Sustain Myself

Welcome to the first post on Sustain Myself. While I don’t for one second consider myself an environmental or ecological expert, I am passionate about it and this blog will contain my findings on my quest for sustainability.

For my whole adult life I have lived in a unit until recently when my wife and I bought a house in Sydney’s Elanora Heights. For some reason when we were in the unit, we never bought a compost bin or worm farm. Needless to say that the second that we moved into the house, a compost bin and worm farm were almost the first things I bought.

After a bit of reading and general research, I decided on a Can-O-Worms worm farm with 2000 worms to start it, and a Tumbleweed Compost bin.

The Can-O-Worms is so great and sits under our balcony so it gets a little bit of sun, but not too much. Also, the cardboard wrapper that the Can-O-Worms comes in is what they suggest you use for the damp cover inside the worm farm to keep the farm moist and cool.

After doing a fair bit of reading on the Can-O-Worms, there was a whole bunch of reading on how these worms do not like to be over-fed. So, when we noticed the worms plateau a little with their feeding, we started putting organic waste in the bin instead. (Note that it is very evident that the worms prefer some foods over others. The love avocado and corn but not so much apples).

The trick with making a good compost is to have 25% food waste and 75% grass and thin garden waste (no bark and wood as it doesn’t break down) so we put a lot of kitchen waste in the bin and then over the weekend when I mowed the lawn, we added all the cut grass to the compost bin with half a bag of cow manure. At this stage the compost will be ready in 4 weeks. I keep turning the Tumbleweed and have been watching the compost start to sweat and its very hot in there. The problem now is that we dont have enough worms to eat all our kitchen waste and we cannot add anything to the compost for another 4 weeks so we may need to buy another bin so we can cycle them.

I am very pleased to announce that at this stage, we do not throw out any organic waste. It feels really good.

Have you had compost bins or worm farms? What are you experiences with them?

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