Well done. Happy vermicomposting. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. :-)

M

Thank you M. I just checked the bin. After only one day there is a big ball of worms where the first feeding was placed. In a couple of days I think they will be ready for more.

From your description, you did everything right, and now your worms seem to be doing well. Good job!

You seem to have done your homework and been rewarded with excellent results. Keep up the good work. The way some people slip off the dock now is to keep adding food but to forget to keep adding bedding. Then the bin goes south. Think about not only new sources and types of food but also new sources and types of bedding. This is one way the hobby stays fun. Maybe pick up one of those white pointy coconuts from one of the larger grocery stores. This is covered with coconut fiber which some use as bedding. Check youtube to see how to open it while retaining your keyboarding fingers. After drinking the water and eating the tiny bit of coconut in it I toss in the shell for the fibers to weaken so I can pull them off. It is more fascinating than one might imagine to watch how stuff rots. It is peaceful to think about how all the micro creatures might be interacting and finding food and shelter in the circle of life in the bin. Please keep us updated about all kinds of things with your bin. Feel free to jump in and answer questions of those who might not be as far along the vermicomposting road as you have traveled. Mostly let us know how you overcome, or not, any system or other vermicomposting failures. We learn more from failure than success. Many of us have certainly learned a half dozen ways not to be successful with vermicomposting. In your retirement you might find that this vermicomposting thing is too easy and want to spice it up a bit. May I suggest BSFL? I won't even tell you what that is so you can have the fun of discovery. Also you are a likely candidate once you have some black gold this spring to dive right into :-) brewing vermicompost tea for your garden. No garden? Time for a few seed catalogues. In 15 minutes you can have 15 speeding right towards your door. Especially, the luxury alpine strawberry ones. I cannot think of a plant more worth of the results of vermicomposting.

Some readers might be wondering... why does he get such an extensive reply. Why do other first time posters hardly get a howdyado? Some of the answer has to do with how much time people have to reply. Most of the answer is, I think, how much of themselves the first time poster puts into their first and next few posts. We could see you did your homework on learning about vermicomposting. Even if your bin had not been successful that studying about the topic before hand would have still shone through in the quality of your question.

Sounds like you prepared an excellent worm habitat and the worms feel right at home. Congratulations!

Thanks to all for the feedback and encouragement.

In response to equinoxequinox:

With regard to the "doing my homework" thing . . . . yes, I plan everything and don't like leaving much to chance. You are correct that I will probably quickly tire of the small plastic box, especially if it continues to be as easy as it has been so far. I am a long time gardener and know that I will be generating much larger quantities of vegetable wastes this Summer. I am looking hard at the Worm Inn concept for the future. I've got several gallons of bedding pre-prepared to accompany future feedings.

Although I was an engineer during my days of paid employment, I have discovered that I have an affinity for working with living systems. For example: Gardening, brewing, composting (conventional), making sauerkraut, etc. In each case, I am not only learning and enjoying myself but also producing a useful product. I see vermiculture as a Win-Win-Win scenario. I get to recycle, produce excellent fertilizer for the garden and worms for my fishing.

Assuming BSFL stands for black soldier fly larvae . . . . I had my first experience with these many years ago. I was living in Louisiana at the time (I am now in Southwest VA.) I was attempting to store kitchen waste temporarily in a 5 gallon pail with alternating layers of sawdust. The idea was to trench-compost the material each time the pail got full. Even though the pail had a tight-fitting lid, the next thing I know the contents had become a smelly, liquid mass of what looked like very-large maggots. I didn't know at the time that these were black soldier fly larvae or that these disgusting things are actually encouraged as compost organisms. I was mostly put of by the optics and the smell, the latter probably being more attributable to having too low a CN ratio than by the activities of the BSFL. I will have to look further into this.

Thanks for your detailed response.

HB

More details give me more ideas. "brewing" brewing waste is a great source for vermicomposting. "making sauerkraut" check out kombucha. A bottle of regular, non flavored can be the base for you. Boil some water and add a tea bag. Sweeten like for iced tea. Cool. Add a bit of your base. It will form a SCOBY. It looks like a mushroom but is a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. When no longer needed I bet the worms will love it. Am aquired but great taste. My youngens like it way better than boring soda.

Well, a couple of days ago I added another pound or so of scraps since it was clear the worms were quickly working off the initial feeding. I buried the food in a corner of the bin. In addition, I added a piece of paper towel over top that I could easily peel back to check feeding progress. For about 36 hours, there was no activity at the new feeding site and I was starting to worry a little.

