I agree, it is the coolest thing.

I put my first harvest out on my tomato beds and even with the drought, my Tom's have been fantastic. Thats why I have 4 bins now, once you start, you cant get enough. It is fun.

congratulations psilin, its nice stuff isnt it? From my understanding and Kelly has confirmed this in the past, is that you should protect the castings from direct sunlight as it can kill the organisms that make it so useful so if you are using light to sort the worms out, its best to do it somewhere shady, the worms are very sensitive to light and they will dive down even in the shade.

glad to see you got all your problems sorted out and things are going so well

I hadn't heard of possible damaging effects of sunlight on vermicompost. I suppose ultraviolet might have some effect on the microbes, but in practice it takes an extremely concentrated dose of UV to act as an effective antibacterial.

It's DEFINITELY true that "solarizing" compost is a bad idea. But that's based on heat rather than UV. It's a method usually used for sterilizing soil that has become diseased: you cover the soil (or the compost) with black plastic and leave it out in the sun for several days. The plastic absorbs heat and the stuff it covers gets well over 100 degrees. That kills just about anything in it. But solar UV doesn't usually do that by itself (that's why soil that's exposed to the sun is still full of microbes).

Possibly Kelly was talking about heat/solarization rather than UV. I'll have to dig into this.

For this harvest I found that the compost was wetter than I liked. My solution was to put it in cardboard trays that I salvaged from cases of soda (about 18" x 24" x 2") and leave it out for a while. The absorbent cardboard and the warmth took the excess water out and left me with nicely moist crumbly black stuff. I put it into a covered pail that used to hold cat litter for storage. I'll have to see if that exposure had any negative effect on it.