Worming 101

[stickydank]

I ordered some worms from urban naturalist 200+ worms 15$
im not sure if there was 200 but i made a pass through worm bin they are doing great Hope they find each other to mate they are all over the bin looking very happy, and i have my bin it the house no smell i mix the bin every 3 days and mist the bin every day i get liquid out the bottom,lots of air getting to the bed from the bottom 20 gallon tote the bottoms cut of and i set it on a grated 1x1 inch rack i set the totes lid on the floor set the raised grate under the bin and a liquid catching pastic box under the worm bin the worms love it.
I wish i had $$ for a couple of lbs of worms I'll take pics and post when i feel better

 

[bigshrimp]

Keep those worms happy and you'll have plenty in no time.

Lol maggot bucket! I had one of those for a while, but my coop is too close to my house and stunk something awful. Chickens loved it, they just sat under there waiting for maggots to fall out all day.

 

[The Revolution]

Ive constructed successful worm bins in the past using large plastic totes. Recently, I started with a cpl 2gallon bucket bins, and also have a bin made from window planter boxes. I stacked the window planter boxes, creating two layers, the top layer was aged vermicompost, and a 400-500 worms, the bottom tier I added fresh bedding and just a handful of vermicompost to get it going.

Ive been experimenting with different bedding types, in an effort to get the best quality castings. Quality castings for me separate easily, don't clump up, aren't too dry or too moist and sticky (clumping). They're rich and dark in color. After harvesting, store easily in a plastic bin, without sticking together.
I am using European Night Crawlers, but plan to try mixing in red wrigglers later on. Currently I'm using smaller bins, nothing over 4 gallons, and a high volume of worms per bin to speed up the composting time, and narrow the time inbetween harvests.
For Bedding Ive used
Maple Leaves
Soil
Newspaper
Newspaper/Cardboard
Blend of Newspaper and Maple Leaves
Id like to share some of my results using these as bedding, and hear what others prefer to use to get the best casting/final product.

Maple Leaves - These work great, providing a nice bedding, and also a nice food. Worms seem to tear right through the leaf litter, but the stems and leaf veins are left behind, and are difficult to seperate from the casting at harvest. Also required frequent watering as they dont hold a lot of water, resulting in a wet sticky casting, that required spreading out and allowing to dry for a while during harvesting. Also, I would find many other bugs (centipedes,millipedes,Pill bugs..not necessarily bad) that would find their way into my bins within the leaves. Separating the veins and leaf stems from the casting is the worst about this bedding. If you dont mind a bit of debris in your final harvest, I would recommend this.

Soil - Hard to regulate moisture levels in soil. Hard to peak down to the bottom to inspect populations and decomposition, requiring you to remove most of the soil, to get a peek inside. Very hard to distinguish and separate soil from casting at harvest. I wont try this again.

Shredded Newspaper/Cardboard - This seems to be a good method, Newspaper breaks down quickly and well,but the cardboard breaks down quite slowly, and holds a lot of moisture. Newspaper decomposes/is consumed, leaving mostly shredded cardboard, with clumps of castings stuck to them.

Shredded Newspaper - This seems to be the best bedding for me. Newspaper is consumed quite easily/quickly. Mixes well with the other compost/casting. By the time the newspaper has all degraded and been consumed, majoirty of food scraps have also been consumed, and decomposed, and the bin is ready to harvest. Easy to dig into to inspect colony, and easily maintains optimal moisture levels. Makes a nice light and fluffy vermicompost.

Blend of Newspaper and maple leaves - great bedding if you dont mind some stems and leaf veins in your final castings. I like to have a clean casting, free of debris and other contaminants for storage and use, or else I would most likely continue using this blend for bedding.

I am interested in using promix, or peat based bedding also. Is anyone else using peat? Do you use peat right out of the bag or do you add lime or use a peat based premix like Promix or something?