Upon checking this morning, I discovered that the situation had changed radically. Once again, the worms were all over the new food. I could almost tell that something was happening because I could actually hear the worms moving around in that area before peeling back the paper towel.

It is hard to describe the noise. I think I will call it the "sticky sound". At any rate, it was very gratifying to once again see the worms responding to my efforts.

HB

When it is quiet at night and I listen real close... from within the bin... I can hear... singing, "Listen to the wormy song of health, the merry chorus sung by Vermi's Red Wigglers as they merrily snap, crackle and pop in a bin of waste. If you've never heard worms talking, now is your chance." That sound is good. It is the sound of bin health. My bumper sticker says, "I do whatever my vermicompost bin tells me to."

This post was edited by equinoxequinox on Wed, Dec 5, 12 at 0:56

Remember that the worms aren't after the food itself. We call it food, but it really isn't the food for the worms. The worms are after the microbes that eat the food. The food is for the microbes. Even then, the term 'food' is a misnomer, since the microbes will also eat the bedding.

The worms ingest the food to get at the microbes. Until the food is overrun with microbes, which can take a couple of days in a normal worm bin, the worms really have no interest in it. In fact, they can't really take an interest in it until the microbes have softened it up, since they can do little more than draw the food into their mouths with their lower lip, and suck it in from there.

You already seem to have a good feel for when to feed your worms.

to sbryce:

Thanks for the info. I'm not so sure how good a feel I have for feeding times/amounts yet. I remember reading somewhere that the worms can eat at least 1/2 their body weight per day. Based on the fact the worms don't seem to be having any problem finding and consuming my offerings, I am trying to stick to this rule of thumb.

The areas, where I place the food seem to be quite wet while other areas of the bin containing bedding seem to dry out over time. Accordingly I add a little dry bedding to each food pocket and lightly mist the other areas in an attempt to create constant moisture levels. It seems to be working OK.

Hey hellbender. As you probably know equinoxequinox and sbryce won't steer you wrong.

One thing that I think equinoxequinox told me to do early on was divide my bin into two bins such that you have two populations of worms. This is to act as insurance against a bin collapse. It took me a few months to divide my bin but I am glad I did.

I also recently did the bedding error that equinoxequinox mentioned. With everything else happening this fall I forgot to watch the bedding in my bins and things got a little unstable and I all but lost one bin.

With the leaf litter you grabbed you can introduce some wood lice / pill bugs / sow bugs. These little guys can plow through bedding and such and I haven't minded them in my bins but some people don't like them. Apparently they have a hard time staying put and will roam out of the bin. On the other hand I use a worm inn style bag with a zipped top so they don't leave my bin.

Wecome to wormin' hellbender! I got started after retirement also.

It souds as though you are off to a good start. How big is your OSCR? Is it indoors ?

Good luck Pete

Mr yan: "all but lost one bin" digging through the bin to fix the situation was maybe a really good learning situation. The only way to learn that stuff is by seeing exactly what is going on in the bin. It teaches us so much. It is actually almost a good thing to go through to get the information.

Shhhhhh. Don't tell sbryce but I currently have a 4 gallon square vermicompost bin with a bottom partially open for completed vermicompost to to fall through. Do not try this at home folks because it DOES NOT WORK. That vermicompost either stays there till the end of time or falls all out in 3 minutes. The part not to tell sbryce about is I have a round pumpkin too big to fit into the square bucket sitting on top waiting to rot enough to fall in. This is how I learned "two populations of worms... to act as insurance against a bin collapse". Plentiful dry bedding is both below the bin and directly below the pumpkin. Some of us (me) just are not smart enough to get it right even the second time around.

mendopete inquires: How big is your OSCR? Is it indoors ?

It is a small one. Each container is 10 gallons. Pending the completion of my new heated garage, the OSCR is sitting in a spare bathroom (along with 5 gallons of fermenting cream ale). No one is more excited about the garage project than my wife. :)

mr yan writes:

With everything else happening this fall I forgot to watch the bedding in my bins and things got a little unstable and I all but lost one bin.

This is a little bit confusing to me. With a flow-thru system like OSCR isn't the aim to eventually get the active bin to a state of containing mostly castings for harvest at which time adding another bin with fresh bedding/food to encourage migration?

On the other hand I use a worm inn style bag with a zipped top so they don't leave my bin.

I like to fish and I am contemplating setting up a Worm Inn for growing European Nightcrawlers. Any reason this shouldn't work?

