Hey, Joe, pretty funny stuff. I'm coming up on my one-year anniversary of worm farming --- I've expanded from the original plastic bin to 3 plus an old-fashioned garbage can with rusted-out holes at the bottom and a very loose-fitting lid. (It's actually my best bin!)

I got kind of tired with how long it took, eventually. I try to stagger the bins now so that I don't have too much to do at once. I remove the top layer of feeding worms and undigested matter before I get started. Then I spread out a big piece of white plastic, dump and spread out the rest of the contents of the bin, and put the obviously unready chunks back in the bin as quickly as possible along with some fresh bedding. Then I sort, and I don't much worry about eggs until later, when I'm actually using the worm compost, which is also when I tend to remove more stuff, including worms that got missed the first time.

I suspect my method is tough on the worms. It seemed to me that they didn't recover from the mid-February harvest very quickly, but then it was also cold, and I keep my worms in an unheated hoop house in the winter.

I find that including some sawdust in the bedding helps keep it aerated. I had trouble with smelly patches until I started using it. It doesn't break down as quickly as the paper, however.

The last time I harvested, I hit a patch that had looked done at first, but seemed full of coffee grounds when I got my hands in it. I had already re-loaded the bins with new bedding, so I layered this stuff on top and buried new food just under it. Four to six weeks later this stuff was much nicer, the worms abandoned it, the eggs had mostly hatched and moved to greener pastures, and it was easy to harvest. I like that!

If you're going for maximum worm population and maximum harvest, I wouldn't recommend my methods, but I'm getting lots of good stuff for the garden and not spending too awful much time on it. And I like doing it, which would probably not be true if it was more burdensome. Good luck. Lovely town you live in.

Best,
Martha

Hi Martha. This bin is one of Kelly's styrofoam peanut and landscape fabric models, so I was hesitant to just dump it. I decided to scoop and sort. The next bin will be a "just punch some holes" in it model. I want to compare ease of maintanance vs. ease of harvesting.

Glad you enjoyed my mission log. :)