Vermicomposting in cold climates - city dwellers

[BedHead]

Where do you put your worm bin when it's 40 below outside? I've been researching vermicomposting and would love to start doing this, but I do not want it in my kitchen (or my house, really) because apparently fruit flies like it, and I do kombucha all the time. Even our garage gets to minus 20 when it's this cold outside. If you keep it in your basement, do you notice fruit flies upstairs much?

[BedHead]

Bump

[noobmom]

Wow, it's cold where you live! We don't get much below freezing very often and I keep my worm bin in the carport year-round. If I had an unfinished area of the house like a basement, I would be tempted to keep the bin there because as the temperature drops below 40 the worms really slow down and do not process as much. Between 50-80 degrees is ideal I believe.

You have a couple of options. If you keep your bin inside, I suggest pre-freezing your scraps before adding them to the bin. That will help keep the fruit fly population down. You could also try keeping an outdoor bin, but insulating it. I've seen designs where the bins are partially buried in the ground. Or ones where the bins are placed inside larger bins and the space between filled with either straw or styrofoam. You can also heat your bins either with heat lamps or with a fish tank heater inside a jug of water, but that is expensive and not energy efficient--sort of defeats the purpose of composting in my opinion.

We keep both a tradition hot compost pile and a worm bin, so we tend to use the traditional compost pile more in the winter because the worm bin is so inactive in the colder weather.

Oh, and I'd wait until spring to start a worm bin unless you're going to keep it indoors.

[AlwaysByMySide]

I have mine in my kitchen. I keep a lid on it, and always cover everything well with newspaper, and don't have fruit flies. (And my kitchen - BEFORE the worm bin - was fruit fly central!)

[BedHead]

Thanks so much for replying noobmom and AlwaysByMySide - that info is very helpful. How tight fitting is the lid?

[AlwaysByMySide]

Mine are in a series of 3-gallon icing buckets (free from the grocery store - woowee!), and they come with a food-grade seal inside the lid. But I just bury the food under newspaper really well, and kind of sit the lid on top, I don't seal it all the way down. The lid has little notches in it (I didn't put them there, they started out that way), so there is still some ventilation, but not a whole lot.

[BedHead]

Very interesting! I think I you've convinced me to try it. I know the compost I keep under my sink gets fruit flies in summer - maybe having worms instead will get rid of mine too!

[AlwaysByMySide]

I was very, very reluctant to put mine in the kitchen because all it takes is leaving some bananas out overnight and it's like I immediately had a fruit fly issue that would take a week to eradicate.

The buckets that I have are about a foot wide, give or take, so I do a week's worth of food, then fill up the rest of the bucket to about the top with newspaper (maybe four or five inches?), then the next week, I do a new bucket on top and load it up the same way, and I harvest from the bottom of the stack of buckets. I don't know if there would be fruit fly issues if you did it in, say, a Rubbermaid container with more surface area, but I haven't had any issues.