Are you going to use the screen wire method to harvest the compost? I have seen pictures in old books and on the internet where screen wire is used to separate the worms from the soil and then the cocoons from it as well. I guess they use different gauges of wire, but I have never looked to see if they even make different gauges of screen wire. I thought that perhaps a food sieve (like for speggetti drainage) might be good for small operations. If you do try to do this, please let us know how it works. It could really do well for those of us with kitchen bins, tclynx, if it works. Good luck, good growth! =o)

I don't know how well trying to sift them would really work.

I've been using the bright light method;
scoop a pile of the castings out of the bin and place on a tarp or in my case a lid of a rubermaid bin. Put it in bright light so any worms in it will go deeper. Scoop off the top of the pile. Keep doing this till the pile is mostly worms that can go back into the worm bin.
This method seems to work well for the larger worms but doesn't really do much to separate the babies or the cocoons from the castings. Some of the babies are nearly impossible to separate from the castings since they are barely visible. The cocoons are pretty tedious to separate too. I figure that some worms and cocoons winding up in my garden will be a good thing anyway.

I haven't finished sorting through all the castings from the one side of my bin but I estimate that I'll have between 6 and 8 gallons of castings once I've rescued most of the worms and larger chunks of food/bedding still mixed in. Actually, there is almost no visible food (except for some peanuts still in their shells) left and only occasional paper balls mixed into those castings. It is the most wonderful looking dirt I've ever seen. The texture is lovely. Imagine, having such fun sticking your hands into poop!

The big rotating or vibrating screens might be necessary for a large operation dealing in thousands of pounds of worms but I expect that it has to be pretty traumatic for the worms.

Having fun just putting your hands in the dirt...I had the most intense of wanting to put my entire body in that dirt! LOL..Talk about a shock to my moral fiber!

Well, You last posted the beginning of harvest on 11/ 19. How's it going Now? Or rather, How did it go? =o)