Tomatoes, green onion bits, lots of coffee grounds, leaves, bunny litter — there they are sitting in my compost bin. I’d hoped to start the spring planting season with lovely humus for my flower and vegetable gardens.

Instead of humus, I have a big disgusting salad of kitchen and yard waste that has become the favored habitat for gnats and spiders.

I’d tried composting before and ended up with the same thing. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Well, I may be a lame composter, but I’m not nuts. So I call for the Wormbulance.

John Anderson of Garbage Busters, aka The Worm Man, arrives to give my compost pile CPR. Anderson grew up digging in the dirt and gardening in Minnesota, eventually moving to Colorado. In 1996, while caring for an ailing uncle, he took master composter and master gardener classes, then began to serve as a volunteer composter for Larimer County. By the next year, he was teaching others how to compost with worms.

“It wasn’t so much a business, but I gained recognition right away,” he says.

In ’99, he transformed an old ambulance he had acquired years earlier into the “Wormbulance,” which got its name from his composting teacher, Larry Benner, a retired Colorado State University extension agent for Boulder County.

Anderson now has two ambulances, the original Wormbulance, which he no longer drives long distances, and a new Wormbulance, which needs a paint job.

Anderson follows me to my backyard, where I show him my pathetic pile of compost — and the lesson begins.
“Waste is not waste until you take the action of wasting it,” he says. “‘Waste’ is not a noun, it’s a verb.’”

I half expect him to dump a bucket of wriggling worms on my compost pile and then head home. But that’s not what he does. Instead, we spend some time talking about the unhealthy corporate approach to food, which has laced our planet, our food and our bodies with chemicals.

“Our prime directive in this culture is to make more food to make more people to sell more shit to,” he says. “The system has to stop designing waste. We design things with waste on purpose because of somebody’s back pocket.”

Eventually, the conversation meanders back to composting. Anderson tells me about two kinds of composting — thermophilic composting and vermicomposting. Thermophilic relies on three different kinds of bacteria.

The first are psychrophilic bacteria. They work to decompose organic material in lower temperatures — as low as 32 degrees F — producing a small amount of heat that, if conditions are right, usher in the growth of mesophilic bacteria. These bacteria thrive at 70 to 90 degrees F, but can survive temperatures of up to 110 degrees. They continue the decomposition process, heating the material until thermophilic bacteria can take over. Thermophilic bacteria operate in very hot conditions — from about 104 to 160 degrees F — killing off harmful bacteria and completing the transformation of a compost pile into humus that you can spread on your garden.

The trick to thermophilic composting, Anderson says, is maintaining the proper conditions. The compost pile can’t get too hot or too cool, and it must be kept moist. The materials in it must also be relatively small in size and there has to be an adequate flow of oxygen through the pile. This sometimes requires a person to take their compost pile’s temperature. Yes, with a thermometer.

Anderson tells me that the bin I’m using is intended for hot composting. But he doesn’t have to tell me what’s wrong. From what I’ve already learned, I know my compost pile is too dry. Also, the materials in it aren’t mixed, and the food waste is too large. Anyone want an apple or a bunch of very brown bananas?

Anderson takes the bin apart and dumps the contents. Most of the junk in it looks just like it did when I dropped it in, clearly nowhere near decomposed. As he digs through the pile with a pitchfork, he tells me he also thinks there’s more carbon than nitrogen in the pile — too much brown stuff, like leaves and bunny litter, and not enough vegetable matter.

As he mixes the pile and hoses it down bit by bit, we move on to a subject that has become a kind of life’s work for him — composting with worms.

“For most homeowners vermicomposting is more manageable,” he says.

He’s even taught college students how to do vermicomposting in their dorm rooms and apartment residents how to compost in their apartments.

Rather than the big, black bin I bought at the hardware store, vermicomposting requires little more than worms, a pile of wet leaves and something to cover the pile with — a big piece of wet carpet, cardboard, an old towel. With northern exposure in the summer, and southern exposure in the winter, the worms can be kept busy and alive year round.

Anderson has developed seven steps that are easy to follow and enable a person with no prior experience to begin composting with worms.