I am going to start turning the majority of my bins into 5 gallon buckets i think, with holes drilled around the rims. Ill place a wooden board ontop, with another 5 gallon bin ontop of this one. I seen a commercial worm farm designed like this. It was just shelves stacked with 5 gallon bucket bins. Seemed to consolidate the whole operation. Though, the commercial set up had a professional harvester, the whole operation seemed tight, and efficient. I need to create about 15-20 of these 5 gallon bins, for my needs. I started with around 500 worms, which have now grown to approx. 2k worms. My bins are teaming with baby worms, and full of unhatched cocoons.

I've also noticed many of the (mostly) younger worms like to ball together at the bottom of my buckets. The pink worms clump up in a wet pile, and I always assumed they were just mating.
My worms are fed a lot of coffee grounds, banana peels, apple skins/cores, alfalfa meal. I also Like to blend oats up to fine powder, and sprinkle across of the top of the soil a few times/week. I have been blending my egg shells to fine powder before adding to my bins. I usually coat the food well in powdered egg shells when feeding. This does a few things. The grit allows the worms to process the food more efficient and effectively. It adds some calcium to the bins, and also speeds up the decomposition of the egg shells. I was getting a lot of shell fragments in my final casting, but now that I powder them in a blender, I just have some small specks here and there.
There's a few more ingredients Id like to acquire to broaden the spectrum of food and nutrients in my bins. Kelp/seaweed, Rock dust/powders, fish meal, feather meal. We used to own a cpl rabbits, and I like to add their droppings to my worm bins. Was about the only thing the bunnies were good for. Those dudes were poop factories. Does anyone add bone meal or blood meal to their bins?

Im currently harvesting manually, by hand. Dumping into small piles, and removing debris that's not been consumed or composted first, while the worms burrow to the bottom of these smaller piles, I can scrape off the finished castings, and redistribute the worms into a fresh bin with fresh bedding. I try to manually pluck any eggs I find and return them to the fresh bins.
I store my castings in plastic bins, and after harvesting, will dig through the castings weekly to inspect for eggs I may have missed, or newly hatched worms that I missed during the harvest. I return these to the newly created bins. Ive been harvesting on a monthly cycle.

Does anyone else prefer to use smaller bins with a higher volume of worms to speed up the whole process? Or do you use bigger bins for less frequent harvests, and only harvest what you need?

 

[Macncheese]

not sure if it is ok to post this here but i thought it fit the topic of conversation.
The Difference between Vermiculture and Vermicomposting
Vermiculture is the culture of earthworms. The goal is to continually increase the
number of worms in order to obtain a sustainable harvest. The worms are either used to
expand a vermicomposting operation or sold to customers who use them for the same
or other purposes (see “On-Farm Vermiculture” later in this manual).
Vermicomposting is the process by which worms are used to convert organic
materials (usually wastes) into a humus-like material known as vermicompost. The goal
is to process the material as quickly and efficiently as possible.
These two processes are similar but different. If your goal is to produce vermicompost,
you will want to have your maximum worm population density all of the time. If your
goal is to produce worms, you will want to keep the population density low enough that
reproductive rates are optimized.
Calculating Rates of Reproduction
Epigeic worms such as E. fetida do reproduce very quickly, given good to ideal
conditions. Compost worm populations can be expected to double every 60 to 90 days,
but only if the following conditions are met:
• Adequate food (must be continuous supply of nutritious food, such as those
listed in Table 2);
• Well aerated bedding with moisture content between 70 and 90%;
• Temperatures maintained between 15 and 30oC;
• Initial stocking densities greater than 2.5 kg/m2
(0.5 lb/ft2
) but not more than 5
kg/m2
(1.0 lb/ft2
).
The issues of food, aeration, moisture and temperature are discussed in Section 2.1
above. The issue of initial stocking density, however, was not discussed previously and
requires elaboration here. Stocking density refers to the initial weight of worm biomass
per unit area of bedding. For instance, if you started with 5 kg of worms and put them
in a bin with a surface area of 2 m2
, then your initial stocking density would be 2.5
kg/m2
. Starting with a population density less than this will delay the onset of rapid
reproduction and, at very low densities, may even stop it completely. It seems that
worms need a certain density in order to have a reasonable chance of running into each
other and reproducing frequently. At lower densities, they just don’t find each other as
often as the typical worm grower would like.
On the other hand, densities higher than 5 kg/m2
begin to slow the reproductive urge,
as competition for food and space increase. While it is possible to get worm densities up
to as much as 20 kg/m2
or 4 lbs per square foot (Edwards, 1999), the most common
densities for vermicomposting are between 5 and 10 kg/m2
(1 to 2 lbs per ft2
). Worm
growers tend to stock at 5 kg/m2
(Bogdanov, 1996) and “split the beds” when the
density has doubled, assuming that the optimum densities for reproduction have by that
point been surpassed.
If the above guidelines are followed, a grower can expect a doubling in worm biomass
about every 60 days. Theoretically, this means that an initial stock of 10 kg of worms
can become 640 kg after one year and about 40 tonnes after two years. In practice, this
is difficult to achieve, though not impossible. For instance, American Resource Recovery,
a recycling firm in northern California, started with 50 pounds of earthworms. In four
years, they had enough to cover over 70 acres of windrows, within which the worms
convert huge quantities of sludge from a cardboard recycling plant into worm castings
(VermiCo, 2004). On the other hand, OACC’s three pilot projects accomplished in total
only a 10-fold biomass increase over 12 months9
, when in theory the increase should
have been by a factor of 64. The factors that kept this number lower than optimum
included various problems with bedding, feed, moisture, and temperature control.
source of info http://oacc.info/docs/vermiculture_farmersmanual_gm.pdf

