So how long did you let the worms work that material. Im guessing you could let the material dry out some before you try to sift it. Most of the time mine seems soft and velvety but once in a while its like a clay consistency. I have a 1/8 grate but I never use it anymore just the 1/4 does fine for me. I dont separate cocoons either to time consuming plus I see enough tiny worms in the shredded paper to know reproduction is doing fine. After you add food do you also add shredded newsprint? If you have multple trays do you occasionally go in the lower trays and mix things up a bit so it doesnt become anerobic, not saying its necessary but I just do it.

Hi Steve thanks for your comments.

I haven't regularly mixed up the lower trays. I recently did and I found a huge knot of new pumpkin seedlings. (Some seeds accidently made it into the compost). There were still plenty of worms working but the compost looked like a good consistency. Albeit a bit damp. When you get clay consistency, what do you do prior to sifting? Since the works were still working I was going to let them go for another month now that it's been mixed up a bit.

Most of my feed is compost from my tumbler or occasionally some fresh kitchen scraps. Since I add a lot of paper shreddings to the tumbler I haven't been adding more paper to the worm bin (other than a layer of damp paper on the top surface of each tray and maybe some bedding at the bottom of a tray). Should I be adding more paper?

The temperature at the center of the bin is about 80oF and the room temp is just below 70oF. This makes me think the bin is not "hot" but it's close to the target worm bin temperature. I'm a little reluctant to mix in too much more paper or cardboard since he temperature would probably go up.

Please let me know if you disagree with any of my thoughts or the direction I'm taking.

I dont have a tumbler or compost pile so cant really comment on how much heat could possibly be adding to the bin. Nothing wrong with your temps from my eyes. Because I have a bale of peat which I use as a mix for potting containers with plants, my main mix is peat well moistened and shredded paper, to this I also add a little composted manure and coffee grounds. I mix all this together well. Then when I add food to the bin I manually strip newspaper to cover that and mist it all down to the point of being moist but not saturated. Im not necessarily saying anyone should do it this way because there are many different mix styles that people use. But if you method "is not broke dont fix it".

I agree with the comment that the clumping may be due to high moisture content. We changed our production routine so that we pull the castings out of the bin (with no further feed or water) in November and let them sit in a tarped stack until screening in May. Our next step is to fine tune the moisture content by taking measurements with a commercial soil probe and zero in on the "just right" moisture for our down-stream processing.

When I first started harvesting I was seeing and saving quite a lot of cocoons, but since then as I have been tiering I no longer even look for them , actually I dont see any. The reason being that my homemade bin is 3 tiered and my 360 is 5 tiered and by the time the cocooned bin get to to be the harvest bin they have had plenty of time to hatch. As you can imagine from top to bottom is at least several months and from what Ive read cocoons will hatch in a months time.

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions. I think you were right about the moisture content resulting in the clumping.

I tried the bright light technique for moving the worms out of the oldest compost tray. I ended up leaving it uncovered for about a week and even though the top tray still had some worms the compost was remarkably dry. I ended up sifting some compost and letting it set in an open bin and then sifting some more several days later. It had a lot of surface area so it dried out nicely. I got some clumping but very little compared to previous effort.

As a side note the worms seemed lethargic in the dried compost. I use red wigglers and they didn't really wiggle much. Once I added them to the next lower tray they seemed fun though. They happily went to work on the fresh compost material in the tray.

Thanks again!