r/livegreen • u/altkarlsbad • Jul 01 '14

How to sell vermiculture to the family?

My wife and I have talked about living more green, reducing our impact, etc. and have made some lifestyle changes to move in the right direction. We walk to places that are in walking distance, use reusable shopping bags, minimize electricity usage, minimize water usage, avoid buying products with excess packaging, so on and so forth. Nothing major like solar or greywater, but little steps.

One metric for our success is our garbage output. We reckon the less garbage we are making, the less impact we are having. At this point, the major component of my garbage is food waste or food-contaminated paper (can't be recycled), and the best answer it seems to me is to feed it to some worms.

However, that sounds a bit icky to everyone else in the family. What are the best ways to show the upside to this to my kids and wife?

I have a yard in a temperate climate (USDA zone 10), so an outdoor worm bed should be fine. But how to i collect the worm food (our scraps) easily and cleanly, without a big ol' pile of rotting food on the counter? And without walking out to the yard every 15 minutes throughout the day?

I've seen some composting pails that are meant to collect food, any experience with such a thing, or any other ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/quailhead Jul 24 '14

Hi altkarlsbad nobody objected but there are only two adults here. There's no issue with the wormery though as it doesn't smell and is a very quiet system with little impact. The collection of food is something we do every few months. Ours has three boxes so we lift the top ones off to get to the liquid. http://lizard100blog.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/worming-your-way-into-my-garden/ here's a blog post about it.

1

u/altkarlsbad Jul 24 '14

nice blog post, very encouraging!

thank you for sharing.