Excellent!!! That's a nice amount of compost. Should really help your tomatoes. Well done!

Carol

I'm dreaming of having five gallon buckets full! I don't have enough yet to put into a potted plant. Well, I'll get there. Look forward to hearing about the BIG tomatoes --

My latest harvest was about 3/4 cup of castings that I scooped out of the bottom drainage tray of my Worm Factory, along with a lot of "basement worms" that went back into the top tray, protesting all the while.

I put the castings on my little bedraggled Morning Glory sprouts outside, which are having a rough time trying to get started. They better not die now, having used up my entire first harvest! :-)

I'm blessed to have a kiddie pool full to the brim of worm compost... What I don't have right now is the plants to put it on right now.

Wonderful!!!! Mine is awhile away from being ready. Wonderful that you have so much vermicompost!

Carol

I've kinda lost interest in my worms and moved on to other things. I dumped a couple indoor bins and buckets I was playing around with into a compost pile last year. I added manure and compostables throughout the year, and insulated it for the winter with a few black bags of leaves. Now, I have approximately a 6x15 x2 feet deep pile of vermicompost. Thats, what, 2.25 cubic yards? I'll probably leave it alone this year and let the tomatoes, squash and whatever else is sprouting grow to maturity.

@Carol -- I would never have expected that much from the "jumpers", after a few years of working with them, I feel that they are almost certainly something of a "seasonal" breeder. I get a lot of yellow cocoons from them spring and fall, but not too much production the rest of the year, that's true even outside my bins in the yard. However, the worms I got accidently from cheap compost I bought to feed TO the jumpers just happened to contain cocoons for another breed of worms that eat, breed, and turn out compost very fast. The irony is that I disliked them very much at first.... Thought they were ugly, greedy competitors for my jumpers......

rayzone7 - At least the worms gave you a nice present before they left. That's quite a haul!!

dottgk - you sure did a big turn around. :) That's great!!

Carol

@Parsley, still cold in Philly? I'm in Florida, we've had 70-80-90° temps already since mid-Feb, so the worms are just working overtime already with the heat.

@Rayzone, I think I would plant sweet potatoes in that big a pile of VC. ;)

dott, it's been a cold, cloudy, late spring here in the mid-Atlantic (after some warm days in March) but in the last week we've zoomed right up to the high 80s. Way to skip spring and go right into summer!

Hey dott, last weekend I spread it out with the tractor, plowed it in, and planted okra in that spot. I'll be curious to see that okra does in comparison to my regular patch.

Cool, I expect it will be an awesome year for okra, hope you have a lot of friends and family, food banks, and churches lined up to take any excess you might acquire. Also, look for some extra earthworms in your soil while you are planting that plot, I hear VC additions tend to attract the locals!

:)

Oh, how big an area are you growing?

@Parsley, See, we do that here almost every year, seems we go from maybe 60° to about 85-90 literally in less than a week. :/

My annual garden is probably around 3/4 of an acre this year, plus another 1/2 acre in perennials. This is why I don't do much composting anymore. It's just too big of an area to be shuttling that much material around.

For those newbies looking for an overnight success , it doesnt happen that way. Its an ongoing time absorbing project for good compost in the end. Keep the worms happy and they will reward you with that true "black gold" all made from the simple leavings from your home garbage, minus meats, cheeses , sauces and acidic concoctions.

OK, now I have a gallon and a half of fine black gold. Well, not very fine - it's really full of lumps and twigs - but it'll do for now, once I've let it dry and raked it over a bit more.

Took the bottom WF tray which has been working since about the first of April and moved it to the top of the stack. With a light shining on the top of the tray, then donned the rubber gloves and proceeded to pick through and rake out the bigger undigested bits (clumps of newspaper, etc.) and gradually transfer the lumps of wet vermicompost to a bucket.

This is hard work for a feeble invalid, so I came back to it after lengthy rest periods several times over the course of about a day, in the hopes that the top of the vermicompost would dry out a bit and be easier to handle. Conclusion: it doesn't air dry that rapidly, it's VERY effective at holding the moisture. But raking over it with the hand cultivator gradually breaks the clumps into smaller clumps and encourages the worms out and down, so that you can gradually persecute them all the way to the bottom of the tray where they can escape through the holes. Conclusion: This works OK, but would work faster if I had a more powerful work light rather than this tiny clip-on desk lamp, which doesn't really scare the worms enough.

