Bill Richmond’s Adirondack Worm Farm in Kingsbury is an eco-friendly gardener’s dream.
Richmond, a vice president at Behan Communications, uses hot composting techniques and turbo-charged composting worms at his family’s 40-acre farm to transform food scraps into nutrient-rich, chemical-free compost.
Curbside concierge composting provides five-gallon buckets for customers in Glens Falls, Queensbury, Hudson Falls, Moreau, South Glens Falls, Fort Edward and Lake George.
“Anything you don’t eat goes into the bucket…Anything once alive can be composted,” he told Glens Falls Living. “You can compost dryer lint and yarn, as long as it’s not synthetic.”
Click here for a list of compostable material.
“I pick the scraps up every either weekly or every two weeks and leave a clean bucket,” he said. “And at the end of the year, they get hot compost back to use in their gardens.”
Cost for every-other-week service is $20 a month. Weekly is $35 a month.
The compost is more than any family could generate on their own, and complements the vermicast natural fertilizer he produces. Since starting the business a year ago, he says “we have already composted more than a ton of food waste that didn’t go into the landfill.”
Speaking of landfills, Richmond notes that food that rots in a landfill is one of the largest sources of methane gas. By composting your food waste instead, you reduce those emissions and the compost produced helps to grow more plants, which keeps more carbon in the ground instead of in the air. Win - win.
Richmond raises Red Wiggler worms as well, which are “composting worms that produce vermicast — basically worm poop — which is an excellent natural plant fertilizer.
“The vermicast has nutrients plants need, and releases them slowly and naturally over the course of the growing season. You can mix it in with soil or put it on your plants as a top dressing.”
He just started selling the vermicast, and is working on a “worm tea” that mixes non-chlorinated water with the vermicast to release the microbes in the worm waste.
“I have an avid gardener who is testing the worm tea for me, and he’s already seeing a difference,” Richmond said.
He sells the vermicast for $15 for five pounds, which more than covers a 4-by-8-foot bed, he says. He also sells European nightcrawlers for fishing.
How does a mild-mannered public relations executive become a self-described “worm wrangler?”
“I always wanted to do something related to farming,”he said. “Our kids William and Noah are older now, and you can leave the worms for weeks at a time. I spend about 15 minutes a day on the worms and the compost, and it’s something I can do and still work at my full-time job.”
