Paul Bickford/NNSL photo
A form of indoor composting has suddenly become the rage among gardeners and yard enthusiasts in Hay River.
It's called worm composting.
And as the name suggests, it uses worms to break down organic material.
Kim Rapati, a volunteer with the Northern Farm Training Institute (NFTI), said the interest was sparked this spring when she did a training video.
"It's just a short video about the benefits of having a worm bin and how to use it," she said. "And it got well over a thousand views, which was pretty awesome for us."
In the past few weeks, Rapati has helped set up about a dozen worm bins in Hay River.
She also noted the video sparked a lot of interest in other NWT communities, such as Fort Smith and Yellowknife.
"It's neat to see how our video was shared quite a lot, and I think there's people in many other communities who are getting excited about worm composting," she said. "I'm pretty excited with the reach of that."
The video on worm composting was placed on NFTI's Facebook page since in-person training is not being done because of Covid-19 concerns.
"We've just been doing that since people aren't travelling or getting together for training courses when we would normally be doing this type of teaching," said Rapati.
She explained that worm composting breaks down organic material and then it can be used to enrich soil, and it means less organic material goes into landfills.
"There are all kinds of different things worms love," said Rapati. "They're really happy with just straight-up shredded paper and coffee grounds, but they also love any vegetable scraps, apple cores, old rice and stale bread. Any of that food that you would just throw in the garbage you can feed to your worms and they will break down that material and create worm compost, which is some of the best material for starting seeds because it's really moist."
Rapati also noted that worm composting offers a window into the world of soil life.
"Because in your worm bin, the worms are decomposing things, but actually in really healthy soil there are billions of microorganisms and they're the ones that actually help grow your plants," she said.
Rapati has been helping people set up worm bins since 2010.
She gives people about 20 worms or so to get them started.
"The only thing they really need from me is the worms," she said. "And you just kind of need a handful to start, and we have in our houses all the other material you need for your worm bins."