While awakening on Christmas morning to a worm bin under the tree might not be the first thing Calgarians wish for, Green Calgary is making the pitch that worms are actually great to give this holiday season.

Worms are the gift that keeps on giving turning household food waste into the best fertilizer for plants one could ask for, the organization said.

This holiday season, they’re offering up pre-made worm bin kits from Trad Worm Industries that make it easy to start a worm bin in any home.

“Every year I seem to go through that question, what am I going to get the people in my life that really have everything? It’s just a struggle, and as a person who’s concerned about the environment, I can’t stand the idea of just another gift winding up in a landfill,” said Green Calgary’s Carolyn Kury de Castillo.

“This just really made sense. It was something that was thoughtful, it wasn’t just a gift card or The Body Shop lotion or whatever. This is a thoughtful gift that keeps on giving, as we say, right? Because you get something through the whole year, and it shows that you were really thinking about that person, and you were thinking about the future of the planet, too.”

She said that in addition to knowing that your compost is being used locally, and not trucked to a landfill, it also means that you have a local connection to nature year-round.

The way worm bins work is that leftover food can be put into the bin, and then earthworms eat the food, leaving behind a rich dense mix of nutrients that can then be used to fertilize plants.

Roxanne Doerksen, CEO of Trad Worm Industries, said that the worms provide an essential element in transforming the basic blocks of life for plants into something easier to consume than other types of synthetic fertilizers, and help to feed the microorganisms in the soil as well.

“It starts this nutrient cycling that helps to sustain our soil, to make our soil both fertile and reliable, which is one of the biggest things,” Doerksen said.

Worm bins take the work out of composting, fertilizing soil

She said that the worm poop also has other benefits, such as helping to grow organic matter in the soil that makes plants have a greater ability to withstand drought or over-watering—all through a process that has already evolved in nature.

“Likewise, to plants, the plant doesn’t have to really do anything. It doesn’t have any prep work, because the worms, the morphology of the worm and the gut of the worm allows the processing of nutrients and the processing of the food to give us almost a perfect, almost perfect, but not quite, feed for the plant.”

The worm bins are also very easy to take care of, Kury de Castillo said. When the worms are healthy, there are no unpleasant smells.

Should a worm bin get a bit of funk to it, just throw in some old newspapers, flyers, or even papers magnetized to the fridge.

“Carbon is one of those things we have in everything; crumpled up newspapers, your kids’ report cards, all those sorts of things that are really important at the time that it may be six months you don’t need on your fridge anymore. Chop them up, put them in your worm bed, because the carbon helps buffer those pH levels,” she said.

“If it smells like a happy soil after a rain, your bed is fine. If your bed sells sour, then you need to just put more carbon in. These are easy fixes. You don’t need any equipment. You don’t need pH monitors, none of that. All you need to do is crumple up some of this, and put it in there.”

Worms prefer foods that have high amounts of short-chain carbohydrates, like pumpkins and crab apples, Doerksen said.

Food waste like meats, or acidic foods like citruses and onions on the other hand are not good things to put into worm bins because they do cause those pH changes that lead to smells.

Doerksen said that her company has sold hundreds of worm bins and that it’s often children who want one after being exposed to them in a classroom setting.

“They put their apple in they they harvest their little poops, they put it on their plants, and then they grow. One of the things that we really, really want to push as a general positive experience, is these little kids see the transformation of waste into something beautiful and it’s not gross and smelly,” she said.

“They’re a great Christmas present for two reasons. One, they’re easy to take care of. But what is really, really interesting is there is an absolute intentional utilization of your organic waste, and you can see it in real-time, which is so cool for little kids.”

Kury de Castillo said that Green Calgary was selling the bins through the Green Calgary website for $99 each.

Every kit contains live worms, soil material, starting food for the worms, and a book on how to take care of the worm bin.