Composting on a Small Scale

Do you live in a small space with no garden, but would still like to compost your food scraps? Are you looking for a way of composting without the heavy lifting, due to illness or disability? We’ve a couple of solutions for you.

Small wormeries

There are some small wormeries on the market that can be kept indoors. Suitable for one to two people, you can chop your food scraps finely, mix them with an equal volume of shredded paper or torn-up cardboard and add them to the surface of your wormery. See our wormeries page for more information.

There are a couple of downsides to small wormeries like this:

You can’t compost all your food scraps – we don’t recommend adding cooked food, meat, cereals or dairy to a wormery like this, as the food may start to go smelly and attract flies before the worms have time to eat it, so you need to stick to fruit and veg.

If things go wrong, there’s nowhere to hide – it’s easy for wormeries to get too acidic or soggy for worms to be comfortable. In a large wormery, it’s likely that there will still be parts of the wormery that the worms are happy with. In a very small wormery, you’ll need to be very vigilant in checking on your worms. Make sure any liquid is drained out of the base every day, and take swift action if you see worms starting to crawl up the sides – if it’s too wet, add more shredded paper or other ‘browns’. If it’s too acidic, add some powdered eggshell.