Livin' The Vermont Way Magazine
May/June 2009
Vermont’s “Worm Woman”
Red wiggler wrangler Melissa Jordan
By Alexandra Garven
Photos by Alexandra Garven

“ My earthworms are so busy eating
soft melon, eggshells, and kale.
In 6 to 8 weeks, dear wormies,
I’ll harvest your poop in a pail.”
— Melissa Jordan

When I was a kid, if I wanted to go fishing I would go out to the compost pile and look for what we called “trout worms,” or red wigglers. They are smaller then your regular garden variety worms and really tiny in comparison to night crawlers. They make the best bait ever. I have such fond memories of rooting around the compost looking for worms, so that when I first heard of Melissa Jordan, the worm woman, the red wiggler wrangler, I knew I had to meet her.

When Melissa was a kid, she was reading Little House on the Prairie books and dreaming about living in a sod house somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Instead of taking a journey in a covered wagon to a new home, her journey to self has taken her first to a home made from an old boxcar on 60 acres in Northern Maine, then to a home in an un-insulated oneroom school house in New Hampshire, and finally a home in Vermont with hundreds of worms in the basement.

Melissa is the women behind Wormpost Northeast, a vermicomposting business that not only sells Eisenia Fetida, (the real of name of red wigglers) and worm composting bins, but provides a ton of information about composting with worms. Melissa is on a mission to connect Vermonters to the earth by encouraging the reduction of household waste and the production of really terrific compost, namely castings or worm poop. She is a one-woman, walking encyclopedia of worm facts and she gives workshops on composting with worms.

Composting with worms turns out to be really easy and surprisingly, not smelly, as I first thought it might be. To begin, you have to figure out how much kitchen waste you have on a daily basis. Coffee grounds, eggshells, veggie peals and the like. For really large worm populations you can compost fish and meat scraps. According to Melissa’s website:

• You need 2 pounds of worms per pound of waste daily. The rule is 1 pound of worms per square foot. Therefore, a 2-foot x 3-foot bin with 6-foot surface area needs 6 pounds of worms and can accommodate 12 pounds of food daily.

• You also need worm bedding: the organic matter that the worms live, feed and breed in. That organic material can be old leaves, straw, hay or even wood shavings. You have to prepare the bedding so that it is just right for the wigglers.

• Your kitchen scraps become the worm food, and you have to feed the worms on a regular basis. The worms eat the scraps then poop out castings. These castings are in turn the best plant fertilizer ever. Melissa doesn’t sell the castings, just the worms and the stuff you need to get going.

Melissa did not start out the journey with worms. She began with an interest in cultural anthropology and language, an interest that morphed into how groups of people adapted from rural and agricultural communities to urban communities. This interest finally led her to Northern Maine where she worked on an organic farm, which gave her the connection to the earth that she so craved as a child.

Melissa Jordan

Melissa is very friendly, self-effacing, quietly tenacious, and a bit quirky. She was born with one kidney. She did very well with one, right into her 30s, until disease started taking a toll on it, and she learned that without a transplant, she would die. Suddenly her prognosis went from three years to just a couple of months. Her older sister donated a kidney and now Melissa is doing really well. You can’t tell by looking at her that she has been down that road.

Being a survivor and coming close to the edge sometimes gives one permission to live authentically. It also means that if you have a passion, follow it; and Melissa has a passion. Her passion is to be connected, to the earth and to others.

Melissa’s tenacity partially comes from choosing to live in difficult conditions. Her home for several years in rural Aroostook County in Maine was a real train boxcar, turned into a home with wood heat, solar electricity, a pump for water and two little windows for light. Showering was done at a truck stop. When asked what it was like to live there, she said “in the winter, it was really cold in the lower part of the boxcar and warm up at the top, and very sooty. When you have that kind of lifestyle, electricity is a luxury.”

No doubt. Still, not a sod house, but perhaps closer to her desire to live a basic self-sufficient life. But from that experience she learned an essential truth, “You can not be totally self sufficient and connected to society.”

Next came a move to New Hampshire and her beginnings as a vermiculturist. At one point her housing was a one-room converted schoolhouse that lacked insulation. Again, her tenacity pulled her through, and she learned another valuable lesson. According to Melissa, “it was too much of a hassle to compost in the winter, I wanted to compost inside.” Worms provided the perfect solution, not only for addressing her kitchen waste, but also in providing a platform for her to engage with community.

Melissa is right. It is a complete hassle to compost kitchen waste in the winter. Being able to bring it inside and not have it smell everything up is a great idea. Adding worms to the mix, making the worms the major player, is the key for keeping the smell away.

A lot of people have compost piles outside and dump their leaves, grass clipping and kitchen waste into it. In almost every garden-supply-catalogue-mailing-flyer-thing, you can find a compost bin, barrel or cone. Composting is not a new idea, my grandparents did it, as many did back in the day. Worms were just the inhabitants in the pile, but this new idea of bringing the worms inside to do the composting is really kind of cool.

What is also kind of cool, is that the worms have become Melissa’s link to community. She can be found at the year-round farmer’s market in Morrisville, collecting the waste after the day. Or collecting the coffee grounds at Thompson’s Flour Shop and Bakery. Or giving a composting presentation for the solid waste district.

Melissa is a pioneer of sorts in the community. She is composting with red wigglers, teaching about recycling, and helping out the community at the local farmer’s market. Melissa, is not a native to Vermont, but certainly a positive contributor here, and doing her part for the community and the environment. For more information about composting with worms, follow up with www.wormpost.com.

Alexandra Garven lives in Morristown.
All Photos by Alexandra Garven