HB

What I have read so far about European Nightcrawler, they prefer deeper down and wetter condition. IMHO, a Worm Inn might not be ideal. How big a population of EN are you thinking of keeping? I have about 0.7 lb of EN (last weigh in when I harvested the VC a couple of months ago) in a 6 gal. bucket. No holes anywhere, covered by weed cloth. This bin has been in operation since Feb. 2012.

I like to fish and I am contemplating setting up a Worm Inn for growing European Nightcrawlers. Any reason this shouldn't work?

About 13 months ago I started my worm inn with a mixed bag of euros and red wigglers and perhaps some other type of unknown compost worm. I have never really felt a need to be able to identify the red wigglers from the euros so I don't profess to be able to distinguish the two in my bins. With that I don't know if I still have both living in the bins now or not and which of the two may have become the dominant species.

Over at redwormcomposting.com there have been several tests with euros verses red wigglers. Currently he is running a test to see how euros work in a stacked tray system. He has a post about euros in a worm inn here:
http://www.redwormcomposting.com/worm-composting/worm-inn-journal-02-10-09/

bedding in a flow thru
A few months ago I divided a worm inn - I call it that but I made my own based on photos - in half to start running two bins. The new bin was a wood sided FT of my own design. This new FT has about 2 square feet horizontal cross sectional area so half the worm inn plus some new bedding filled it 150 to 200 mm deep. And like an idiot I started feeding both systems somewhat heavily since the garden was in full swing at the time. I think I had some combination of over feeding and drying out that doomed this bin. There were still worms in the bin way at the bottom in what looked like finished castings. The top several centimeters had no signs of life other than mites and a random sow bug. There were several dead dried worms in the catch box under the bin.

When you start a flow thru you want a bunch of bedding in it. You're right in that you don't want to add too much bedding or it will still be present at harvest. I am still learning what amount of bedding to add to an established system when feeding. For the last few weeks a gallon zip lock bag of frozen and thawed kitchen scraps mixed with a large handful of shredded newspaper and any cardboard eggcarton on hand has seemed right in my worm inn. That is also mixed in with the top inch or so.

I read it here a lot but now have really learned it BEDDING IS MY FRIEND. It acts like a ballast absorbing and releasing water as needed, providing a home for wee beasties, and generally protecting the system from the user.

The worm inn also tends to get a dry layer around the fabric sides where nothing really happens or composts down. You'll read about several people over watering typical rubber made bins but I find that I have to actively water my worm inn when kept in a midwestern basement. Sometimes as much as a liter of water a week.

Every time I have harvested I have sifted it through a 1/4" mesh. This grabs the bits of bedding and most worms down at that level.

Last August I made my first batch of home brew and tossed the grains into my bin while still in the grain bag. The cheap grain bag from the extract kit is a cotton poly blend cheese cloth type knit. Well I still haven't fished out the bag.

I'm sure I got something wrong in this post so please correct what needs correcting.

I have heard of people who freeze, blenderize or both their kitchen scrap worm food. Think a mix of an old quarter of a watermelon, two tomato sad looking, 5 apple cores, 10 banana peels, elderly celery. Tossed into a food processor then into a ziplock in the freezer. When the ziplock is thawed some vermicomposters drain out the liquid and dispose of it. I think the liquid is half of the value of the kitchen scraps. Not just for the water content but for the sugars, vitamins, minerals. I do not want to see those thrown away. I propose the correct amount of bedding to add to this amount of frozen, blenderized, thawed slury is the precise amount of bedding that will absorb all of the liquid. This would leave the food / bedding mix being just as wet as a wrung out sponge. The bedding could even be tossed into the bag to mix before feeding. Or the bedding could be tossed into the bottom of the kitchen scrap collection bin to absorb any yuck, thus keeping the scrap bucket cleaner for longer. Lining the kitchen scrap bucket might make a sort of worm food burrito. This would be clean and easy to feed and freeze.

My experience with paper towel tubes is they collapse way before I want them to and the air space disappears. I have stood then up on end and put wet vermicompost on top to "save the herd" trying to get air into the smelly muck as fast as possible.

If rubbermaid is too wet, and worm inn is too dry, maybe we need something that is juuuuuuust right.

I wonder how big the holes on the sides of a bucket can be before the vermicompost falls out. I want airy bins. The tray idea is good but I do not want to manhandle trays around. Flow through is good but getting that stuff to flow and not flood or drought is magic. I am here to try to figure out how to do that magic. I might need smarter worms.

mr yan writes:
I read it here a lot but now have really learned it BEDDING IS MY FRIEND. It acts like a ballast absorbing and releasing water as needed, providing a home for wee beasties, and generally protecting the system from the user.

