost less than $300.

At the end of the day, although our building and assemblage techniques may have been a tad homespun, the structure itself is impressive. This agrarian experiment spanned months, many under the sweltering Louisiana sun, and I for one cannot be prouder to have been a part of it. For me, this process was a testament to the fact that even in the most urban of environments, there are always opportunities for creating interesting connections to the land, and to the cycle of life and decay that sustains us.

If you’re interested in building your own bioreactor in the New Orleans area, contact Megan at babytrexfarms@gmail.com!

Thank you for reading - Nat Kearney, farm apprentice and bioreactor project coordinator.

Riding the water buffalo at Bayou Sarah Farms