After reading Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof, Jeff was excited and I was skeptical. Even though I loved the idea of recycling food waste, I was concerned that we would be inviting little friends and creepy crawlers into our South Philly row home basement. After some convincing, I decided to purchase our very own home vermicomposting system for Jeff’s birthday (how lucky, right?! - but he was thrilled). It’s been several months and I have to say that it does not smell, any “organisms" are only inside the bin, and we have beautiful black soil filling the bottom tier of the Can-O-Worms.
We have estimated we are able to divert 50%-75% of our food garbage any given week. We started with 1000 worms (1lb.) and hope to have 5000 by the end of one year. At that point, nearly 100% of our non dairy, non meat products will be eaten; even napkins and paper towels that we would normally just throw away can be composted! But we have to be patient for now while the worm population is still small. Similar to other lessons we've learned since taking sustainability classes in Santa Monica, these choices do not allow much instant gratification. There's a lot of waiting for a payoff and growing up when we did and where we did (suburbs) conditioned us to like instant gratification. If I were playing FarmVille on Facebook, I would already be picking strawberries from the soil created by the worms!
Speaking of composting, when we were in Ithaca this weekend we met up with friends for lunch at Wegman's. I was blown away by their recycling capabilities which included compost bins that you could place your used biodegradable plates and plastic ware in (for those dining). They also had a large recycling center in the front of the store for cans, bottles, and glass etc. I have seen this before in California and Oregon, but it was exciting to see it in a small town on the East Coast. This left me feeling hopeful about the potential here in Philadelphia.