I feed twice weekly and add a handful of dry bedding each time. This seems to work well, Looking at my bin this morning, I see that the initial feeding is totally gone. The second feeding is now being vigorously attacked. I note that nearly all the worms have gravitated to the feeding area with the rest of bedding showing very few worms at all. The third feeding is ripening in the bin. I expect it will be in play in another 24 hours or so.

Last August I made my first batch of home brew and tossed the grains into my bin while still in the grain bag. The cheap grain bag from the extract kit is a cotton poly blend cheese cloth type knit. Well I still haven't fished out the bag.

The problem is that each batch of home brew generates large amount of spent grain. I guess I will have to freeze some of it for later use.

HB

otis 1 writes:

What I have read so far about European Nightcrawler, they prefer deeper down and wetter condition. IMHO, a Worm Inn might not be ideal. How big a population of EN are you thinking of keeping? I have about 0.7 lb of EN (last weigh in when I harvested the VC a couple of months ago) in a 6 gal. bucket. No holes anywhere, covered by weed cloth. This bin has been in operation since Feb. 2012.

Well that is a little discouraging. I had planned on utilizing the Worm Inn to capacity. This would indicate a herd of several pounds of worms which could easily sustain the pressure of me routinely culling a few worms for fishing. I would like to know more about how you setup and managed your bucket od ENCs.

HB

Since I do not plan to drill the bottom, it is easier to handle buckets to lay them on their side when needed (too wet)than larger RM bins. I have used drilled RM bins in the past and found that it could become messy indoors. The main composting worms are EFs. The ENCs are a "side line" because I do not want to mix them with the EFs. When starting the bucket, I filled the bottom with rolled up corr. carboard positioned vertically. CB cut to 2" strips across the corr. To avoid standing liquid and anaerobic condition. Add a couple layers newsprint and started inoculating it. Then add the worms and VC after that. With no holes at the bottom I do have to watch moisture contents of the feed.

Iknow what an OSCR is and I thought OSCR Jr. would be a smaller version. WRONG!

OSCR (oregon soil corp. reactor) is a flow-thru system. In a flow-thru the wormbed is on a grate, strings, cable or rods allowing greater airflow and easy harvesting from the bottom. Food in the top and castings out the bottom..... flow thru.

OSCR Jr. is a "stackable bin" system. It works on the principle of vertical worm migration. They are sold commercially as can-of-worms ect. Some folks on the internet refer to these also as f;ow-thru's. This confused me when I started. Hope this helps.

A full size OSCR is a sight to behold. Roughly 4'x4'x3' of worm bed. My guess is you would either need livestock manure or a restaurant's worth of kitchen scraps to maintain it. There is no wonder why they designed the Jr.

Hellbender, what are you doing to optimize the kitchen scraps? You mention they are ripe when added. Something like freezing and thawing or finely chopping or blending the scraps will significantly reduce composting time.

I chop mine fine-ish by hand (hey it's already on the cutting board usually). Then I put it in a small tub that I store in the freezer. I keep it in the freezer rather than on the counter to control the fruit fly population in my kitchen. From that small collection tub it either goes into a zip lock bag to store a little longer or thawed and to the worms depending on feeding time for the worms.

mr yan inquires:

"Hellbender, what are you doing to optimize the kitchen scraps? You mention they are ripe when added. Something like freezing and thawing or finely chopping or blending the scraps will significantly reduce composting time."

I do both. I have a very large chopped vegetable salad each day for lunch. As long as I am chopping the vegetables for myself, I go ahead and chop the scraps for the worms. They ripen for a few days in my scrap container. I then run them through a single freeze-thaw cycle before burying in the bin. Usually (based on my limited experience) the worms are all over this in 48 hours or less.

". . . . Then I put it in a small tub that I store in the freezer. I keep it in the freezer rather than on the counter to control the fruit fly population in my kitchen."

I initially put the scraps in a commercial-style kitchen waste container with a lid equipped with a charcoal filter. The waste is allowed to sit there at room temperature for 3-4 days before freezing. No problems with insects or odors so far.

HB

Hey Equinox;
Haven't been here in awhile. This darned internet, ever expanding - ever interesting; like the world's biggest library. Maybe if I'd just never learned to read, I would've been ok, Ah Well..

