How to make an at home indoor compost bin that DOESN’T stink.

When my husband, Ariah, asked me if I wouldn’t mind trying to compost inside our apartment I had some visions of sharing our apartment with overgrown, slimy, yucky little critters. I envisioned dirt everywhere and a huge mess with rotting food smell to boot. It turns out that I was wrong, and we have about 500 little clean worms under our sink contained in a wonderful home-made little composting system that (my happiest little part) DOES NOT smell!

So do you want to know how to make your composting dreams a reality? Follow our steps and we will get you going.

1. Order worm friends. In order to do this you will need to search online (if you’re reading this you are capable of ordering them online, thankfully) which is pretty easy and will take a little while. A website that we used was Worm Man’s Worm Farm.
2. Collect newspapers without color (this may take you a couple of weeks) so that you can shred them into pieces about 1-2 inches in width. (This is actually kinda fun because you get print all over your little grippers and you get to tear apart any ads that may be totally ridiculous or any articles that you don’t like the author of.) I would recommend doing all of the shredding at once so that you sit in a fun pile of paper AND only make as much as you need.
3. Select a good sized bin (you can see the picture of perfection in our bin 2′x3′x1′ Rubbermaid, which fits nicely and snugly under our sink in the cupboard). Having a bin with a large surface area is more important than having a deep bin. Using a sharp object, like scissors or a knife, put holes in the sides about 2/3rds of the way from the bottom. This gives your friends the oxygen needed to turn your rotting veggies into great compost.
4. Take your shredded newspaper and get it wet in your sink. Now, if you take it and hold it under the water to soak it and then squeeze it out like a sponge it is kinda fun – and the benefit is that you won’t totally drown your new worm friends. (NOTE: sometimes worms like a little change in texture…so if you are adventurous you could also add some wet shredded thin cardboard to your bin – a good example of this type of cardboard is the toilet-paper role!)
5. Spread the damp/wet and loosened newspaper in the bottom of your bin to cover it to about the depth of 1/2 full. This is their nice little bed. Then spread your new worms over the bed and watch them wiggle. This is the fun part where you get to say hello and say any blessing over their work that you would like to do. And then cover them up with about 2 more inches of the damp/wet newsprint that you have shredded, wet, squeezed out, and loosened.
6. Next you wait one week to let the friends get accustomed to their newspaper home after which time you can take veggie/food scraps that you have. Good ones are carrot peels, excess from cutting celery, banana peels, and actually egg shells crushed up (if you are going to do egg-shells you need to rinse the shells right after you crack them so that they don’t have any gook on them when you put them into the bin), coffee grounds that have been used, tea bags, used paper towels. Things to avoid putting in your compost pile: meat scraps, actual eggs, anything that is already rotting. or other leftovers.
7. Wait, and smell the nothingness of your bin while the worms do their job and fulfill their purpose.

NOTE: Wormies like to be in a dark cool place that has not TOO much noise or movement of their bin. If you open up the bin with the light on they will run away because they don’t like the light…so if some of them wiggle near the top of the bin just open it up and watch them retreat.

Another NOTE: You can add about 1-2 pounds of veggie scraps to your bin every week, and the best way not to disturb your little friends every day is to collect them in a larger tupperware bin in your refrigerator through the week and then open the bin to put them in once on the weekend or something.

One more NOTE: For up-keep of the bin you need to move the created compost to one side of the bin and then add some more of the good damp/wet paper to the other half and ONLY put your food scraps on this new half. This will coax your worms to the new bedding and then you can take the created dirt and put it in your garden! This is good to do after about 3 months, but you can wait until about 6 months if you are like us and don’t want to do it that often. Just make sure that your friends aren’t drowning in the nutrient rich liquid that gathers at the bottom of the bin (and if it is gathering, just add some shredded but dry newspaper).

I walk out my backdoor 32 steps, past the shed that Mike built, past the forsythia that is starting to bloom to my15 year old compost bin in the back corner of our yard. I dump the little bucket-full of grapefruit rind, banana peels and coffee grounds on top of the decomposing leaves and know I?m doing something good for the earth. But let?s start over so I can tell you exactly how you could start a compost bin of your own, just like ours.

First you need to get a wire frame in which to dump all of your stuff. We purchased a do it yourself compost bin years ago, but it is just as easy to buy 7 sections of sturdy wire measuring 36x36x26 from your local hardware store. We have three separate bins, each is 36? wide and 36? deep and 26? high and made of plastic covered wire. The three bins are connected with a chain link fence comprising the back wall of each bin. Because it was possible to utilize the chain link fence in the back, we were able to make 3 joined compartments out of the 7 36x36x26 sections.

We joined them together using long wires on the sides of each section, but you could buy extra wire and using a pair of pliers, wrap it around each section you are joining. If you don?t have a chain link fence to hook it up to, you would be able to make a 2 compartment bin with the 7 sections using the same method. It is best to situate the bin with as much exposure to the sun as possible. Ours gets more sun when there are not leaves on the trees and we have trimmed trees in order to expose it to as much sun as possible.

The bulk of the contents is leaves from the autumn season, but you need some moist stuff like grass clippings, dead plants, and kitchen waste mixed in to make it go. I don’t like to put in sticks or pinecones or other solid matter because they really don’t decompose fast enough. Be careful not to put the weeds you pull out of your garden into the compost because the seeds will not be destroyed so your compost soil will contain weed seeds.

We keep an orange plastic bucket in the kitchen sink so that every time we are tempted to put some biodegradable item in the disposal, we will see the bucket and put it in there instead. Mike likes to cut everything up into little bits so it will decompose faster, but being the lazy me, I sometimes leave the grapefruit half intact and that?s okay. It will just take a little longer to de-compose. We compost all fruit and vegetable detritus including coffee grounds. However, avoid putting in animal product waste (e.g. bones, eggshells, etc.) because it will stink, attract pests, and not decompose fast.In the fall, we load the bins up with leaves; 97% of the volume of the compost bins is leaves. The kitchen waste we put in the bins speed up the decomposition process of the leaves.

Mike turns the contents more in the spring summer and fall, than in the winter, probably 12 times year. If you leave one bin empty it makes it easier to mix things up with a pitchfork by throwing the stuff from one bin into the other. That turns the pile. The purpose of turning the compost is to put air pockets in between the stuff. If a compost pile is working well it will generate heat from the decomposition happening, you’ll feel it if you plunge your hand into it. But you need oxygen for decomposing. You should turn the pile as often as you can to keep it going. After a rainstorm, the pile will shrink due to the water absorbed. That usually will drive out the oxygen, requiring a turn. Depending on how you choose to practice compost managment, you can either have each bin at different stages or all at the same stage.

Compost piles make great quality dirt by the time they are done! It’s time to take the dirt out when you see that you are turning mostly dirt with your pitchfork. You can separate dirt from the other pretty easily. Then just shovel it out into a wheelbarrow and you can place it somewhere in your yard or garden.

Happy composting!