When Carey began composting about a year and a half ago in the small Brooklyn apartment she shares with roommates, her efforts were met with less than satisfactory results.  She got a terrible case of fruit flies from larva in the tropical fruit skins she naively put in her compost bin.  “They were all over our apartment, and would fall on our plate while we were trying to eat dinner. " To combat the problem, Carey made her own fruit fly traps.   

She put apple cider (beer will work too), along with a drop of detergent into a cup, and cut the corner of a plastic bag and inverted it over the cup, so the flies would fly in and die.  But it wasn’t enough to get rid of all of them so she had to separate the decomposer worms from the decomposing stuff, throw the decomposing stuff out, wash the bin out in a bathtub and start all over again.  Needless to say she doesn’t put tropical fruit skins in the bin anymore.  

Now Carey's fruit flies are replaced by just a few black beatles and red mites which stay put in the bin and actually help with the decomposing process. She also composts outdoors in her community garden because not all her food scraps fit in her indoor worm bin, which she keeps under the kitchen table, and hasn’t given her trouble since.

Carey now works as a Project Manager for the Lower East Side Ecology Center, the Manhattan branch of the Department of Sanitation's New York City Compost Project. She says it takes 4-5 months for scraps to turn into compost. Upkeep consists of making sure there is always a layer of fluffy shredded up newspaper bedding on top of the scraps because that keeps the bin from getting too wet and smelly and prevents flies from finding it. Also, no meat, dairy or oily products should be placed in the compost bin. The resulting vermicompost (that's compost that has been digested by worms, rather than natural chemical decomposition) can be used on indoor plants, in a garden, or plant box. And no compost bin is complete without the stars of the show----the worms. Red wiggler worms are worms that you would normally find in a composting heap outside and if you put them inside it just speeds up the composting process.