The harvest is out on the patio now, drying some more spread out in a plastic tray. My invaluable dirt-handling trays are actually cat litter trays - I don't have a cat, but they come in handy. The plain kind of litter trays, not the kind they make now that look like Arctic survival shelters. I may sieve some of the VC if I give some to my brother-in-law for his fig tree, which is only the polite thing to do, but most of the lumpy stuff is going into the patio garden. Gotta feed the butterfly plants now that caterpillars are starting to hatch. Busy times on my invertebrate ranch.

So, you have butterfly gardens, Parsley? I just planted some bright yellow lantana for the butterflies, but it's kind of dangerous proposition, because we are about overrun with a bunch of TNR cats that would probably love to chase butterflies, until they discover that butterflies aren't great tasting, and don't fill the belly.... I also planted some dahlias but they all died.

@ the parsley, Good on you for spreading the black gold wealth.

Do the flutter-bys help with pollination? I love them and would also feed them if I saw a benefit beyond the aesthetic.

I've got a book from the 70's called grow your own, and in it the couple purposely introduced ladybugs and praying mantises to their garden. The ladybugs did great eating the aphids and what have you. The mantises are cannibalistic and so after a time there was just this one fat and very pleased-looking mantis which liked to hang out in a flower pot on their front porch.

If you build it, they will come - even in the city, there are various butterflies fluttering around. I don't exactly have a "butterfly garden" but I do have some caterpillars in a jar. It turns out that just one measley parsley plant in a pot is enough to attract black swallowtail butterflies to lay their eggs. This will inevitably lead to planting more parsley, planting some flowers wherever you can to feed the grown-ups (I also like yellow lantana!), and converting your bird bath to a butterfly bar. No monarchs yet, and I haven't tried growing milkweed, but I've definitely seen monarchs elsewhere in Center City, so if I spot any on my premises efforts to create a milkweed plantation will surely follow.

Still picking out baby worms from the last portion of un-screened vermicompost. Apparently I'm rubbish at spotting cocoons in the VC, but once the worms are hatched and wriggling, I can see them.

Really tedious trying to catch those little wiggling threads - I wouldn't need to be quite so conscientious about doing this if I wasn't in a hurry to get the finished compost in the garden, and if I didn't still have a strong need to build up my wormy herd. In the future I want to "age" the VC in a bucket for a good month or two to let all the babies hatch and get to a size where I don't go blind trying to snag them all.

It would have been so much better to have the vermicompost operation going over the winter so that I'd have plenty of finished VC in the spring as well as a sizeable herd to eat all the garden waste and produce scraps of summer. Well, I couldn't have started any sooner because I bought this place in March, and before that I didn't have a garden OR a basement to make all this possible, so I shouldn't really be complaining.

I have now used up every scrap of my first harvest in my garden, except the container I reserved to give to my brother-in-law. Their patio garden is even smaller than mine and largely in containers, but he is obsessed with growing little potted fig trees, so I hope the VC does the little figgies some good.

I'm now working on my second monthly harvest. Much, much easier to process than the first. I think this tray has been worked over more thoroughly than the first one I harvested. It was never very full, and my worm herd numbers are going up, so that probably helps. I also had to scoop out a hefty pile of very wet castings from the drainage tray of the WF. They smelled a bit anaerobic, but once spread and dried that goes away, and the castings from the drainage tray are very fine grained, since I never put food down there and only a little bedding, so it's got to be close to 100% castings.

Very few lingering worms in this batch. It's now drying in a tray and waiting for any babies to hatch. New rule: No more avocado skins in the bin. They are like nature's plastic. Everything else was pretty well broken down but those avocado skin pieces look shiny and new. I've lost patience for sieving them out and putting them in the next tray.

Re. avocado "skins", I got quite a few of them from my neighbour and the worms love to clean out the scraps that were left on the inside. Once that's done and after about 10 days or so, the shells were usually brittle enough and easy to crunch them into little pieces between my fingers.

I have developed a super secret highly advanced vermicompost tea recipe. But I'll share it with you guys because you're awesome.

Put a handful of vermicompost into a bucket of water.
Mix it up thoroughly.
Pour onto the soil around the plants.

I expect great things from this advanced tea technology.

:)

That's a super secret highly advanced recipe!!

Carol

It took me at least 30 seconds to come up with it!

Seriously, I don't get all the elaborate "tea" making ceremonies that I see promoted. I think the good old black gold has everything it needs already in it. Just a bit quicker to get down to the roots if you slosh it in water first, especially if like me you are lazy and don't want to push the mulch around all the time.

