A turn for the worms

Composting with wigglers pays off in more ways than one

Susan Quinby-Honer is a big promoter of earth-friendly lifestyles. But her chief method of doing so is a lowly one. And a slimy and squirmy one. Quinby-Honer uses earthworms to turn garbage into fertilizer. Through her North Raleigh home business, she works with schools, individuals, scout troops -- almost anybody who will listen -- to help them compost with worms.

She first caught the worm bug in 2001, while making dinner one night. A TV newscast featured an interview with Rhonda Sherman, extension solid waste specialist at N.C. State University.

"It showed how she was composting food scraps with worms," Quinby-Honer said. "I thought about it for a few weeks, and finally decided, I've got to see this!"

What impressed her was how simple and quick the process, known as vermicomposting, turned out to be.

"I've never been good at composting." Quinby-Honer said. "There's too much turning. You have to know about nitrogen and carbon, and if you don't have the right mix, it just sits there in a big gloppy mess."

But in vermicomposting, a standard red wiggler worm can eat half its body weight in food every day. In three to six months, the resulting worm droppings, or casts, are a beneficial fertilizer.

"Vermicompost has significant effects on plant growth," Sherman said. "It increases germination, flowering, growth and yield, due to nutrients and plant growth hormones in worm casts. It also suppresses a variety of plant diseases and insect pests. Vermicompost contains millions of beneficial microorganisms, so it crowds out the bad ones."

Quinby-Honor likes to say that vermicomposting not only "feeds the earth," it also helps "starve the landfill."

Twelve percent of municipal waste, or more than 900,000 tons per year in North Carolina, is organic material that could be composted to save space and reduce dangerous methane production in landfills, according to the N.C. Division of Pollution Prevention and Environmental Assistance.

Worms can't handle just any food. Sherman cautions against composting human or pet manure for health reasons, and she says that dairy, meat and greasy foods will not compost well. But fruit, vegetable and paper scraps are fair game.

Starting the business

Quinby-Honer first began vermicomposting at Raleigh's Conn Elementary School, where her youngest daughter was in third grade. In 2002, she received a $9,000 dollar grant from Wake County to create a large-scale worm bin to divert the school's cafeteria scraps and waste paper from the landfill.

Still, Quinby-Honer didn't compost at home until the Conn worms came home with her one summer.

"Once our own stuff was going in the worm bins, I couldn't go back," she said.

Her worm population grew, and people started asking her where they could get their own worms.

"I would tell them, 'you order them from a catalog,' " she said. "And then I realized, I have a lot of worms."

Thus, Red Hen Enterprises was born. Quinby-Honer quit her part-time job at Hallmark and threw herself into growing and selling worms and compost, and demonstrating her techniques to individuals, in classrooms and for clubs.

She named her business after the story of the Little Red Hen because "the Red Hen does what needs to be done, whether anybody helps her or not," Quinby-Honer said. "I'm not the Red Hen, but she's my mentor."

The hardest part of starting the business was making it visible, she said. But since February, she has received calls about worms every day.

Sara Self recruited Quinby-Honer to set up a worm bin in her second-grade classroom at Turner Creek Elementary in Cary, where she uses the worms to teach her students about life cycles. The students feed the worms leftover snack food, apple cores and banana peels. They then give the compost to classroom plants.