This spring my family and I started to test out the Australia Tumbleweed Worm Compost Bin. This is my first adventure with worm composting, and it’s pretty exciting. It combines the eco-friendly activity of composting with the fun of taking care of pets. Ok, so they’re small, wiggly, slimy pets, but living creatures with personalities nonetheless.

If you’ve ever had an ant farm or perhaps sea monkeys, that’s the kind of experience it’s similar to. However, the worms are actually doing some very cool things. Namely, turning kitchen scraps into fertilizer for use in your yard, garden and with your houseplants.

I’m actually working on an entire website devoted to the art of worm composting, so you can refer to that for more details in the near future.

Basically, this is a review of the worm-composting unit itself.

The Australia Worm Farm is a two-piece vermicomposting unit. Other than snapping the lid on the bin, there’s nothing to assemble. The bin also comes with a short but well-written instruction manual and trouble-shooting guide. The top part of the bin is where you keep the worms, the bottom part is where the liquid drains down from the composting process. This liquid is the fertilizer you can use in your garden.

We used the red wiggler worms available from Clean Air Gardening to start the bin off. They arrived quickly and in good shape from the worm farm, which is located in California.

This bin is small, so if you’re serious about worm farming, you may want to get a larger bin. However, it’s a perfect size for a family of 3-4. We’re a family of 3 and it’s ideal for us.

From reading about worm composting, I’ve learned that a worm bin may not be the ideal composter if you want to compost citrus peels, onions, fruits, and other kinds of organic waste that may affect the worms or attract fruit flies and other pests. We compost fruit in our bin and it did attract fruit flies when we had it indoors. However, you can still compost lots and lots of stuff, so you’re still able to recycle the majority of your kitchen waste. Now that the bin is outdoors, it’s not really a big deal.

However, you should think about a regular compost bin in addition to a worm composter so you can compost everything, which is the route we’re taking. You can’t really compost leaves or grass clippings in a worm composter. Although if you want to build a massive one, go for it!

The bin is generally sturdy and seems to be holding up to elements at our house. We’ve had it just about three months, most of the time outdoors.

It has plenty of air holes and a drain spout. It’s a drain without a way to open or close it, so the liquid will freely flow as you compost. The drain spout seems like a great idea as I’ve talked to people who’ve had their worms drown from their worm bin filling up. We did have the spout clog but it’s easy to clean. Our bin so far doesn’t produce enough liquid to worry about the bottom filling up, so that’s not really an issue, but I appreciate that it’s built into the design. We keep a small cup at the bottom to catch any liquid.

This bin is also very lightweight so you can move it around indoors or to other places in your yard if you decide to relocate your worms during the year.

I have to admit that I started the bin rather in a hurry, tucked it away in a closet, and let it sit. The conditions were not the ideal, so we had some worms die off.

Fortunately, with a little adjusting, the worms are coming back. We also got some red wigglers from a friend to get the population back up.

I know you’re all wondering about the smell. Well, our worm bin actually did smell a little wormy when we first started it indoors. It was barely noticeable to me, and my wife seemed to find an issue with it more than I did. However, I think the odor had more to do with the fact that the conditions in the bin were not ideal. From reading the troubleshooting guide, I found out that we probably had the bin too wet and too much food in there initially.

Now that we have the bin outside and things are warmer, the bin is doing great.

All in all this is good worm bin, especially for people with limited space and who have a small family. The instructions are brief but very useful, and the trouble shooting guide will help solved basic problems.

I think worm composting in general is a little more challenging that we at first thought, but with a little reading up on the web, you can solve most issues quickly and easily.

The design of this bin is nice and compact, and it makes worm composting very easy.

Stay tuned for our complete worm composting guide which should be up on the web soon.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 17th, 2007 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Products We're Using. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.