Everybody poops and some of that poop is quite valuable. So let’s get moving so you can find out how to get some valuable poop for your ownself.
—Sandra Wiese, The Best Place for Garbage
1. I raise worms at a volume that is explicable only for a person who has either a business selling the castings or some sort of career in sustainable agriculture. I have neither, just neurosis, witchy tendencies, and some shared garden plots. Our main crop is chaos.
2. I also have a townhouse with a spacious unfinished basement. Many of our neighbors in our condo community have turned their basements into bedrooms, or dens and playrooms, or home offices, or failing that, at least quiet spaces to engage in substance abuse. Not us. Our basement is where the cats shit and the worms live. (Not in the same boxes.)
3. I started my basement worm farm about fifteen years ago. I recall only two motivating factors: I had recently started a PhD, and I had an Amazon certificate for several hundred dollars, due to having recently dumped about a decade’s worth of spare change into a Coinstar machine. For reasons best known to whoever I was fifteen years ago, I decided to buy fancy stackable worm bins from Amazon, because nothing says “reduce academic stress” quite like, “start a new hobby involving rotten food.”
4. Fancy stackable worm bins, I learned, are worthless. After several disgusting failures with my new batch of worms, I found a cheerfully weird manifesto on worm farming, entitled The Best Place for Garbage, by Sandra Wiese. Summarizing the problems with the stackable bins and their “upward migration” model, in which enterprising worms are encouraged to shit their way to the top through multiple, cutely assembled levels of food and bedding, Wiese chalked it up to faulty theories of worm behavior. “There is actually only one real reason that these types of bins don’t work quote as well as advertised: worms aren’t known for their overwhelming intellectual capacity.” Her preferred bins are the ones “you throw together in six minutes your ownself.”
5. After absorbing Wiese’s book (later I used it as a nightly insomnia cure, which didn’t work very well because I actually found it interesting), most of my worm bins came from dumpster finds and feats of upcycling. The one I’ve used the longest is an old plastic laundry basket with a broken handle, lined with a contractor-weight trash bag. In terms of real estate, it’s like my house—held together with duct tape and enchanted trash, but with undeniable staying power.
6. The standard composting worm is called a “red wiggler,” also known as Eisenia foetida. My best understanding of our foetid friends is that, unlike those huge nightcrawlers that find their way onto the sidewalk after it rains and have to be rescued by bleeding-heart humans like me, red wigglers enjoy spending time with each other. From a reproductive standpoint, you can see why this is a bonus.
7. In reference to both its literal and metaphorical meanings, compost worms are unfamiliar with “don’t shit where you eat” as a concept. Basically, it’s all happening, everywhere, and the fine art of worm husbandry, should you wish for a multi-bin-level population, is mostly about feeding them in a central location to facilitate as many inadvisable office parties as possible. (For further information, see Wiese, Chapter 10, “Boom Chicka Whaa Whaa.”)
8. I have been asked if it’s possible to raise worms for their castings without ever touching the worms. Some may disagree with me, but my answer is no. It is not. If you can’t stick your hands in a bin once every week or two to aerate the thing and adjust moisture levels, you’ll probably end up with a nightmare papier-mâché project full of dried up dead worms who never even had a chance to start productively shitting.
9. Alternatively, if you’re averse to touching your worms and start out with a bin that is too soggy, you’ll end up with anaerobic pockets, which will smell like a barrel of fermented roadkill. You will never get that smell off your hands. Avoid.
10. I have been asked if I name my worms, as if they are pets. When I explain that I have eight to ten bins of worms at any given point and that naming approximately ten thousand near-identical tiny creatures is beyond my organizational capabilities, people either lose interest or seem frightened.
11. Compost worms do best in bins full of shredded paper maintained at the moisture level of a just-wrung-out sponge, and with small amounts of soft food scraps offered periodically. The best sources for shredded paper are corrugated cardboard boxes (if you have a heavy duty shredder), non-glossy junk mail, legal threat letters from your mortal enemies, and books written by people who turned out to be rapists. (Fuck you, Neil Gaiman. Fuck. You.)
12. Worm farm/dead asshole memorial idea: Round up all the ex-evangelicals in your neighborhoods and friend circles and organize a James Dobson book-shredding party. Leave the book-burning to the fascists (or run for your school board and stop them, please)—on our side, we turn swords into plowshares, and anti-child misogyny into garden soil.
13. One time, after a rainstorm in which our basement slightly flooded, I found a lone nightcrawler on the floor in a puddle. It was the size of a small snake. I was startled by its appearance, but recovered quickly and decided to put it in one of my worm bins. To get a sense of the species size difference involved there, imagine dropping off the Hulk (the nightcrawler) in a house full of toddlers (Eisenia foetida). They all coexisted just fine, however, and when I emptied the bin into the garden several months later, the nightcrawler was still alive and seemed healthy. It did take the opportunity to head immediately underground, presumably for some goddamn peace and quiet.
14. You have to watch out for stone fruit. A worm bin is the perfect place to bury a rotting peach or plum, because worms will quickly devour it, but those pits have sharp points that can surprise you. I once impaled myself under a fingernail with a rogue nectarine pit while aerating a worm bin. I may have cried.
15. If you freeze a corn cob, thaw it, and then bury it in a bin, the worms will eat through the center and then turn it into what Wiese refers to as a “love shack” (again, see Chapter 10).
16. There was once a rumor circulating in online worm farming forums that eating broccoli would make worms fart, and then your worm bin would emit fart smells. This is dangerous misinformation. I’m pretty sure the rumor started with someone who overfed insufficiently mushy broccoli to their worms, smelled it rotting before the worms could eat it up, and was too grossed out to investigate further. Which, well, fair.
17. Sometimes I have dreams in which I find worms in my pasta, or my pasta turns into worms. It has not put me off pasta, but be forewarned nonetheless.
18. During the pandemic, I got one of my friends’ kids started on a worm bin as a science project. The bin did fine for a while, but he was still a little kid, and eventually forgot to take care of things, and the worms all died. I have a very “from the soil, back to the soil” approach to this kind of thing, but my friend told their kid that he would be haunted by hundreds of tiny worm ghosts. For the record, I do not endorse this as a pedagogical technique.
19. If, after reading this list, you feel intrigued rather than repulsed, you should probably get your hands on the Wiese book, buy a good paper shredder, start combing the dumpsters for plastic storage bins, and embrace your fate. There are online sources for the worms themselves, but ask around at your local farmer’s market first, as it is the most likely place for worm fiends to congregate.
20. I feel obliged to tell you that it is entirely possible to have just one very nicely managed worm bin underneath your sink, that it’s very easy to maintain without things stinking, that your coffee grounds and dried eggshells are gardener’s gold and that a handful of worm castings in the water makes for lovely house plants, blah blah blah etc. If my way sounds unhinged but you still think you might want a bin or two, know that it is possible to be civilized about this.
21. There are people who create lovely furniture intended to double as socially appealing worm homes. I think they have fallen into the same murky pool of obsession as I have, but are hanging out at the opposite side of the deep end.
(Dedication: Suze, this one is for you.)
I miss you. These newsletters are great.
Aww, I miss you too, Scott.