55 gal drums are alot cheaper and work just fine!

I've not had much luck with the "store bought" worm bins. My best bins are just plain 'ol plastic storage bins, plastic garbage cans or burying the worm food in the garden topped with grass cuttings and kept moist. If you have a small gardening business, try wind rows of decaying material kept moist and perhaps covered with plastic if it gets cold. Stir the material occasionally until it's mainly vermicompost then expose the top layers to sunlight so the worms go down and harvest the top part only. Or scoop it all up and run through a sieve to separate the worms from the compost. That's a lot less expensive than the wigwam.

Thanks for that. I am looking at the windrow idea as I have a friend who has a horse farm so I have lots of material to work with!

John

I have a WW, as well as a Can-o-Worms, 5 home made Rubbermaid-type bins in various sizes, and another home-made stacking system which I fashioned after the Can-O-Worms design...

It's made from 4 opaque 5 gallon paint buckets,(lid on top bucket), with large holes drilled at the bottoms of each the top three buckets so the worms can move upward. The bottom bucket with no holes catches all of the run-off moisture, which I empty once a week or so. From my experience, this bucket system works just as well as any of the commercially available bins, and they are very inexpensive and easy to make. I ordered green 5 G buckets on the internet from a company named U-Line for around $3.00 each. (They come in green, black, blue and red, all of which are dark enough inside to keep the worms happy!)

The only downside is that the system holds less volume than the WW or CoW, but you can always make more of them, or use the exact same concept for a larger bin made with small stacking trash cans.

Good luck!

Oops! I gave you misinformation....I got one of my personal worm systems' names mixed up with the much larger WORM WIGWAM, which I am very familliar with, but not from personal use! Eaarlier this year, I worked with the Shipley Nature Center in Huntington Beach CA in setting up thier vermicomposting exhibit...They had purchased one of these units which they had never used (too big), and asked if I wanted to purchase it for a fraction of the original cost. The system was completely assembeled, very large and kind of flimsyy...But it looked interesting for a friend's commercial composting project, so I did some research. I could never confidently determine that it would actually be capable of operating as marketed, based on the the way it was designed...It looked like the worms would fall to the bottom along with the castings! In addition, it appeared that a large portion of the cost could be attributed to the heating/temperature control element, which we have no use for her in So California's mild climate. Anyway, I'm sure it's still there at Shipley if you are interested in taking it off thier hands!

Sorry for my original confusion about the units!