I finally decided to finish off my winter vermicomposting bed yesterday afternoon (while my WF-360 was having a “time-out” on the deck – haha) – good thing, too! It ended up snowing quite a bit overnight and this morning.
As you can see, the design is a wee bit different from my usual “worm composting windrows”. Our street was torn up this fall for water main work, and they ended up yanking out a couple of nice railway ties that bordered the entrance to my driveway. I can’t say I was too pleased, initially, to still see them sitting on my driveway when all the work was complete – but it certainly didn’t take me long to come up with a way to put them to good use!
One of the things I found annoying about the windrow beds was their tendency to be messy – it was very easy for materials to fall out while doing any work with them. The ties will serve as a nice retaining wall, making it easier to keep things tidy. I’m confident they will also add some insulation value as well!
The first thing I did was stuff the space between the ties and the windrow with fall leaves.
I then moved back the upper layer of straw and removed a substantial quantity of wormy material from the bed for the purpose of re-stocking the shelving-unit-worm-beds in my basement.
Next, I added a decent quantity of food scraps, along with some leftover squash etc (chopped up) from the garden, before dumping in the older material from my indoor bins and covering with a thick layer of fall leaves.
Lastly, I topped everything off with a nice thick layer of straw…
…before securing my trusty winter windrow tarp over top! (shown in first image above)
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Previous 2011/2012 Winter Vermicomposting Posts
Winter Vermicomposting 2011
Nice place for worms during the winter. Worms really love lots of leaves and an outdoor pile, don’t they? Good exercise too building all that! Have a nice holiday season Bentley.