I believe some commercial worm castings operations use this method - hot composting first, and then serving the compost to worms to be made into castings. Sounds like you get a very nice finished product. But not everybody has an outdoor compost pile and/or wants to put in the labor of an extra step.

Parsley, I for one have tried putting worms into my once-hot compost to see if they would thrive or not. Can't say I've had much success unless I started to add food scraps for them. Even then they don't seem to venture out into the rest of the compost despite how yummy it looks. Maybe I put them in too late and the compost doesn't have enough for them to feed on. Or maybe the compost at that stage was just a little too dry. Still trying to figure that one out!

It sure would be nice to just throw in a few hundred worms in the fall and have a bin full of compost AND wigglers in the spring!

Harry

@harry - my outdoor piles work pretty well that way, but with suggestion that they need to be pretty well established before it gets very cold. I find as long as a pile is big enough, even a hot pile doesn't bother them - I guess they move to cooler areas when they need to. Of course, if temperatures are below freezing, they won't do much (if any) active composting, but they bounce back in the spring pretty quickly, and get right to work finishing off the pile.

I think a lot of people would just as soon not do all the steps in regular bin vermicomposting (building the thing in the first place, managing the bin, separating the castings from the bedding).

They seem to thrive on my finished, sifted compost, and they seem to like the terra cotta container too. That's the ticket, IMHO, compost feed/bedding plus terra cotta.

Of course that means you need to have a pile that is hot when you empty the kitchen pail, but that stuff can be stored in airtight containers until you are ready.