:)

What I do is put it in a big wheelbarrow with some organic stuff like fish oil, and I put the hose nozzle on a narrow stream to really spray the crap out of it. LOL I do that to make it anerobic.

Carol

Starting on the end-of-August harvest. I can tell the tray I'm emptying is from June. Stone fruits begin here! Peach pits, apricot pits, cherry stones...and the usual avocado pits, but I find that after they've been in the vermi environment that long, you can crush them with your fingers and put them back for re-processing. Peach pits, on the other hand...

The bottom drainage area on my Worm Factory was an absolute lake this time. Leachate had been coming out the spigot for the last few days so I'm not surprised. (High levels of veggie waste recently.) Fortunately, not too smelly. Managed to get the whole base part up and out to the patio for a comprehensive hosing-down without spilling dark brown worm juice all over my apartment, which is a real accomplishment. I think a few red wiggly stowaways made it into the garden, but if so they'll find plenty to eat in the mulch layer.

As for the issue of drainage leachate or something else I just never have any in my harvest tray, except if I put in a lot of watermelon rinds.

I haven't had any leachate to speak of for a good long time, but the fruit onslaught of late summer plus fixing salads, gazpacho, etc. for a few dinner and lunch guests seems to have tipped the scales.

The lake in the drainage tray hadn't gone anerobic, at least, apart from a whiff or two. It does bother me that the spigot on the Worm Factory is not positioned low enough to actually drain all the excess liquid out: there's room for more than 1/4" of leachate to accumulate in the bottom of the drainage tray before the level gets high enough to start spilling out of the spigot. I may correct this problem with a drill bit sometime in the future. As best I can recall, the Can O' Worms I had some years ago had the spigot more appropriately placed, at the very bottom.

I have been pulling pieces of some kind of very thin plastic film out of the VC. I've occasionally seen these before, but in this tray there are a lot of them. They are all of a uniform size and shape, a small rectangle when you flatten them out. I think they are a plastic film coating from the cardboard tag on some tea bags, I think I remember brewing some pitchers of iced tea and using lots of tea bags.

These kinds of things cannot be composted so its best to remove them before adding to worm bins or you will find them later in harvest material. Shipping/scotch tape, self-sealing labels and any other material that is not true cardboard should be removed first. I have forgotten about shredded credit cards and found them later in the harvest as they are shiny and stick out. Remove it now or remove it later.

It's also possible that the bits of film are part of the tea bags themselves - I have often heard mention of the heat seal used on some brands of bags not being biodegradable. If so, a shame to have to waste a whole tea bag into the trash when it could otherwise go in the bin. The bits of film are annoying, but not that hard to see and pick out of the finished VC at the end.

By the way, how were the tomatoes? Large?

My ground is not yet what it should be , working on that. But yes had several in the 1.5- 2.0 lb range as my siblings and I are in competition for large toms. Sis had the largest at 2 lb 7 oz.

1.5 to 2 lbs sounds pretty big to me! But then again, you know, size isn't everything ;-)

Very true , yesterday my brother visited and it just so happened my last large one off of a Domingo plant weighed in at 1 lb 15.5 oz. This is a bit of a rare plant not talked about a lot as its from Italy . I just wanted to try it out .

End of September harvest last night. I'm pleased with the quality of the VC this time. Not too wet at all and pretty finely grained. I think my vermiherd has increased very nicely, which helps, along with having put jars in the corners of the trays to keep them from pressing down all the way.

Eventually I will get bored with moving June's peach pits from tray to tray. And there are still pieces of avocado skin, nature's plastic.

Started my end-of-the-moth harvest today. I couldn't be more pleased with the quality of VC I'm getting from this tray. It's actually fine-grained and not soggy or muddy at all - like finely processed compost. I'm ready to 100% endorse the method of putting jars or something else to serve as 'columns" in the four corners of the Worm Factory trays - that, along with getting my worm population up to what finally seems the right density, has made a night-and-day difference in the quality of the VC.

This is also the first tray I've harvested since I started finely powdering eggshells before adding them - so nice not to have big jagged chunks of eggshell in the VC.

So. Many. Cocoons. I picked out a bunch when I took the vermicompost out of the tray, and I've been picking it over today and finding more and more and more. Since I'm not in a hurry to use this batch, I think I might just leave it in the bucket for a few weeks and then go through it for baby worms, which are slightly easier to see and pick out.