Yep, I'm one of those people who freezes and blenderizes.
For those who don't know me, I have two large (16 Gal.) Rubbermaid-type plastic bins which I originally started in Nov. 2009 with EF's. Part of the problem, is that we produce a lot more waste than the worms can consume and even though the town where I now live has a city-wide organic waste recycling program, it just feels wrong to be tossing stuff that I know the worms (microbes) will enjoy.
The freezing and thawing process really helps to break down cell structure, leaving a nice, soft mess. This then goes into my (not my wife's) food processor, to which I add composted rabbit poop, coffee grounds, powdered eggshells, etc. The resulting mash which usually tends to the wetter side, I mix with shredded cardboard and then feed on one side of the bin. It usually takes the microbes a week or so to start working on the food. Within two weeks the worms have migrated to the food, leaving the other side worm-free and making it easier to harvest the castings. As for air flow, I finally solved my problem. I drilled 1/2" holes all around the sides in the upper half of the bin. Sure, the worms could escape if they wanted to, but with ample moisture, plenty of food, good airflow and proper bedding; they just don't seem to want to leave. Of course when the weather is nasty, I'll always find a few gone exploring, but the majority seem to stay put. In the past I lined the inside of the bins with fine mosquito netting, hoping to keep out the fruit flies and fungus gnats while providing air flow through the netting, as well as keeping the worms from escaping and making it easier to harvest the castings (because all the castings are within the netting and not stuck to the walls of the bin). In reality it didn't quite work out that way. The flies and gnats got in regardless. I found the best thing is to hang sheets of yellow sticky fly paper above the bins and then to encourage the flies to join their friends at the big yellow picnic table. It usually works. When the mosquito netting got wet, it stopped the airflow rather than helped it, so that didn't work either. But here was the worst of it: when the worms hatched, they were so tiny that they could actually pass through the fine mesh of the mosquito netting into the space between the netting and the wall of the bin. Once there, they couldn't get back. Food particles and moisture would filter down through the netting and I always found worms there whenever I harvested out the main bin. Now, my bins are outside. I have a large porch/patio area, but no actual ground. The winter of 2011-2012 was particularly wet (in my area) and so I didn't really have a chance to harvest out the bins properly, until Mar.2012. In Dec. 2011 after about a week of constant rain, I had a major worm escape (though mostly from the worms living in that limbo place between the netting and the bin)and lost around 500 worms. After that experience, I tossed the mosquito netting and drilled large 1/2" holes all around. So far, even with heavy rains, they seem to stay put.

Shaul

Hey Shaul, "it just feels wrong to be tossing stuff that I know the worms (microbes) will enjoy." Agreed. A sin like using gallons of potable water to throw plum peels down a garbage disposal. "This then goes into my (not my wife's) food processor" yup

Yup;

Believe me, Hell hath no fury, like a woman... who finds her husband using her nice, clean food processor, to grind up stinky, rotting fruits and vegetables, for his worms. Far better to go to Craigslist, or Salvation Army, or Yard Sales and get your own equipment. Much, much better.

Shaul

Hi, All. I'm in New England and grow tomatoes and some veggies during our season. I eat mostly veggies and fruit, and it's always bothered me that all the trimmings just go in the trash. I started researching ways to use it, starting with outdoor composting, but just couldn't figure out how to do that during the winter from a second floor apartment. So in come the worms. It seemed like a good idea, and I ordered a Worm Factory 360, four trays and 500 worms. It's been set up for about 2 months. No odor, no insects, but I have this nagging feeling I'm missing something. For the first 6 weeks or so, I was covering the food with bedding like the instructions said, and the worms are eating and not getting out of the bin, but I keep finding them inside the lid and I have castings all over all the sides, even in the tray that has nothing (lack of storage so I just stacked them on top. I chop the food up in a Ninja, and for a very short time I had skinny mushroomy things popping up, but they are gone now. The bottom tray is pretty much full of castings, but the worms have only partially left. Am I being too impatient? I did start wetting the bedding and squeezing out the extra water, then fluffing it, but only about a week ago.

Forgot to say, the bin is in my kitchen. It gets down to 58, maybe 60 degrees at night, during the winter, and probably around 65-68 during the day. Unless we're cooking, then it might go up to 80 if the windows are closed and the oven is going.

""Am I being too impatient?""
Yep. But, all new worm composters are, so you are in good company.

""Forgot to say, the bin is in my kitchen. It gets down to 58, maybe 60 degrees at night, during the winter, and probably around 65-68 during the day. Unless we're cooking, then it might go up to 80 if the windows are closed and the oven is going.""

Sounds fine.