Composting Tips: what you can and can’t feed the worms

In our quest to reduce as much waste in our lives as we can, we’re starting a worm farm. Check out our composting tips to keep your worms happy. 

Why bother?

Composting is a wonderful way of creating a self-sustaining cycle of food production. Even if you don’t grow a lot of your own food, you can reduce the waste from the stuff you do buy by making your own organic fertilizer from veggie and other kitchen scraps. This cuts down on your rubbish, and is great for your herb garden or other veggies!

How to do it

Composting is basically encouraging the decomposition of natural materials (Ooh! Glamorous!). What’s amazing about is that besides a garden fork and a tarp or compost bin, you don’t need to buy anything else.

Start by layering your compost materials on a patch of earth – this will encourage natural organisms like worms to make the compost their home. Once you have worms and other creepy crawlies in the compost, the process of turning waste into beautiful, nutrient rich soil will be sped up.

Add new materials as it becomes available (we like to keep a small bin in the kitchen and empty it in periodically). It’s a good idea to layer ‘green’ and ‘brown’ waste. Greens are veggie and fruit scraps, tea, coffee and egg shells. Small twigs, paper and wood chips are considered brown.

Make sure to keep your compost heap covered, either in a bin or under a tarpaulin. The compost should be kept moist.

Do Compost

• Vegetable and fruit scraps (try to avoid seeds)
• Egg shells
• Coffee grounds and used paper filters
• Tea leaves and tea bags
• Fresh grass clippings
• Nut shells
• Hair
• Old newspapers, paper towel and cardboard tubes

Don’t Compost

• Meat
• Fish
• Eggs (the shells only are OK)
• Dairy products
• Bones
• Cat or dog waste (fur is OK)
• Oily foods or grease

Let us know your composting tips in the comments!