Homemade Manure Mania

Hello everyone, my name is Bentley Christie and I am a homemade manure maniac. Please HELP me!

It’s true! I spent the entire morning blending up a mega batch of homemade manure for my indoor worm herd. They just can’t seem to get enough of the stuff. The zones in the bins where I’ve added it are absolutely writhing with Red Worms, and they definitely seem to be growing in size quite quickly!

Today’s batch, as per usual, was mish-mash of everything under the sun. It has coffee grounds (and filters), carrots, turnip, cabbage, squash, zucchini, pasta, apples, broccoli, bananas (mostly peels), and egg shells – among numerous other things I’m sure.

To help soak up some of the water (and make things a little more interesting) I added a bag of wheat bran I was originally saving for my next batch of bokashi. To really bulk the material up and add more carbon, I added quite a bit of coconut coir as well (the picture below is what it look like before the coir was added). This seems to be made for this purpose! As a bedding material on its own, the worms don’t really seem to like at all (in fact, I put a layer of dryish coir at the top of my breathable bags when shipping worms to discourage them from venturing out), but it really soaks up moisture well and adds a beautiful fibrous quality to the ‘manure’ – making it a lot like the real deal – at least in terms of appearance.

Luckily it is quite cold this week (generally below freezing) since I made far more worm food than I can add to my bins at one time. After adding another healthy serving to the bins this afternoon, I put the tub with my homemade manure mixture out on the deck where I know it won’t turn into an anaerobic mess any time soon.

Anyway – just wanted to continue sharing my enthusiasm for blended worm food. If you haven’t tried it, you definitely should give it a shot!

By the way…

I originally worried that this stuff would be way more prone to fruit fly invasion – but the more I work with it the more I doubt this prediction. Since you are basically creating a material that is a perfect worm food, they can start consuming it right away, and very quickly in comparison to whole food scraps. If you have a reasonable density of worms, they will likely out-compete any fruit fly larvae that happen to hatch. A chunk of apple on the other hand will be easily over-run by fruit fly maggots before it’s even soft/rotten enough for the worms to dig in!

Just some food for thought!

Food sludge before coconut coir was added.

Written by Bentley on November 17th, 2008 with 12 comments.
Read more articles on Home Vermicomposting.

Related articles

• Harvesting Red Worms (March 1st, 2010)
• Homemade Manure Revisited (February 26th, 2010)
• Worm Composting – The Fundamentals (February 17th, 2010)
• Garbage Can Potatoes (February 10th, 2010)
• One Person’s Trash… (January 19th, 2010)