First, choose a bin or a bed for them. It can be anything from an old tire to a large wooden box to a fancy insulated bin that you build yourself. But you can work with something as simple as a pile of dead leaves. Because my compost bin is intended for thermophilic composting, Anderson suggested we just use what he calls the “free range” approach and create a pile on the ground.

Second, place the worm bed. You’ll want to find a place with full shade to full sun in the summer and full sun in the winter. Southern exposure fits the bill best. Fortunately, I have lots of southern exposure at my house and will probably start a new compost pile on the south side of my house when the current one is decomposed.

Third, fill the bed. Bedding can include shredded newspaper or cardboard, straw, sawdust, small wood chips or dead leaves. Looking at what I had on hand, Anderson suggested that I use bunny litter, which wasn’t too saturated with ammonia to be hospitable to the worms.

Fourth, bring in the worms. Andersen is a worm farmer and sells his worms at local farmers’ markets and elsewhere. Though one can buy worms online, buying your worms locally enables you to be certain you’re getting the right thing. Plus, it decreases the amount of fossil fuels used to transport your worms and keeps local vermiculture thriving.

In this case, Anderson was paying a house call. He walked out to the Wormbulance and retrieved a large covered container, which held what looked like nothing but wood mulch — until I looked closer. Wriggling among the wood bits were dozens upon dozens of Eisenia fetida, otherwise known as California tiger worms or “red wigglers.” One species of epigeic worms, they don’t burrow through the soil but live in duff, feeding off the bacteria and other microorganisms that live in decomposing organic matter on the ground.

Anderson carries the container to my backyard and dumps the worms and their wood mulch next to my now wet and well-mixed compost pile. Next, he shovels on some bunny litter and hoses it down. Then I cover it with an old cotton towel.

That’s as far as we got, because my next task was to leave the worms alone for a several days. But Anderson let me know what to do next: Feed the worms.

He has worked out two feeding methods — pocket feeding and surface feeing.

Pocket feeding entails digging little pockets in the bedding and slipping in food scraps and other organic matter, taking care to mark the location of the pocket (he suggests using a popsicle stick), then covering it up. The smaller the matter is, the faster the worms will consume it.

The surface method entails placing about an inch of food waste on top of the bedding and then covering that with perforated jute-backed carpet or some other covering.

“Worms like to have something on them,” Anderson explains.

Then close the bed, checking back to see the worm’s daily feeding rate until you see how fast worms consume what you’re feeding them. New composters often start off feeding the worms too much, but part of vermicomposting is getting the hang of it, he says.

Fortunately, worms are very hearty creatures, having been on the planet for roughly 600 million years. They know their business better than we do.

Within three to four months, you’ll want to harvest your compost. What you’re really harvesting is worm poop, or castings. Anderson suggests two ways of separating the poop from the pile. To sort it all by hand, gently rake out worms and unfinished food from the first few inches of the pile, then dump the rest of it on a tarped surface, breaking up clods and forming a conical pile. Worms will naturally burrow down through the pile, away from the light, enabling you to scrape off the compost gently from the top and outside edges of the pile. Then put down new bedding, add the worms and continue composting.

Or you can move unfinished food to the other side of the worm bed and harvest the finished compost as previously described. Put new bedding in the empty side and continue feeding. After time, most of the worms will have moved over to where the eating is better.

Once you’ve got your castings, it’s time to spread your vermicompost on your garden. You can also use it on houseplants. This is the stuff your garden craves — gourmet compost, nature’s best topsoil amendment. Because the worms consume bad microorganisms, it’s clean and safe to put on food crops. Worm compost is also high in growth hormones plants need to thrive.
You can also use worm castings to make compost tea.

“There’s a lot of bad information about compost tea out there,” Anderson says. “Some online sites basically teach you how to grow e-coli. We don’t worry too much about it with worm composting because worm compost has undetectable levels of bad bacteria. That’s what the worms eat.”

Between running his worm farm, teaching classes at multiple and varied venues and selling worms at farmers’ markets along the Front Range, Anderson is a busy man. It’s strange that what he’s teaching is something many of our grandparents and great-grandparents knew how to do — grow our own food and compost the waste.

Anderson believes our current system of spending and waste must and eventually will transform to something healthier.

“I don’t understand why we continue to ignore so many of the laws of nature,” he says. “There’s only so much here.”