On Thursday I talked about some of the vendors I discovered at the Boston Local Food Festival. But the thing I was really taken with last year was the trash collection. This year they diverted 13.16% more waste  than last year—by composting 3,600 lbs, recycling 1,820 lbs, and only throwing away 900 lbs. I even [...]

So Planet Police only picks up food waste from larger organizations who can’t compost themselves, but there are a couple good services for residential customers in the Boston area, both of which use bicycles to pick up your food waste. SoilCycle and Bootstrap Compost offer services starting at $25 and $10 per month, respectively.  Has [...]

We checked on the worm bin tonight, and—finally!—the flies are gone. It’s taken four months of no feedings to eradicate the pests, but it eventually worked. (The spider that we found inside may have helped, too.) It obviously wasn’t the ideal environment for the poor worms; the few dried-up bodies on the floor around the [...]

We checked on the old worm bin—the one we haven’t been feeding—and were amazed to see that it’s full of worms. Huge ones, too! Not feeding that bin for a couple months has completely eradicated the fly population living in the compost. Unfortunately, it looks like they’ve all moved to the new bin. This is so embarrassing!

The worms are snug in their new bin. The tally: 738 worms weighing 9.42 ounces. That includes a lot of baby worms, which is good, because growing worms eat more food than their adult counterparts. To harvest the compost, we first emptied the bin into piles. Worms automatically move away from light, so they congregate [...]