hi there!

re: condensation on lid...

how long are you keeping your lids off? i regulate my bin wetness by leaving my top off for half a day or so in the shade whenever the temp is moderate (it just became spring where i live). is there a shady spot where you can keep your bin with the lid off so some of the moisture can evaporate into the air, rather than condense on the lid?

are you adding food before the food in there has been eaten? this can lead to too much moisture in the bin which is bad cuz it leads to sour crop, which can kill your worms. if you still have food in the bin, try waiting til it's all eaten, even a bit after that (the worms will keep processing what's in there). that way you won't be adding more moisture.

adding more dry newspaper is a good idea.

as for the clumping, i've used a gardening fork for that in the past. i just sort of stick the tines in there and shake it around until it all loosens up...

good luck! (sorry i can't address your other Qs...i really only have experience with wetness and clumping...)

yes, too wet is the problem, and I'd say the ice is part of it, the difference in temp will encourage condensation .... more air circulation, slower feeding, insulating in the day and removing the insulation overnight will help, also some coarser bedding that doesn't compact like paper when wet, like sawdust

Bill

Hi VCC, I'd also advise you to add some coarsly shredded cardboard to help even out your moisture level and add some air pockets to your bedding. Worms seem to love the paste used to make corrugated cardboard so I put a couple of Xerox boxes through a shredder and add them to my bedding. Worms will actully crawl into the corrugations and loll around in there. Newpaper clumps together very bad when it gets wet and I hardly ever use it except to layer on top to maintain moisture levels.

You want to moisten everything before adding it to your mix or else they can't move around on it. Coconut coir is a good bedding additive too and you can get it at the local Petsmart. It's sold as reptile bedding and doesn't cost very much and it doesn't clump together at all. Cheryl

Here's an update -

1) It was 96 today - interior of bins feel very warm to the touch

- The temps have been much less extreme over the past few weeks. I brought the bins inside and put them under the sink and under a counter. I filled gallon-sized bags with water, froze them overnight, and put them inside the bins on top of the bedding. The bins did cool down, but I have no idea how many worms may have died from the heat.

2) When I moved the bin off of it's tray to add ice
cubes, I found about 10 worms that had escaped in the tray.
-Since that one time, there were no more escapees so I was praying that the environment had been cooled down enough to keep them happy, as opposed to a much more gruesome alternative :-(

3) When I opened the lid yesterday before I brought it in, a swarm of flies (mixed fruit flies and something resembling soldier flies) came out.
- This became a growing problem. We ended up with an enormous fruitfly and soldier fly problem in our kitchen, where the bins were. We ended up moving all of the fruit out of our kitchen, and I realized that all the kitchen scraps I was saving on the counter was being contaminated by the flies before I was putting them in the bins, so those got set outside, as well. Then the bins went out, and I noticed when I moved them that there was a ton of "leachate" in the trays underneath the bins. I don't think it was true leachate, I think it was all the moisture from the ice cubes just leaking out of the bins. There were also a lot of maggots of different sizes in the leachate.

4) There's a lot of condensation on the lid - enough to pour a couple of teaspoons or more onto the floor when I lift it.
-I tried leaving the lid off the bins during the evening to allow more air circulation, and I put lots of dry, shredded newspaper on top to absorb extra condensation. This dry paper turned thoroughly damp within a day or so, so I think it was a good suggestion, but the flies were definitely gross.

5) Despite my best efforts, the bedding appears to be compacting. I originally used dampened newspaper strips mixed with dampened brown leaves from teh garden (crunched up)
-I realized, upon reflection, that at one point I had a lot of kitchen scraps and couldn't remember which pocket was available for pocket feeding. So I decided to cut corners, and spread it out in a layer a few inches under the surface of the bedding. I think this definitely contributed to the compaction because it was heavy, and it diminished air circulation because it sort of glommed together into an impenetrable carpet of goo. I also am now regretting my decision to use dried leaves from under our filbert tree. When I opened the bin, I kept finding slugs in it, and beetles and spiders and other little critters. Despite my best efforts to pick up clean leaves, I think a lot of these guys came in on the leaves and while spiders aren't too much of a problem, the slugs definitely were.

8) When I removed the lids today, on one of the bin lids, I saw a lot of larvae - what looked like light green inch worms, plus teeny-tiny hair-thin white worms, and a couple of slugs.
-At this point, two weeks after my first post, I finally had a day to deal with the bins. I have not fed them since my post on the 17th, following the suggestion to let the worms catch up on the food in the bin, and in an effort not to increase the moisture. However, once every few days I would sort of open the bins to air them out, and check to see if there were any living worms still in them. Every time I did this, a massive swarm of flies would come out of both bins, and I could see even more sort of immature flies crawling around the surface of the bedding, and the sides of the bins. The bedding seemed to be teeming (think Indiana Jones, Temple of Doom)with larvae and white worms and non-flying flies in different stages of development.

-Today I decided to rescue what I could of any worms that were left in the bins, so I laid thick black plastic out on my lawn in the shade, and set up several containers of water, plus a bucket with a plastic liner (garbage). I scooped the top layer of bedding right into the garbage, and noted that it was covered with tiny eggs...they looked like very fine salt, and they covered every surface. The rest I dumped onto the black plastic to be sorted. I scrubbed out the bin with Ivory dish detergent and lots of water, and filled it with 3:1 mixture of coconut coir and newspaper shreddings. I decided to go with coconut because I wanted to start with something sterile (or at least bug/slug/fly-egg free). I was trying to figure out what that would be when I saw the remainder of a coconut coir package that I had purchased to amend my soil and remembered that they said it was a good substitute for peat moss and was harvested in a sustainable manner. YAY! Then when I logged on today I saw Seamommy's suggestion and that felt good to know I was on the right track.

My 5 year old daughter and I spent about two hours sorting through the pile to carefully pull out all the worms, and the worm cocoons. We had a small dish of water and a small strainer that we used to rinse off many of the worms and the cocoons that had larva eggs, white worms, or other contaminants on them. I noticed that as we got toward the bedding that had been on the bottom of the bin, the worms and cocoons were more plentiful and there were almost no larva or fly eggs in it, so we did a lot less rinsing unless we saw something suspicious. It was a great chance to talk with her about how worms reproduce, what cocoons are, what worms eat, etc. My two-year old was not allowed to sort, but she really enjoyed picking up the freshly-washed worms and talking to them for a minute before putting them back. This afternoon we will tackle the other bin, which I suspect will be in a similar state as teh first one.

7) I recently added some cooked rice and cooked oatmeal/hot cereal, but I did mix it up well with chopped vegetable and fruit trimmings.

- Today is the first day (bright, sunny, breezy) that we've been able to open teh back door and windows and for several hours, so all the fruit flies seem to be gone. However, for a while I will freeze all my kitchen scraps before feeding the worms just to make sure any and all eggs or larvae are killed before adding them to the bins. I also noticed that there were lots of potato skins with well-developed roots growing in the bin, so that should curb that problem, as well.

The coconut coir looks pretty thick, so I'm toying with the idea of adding some more dried leaves, but sterilizing them first by either freezing them or pouring boiling water over them (would this make me a vermicomposting wacko?!) I don't want to go crazy and try to make this clean like a doctor's office, but I would like to know that I'm not starting with a ton of nasty larvae already in the bins from the get-go. I think I'll use the shredded cardboard suggestion and think a little longer about the leaves. This also goes for the wood chips. We have a pile of woodchips that has been sitting in our driveway since last fall that we've been using to mulch our plants. I'd like to put some of them into the bins, but they have become host to a growing population of worms, beetles, spiders, slugs, etc. I'd like to sterilize them first. I'm also concerned that wood takes sooo much longer to break down than other organic material...so that one's on hold for the moment, as well.

Thank you to shesoldier, Bill, and seamommy for your helful suggestions, and also to numerous others whose posts I read from other threads. This forum is awesome!

Hi vermi,
I always freeze my food scraps for several days to kill any potential flies, so you're on the right track.
I'd advise you to be cautious with feeding oatmeal. I fed mine rice once, mixed in with my veggies and my bin overheated resulting in the death of many worms. Rices and starches can be used in moderation.

I'm wondering if your white tiny eggs, that looked like salt were white mites. Mites are attracted by too much food and moisture.

Anyway, good luck with your next bin setup! Worming is definitely a learn as you go! Thank heavens for forums like these!

Sherry