 

[The Revolution]

Some interesting info macncheese. Thanks for sharing. Its hard to gauge the exact reproduction rate when harvesting by hand. I know I started with one small bin (about 400-500 worms), and I now have 3 densely populated bins about 4 months later.

 

[The Revolution]

out of my 2,000 or so night crawlers, I have 2-3 worms which are absolutely massive, and they always stick out from the the others. All of my worms were hand collected in my backyard, which consists of only European Night Crawlers to my best knowledge. However, these few worms are about 10x the length and diameter of my average worm. They're resemble snakes! Ive been wondering if perhaps these are African Night crawlers, or if perhaps somehow African night crawler had bred with one of the local European Night Crawlers?? Does anyone know if African Night Crawlers are able to live in Northeastern USA Climate? Or are these just genetic freaks, perhaps grandfather Night Crawlers, with voracious appetites, and the ability to grow 10x larger than your average worm..? I'm going to try to get some pics to compare these mammoth crawlers to the others in my bin.

 

[stickydank]

thank you Macncheese And The Revolution I learned alot So i started with a very small number of reds 200 I went news paper card board soil from my garden saw some worms in it,
rabbit poop, frozen scrap vegies ,then thawed Straw eggs shells coffee grounds w/filters
I water daily turned the bin once by hand yesterday the worms are spread out thin I stared my bin a week ago i need more worms will be a while till i get a good ratio of worms

 

[Microbeman]

The scientist becomes an artist after he understands science so well that he is able to use his creative mind to apply science in a way that we view as beautiful. ~ The Revolution - sig

 

[Macncheese]

Nice Microbeman! can you please educate me a bit and tell me what we are looking at. I know its under the microscope but was wondering what it is? I have been wanting to get a microscope but they are so expensive and im not sure what i should be looking for, with it. thanks

 

[The Revolution]

Looks like hyphae, or mycelium, but Im probably way off. I see all kinds of microbial life in that lower pic.

 

[Macncheese]

I love it! its the first peace of art that has just made me set here and really look.

 

[Granger2]

Yeah, my guess is hyphae, and now I can see why filtering finished tea thru a 200 micron filter like I've been doing is a problem. -granger

 

[stickydank]

MY REDS TODAY

MY REDS TODAY

Heres a few pics of my worms and one of dry screen

 

[hoss1111]

I keep Africans and Europeans and feed organic rabbit poop ,crushed eggshells and green sand.

Best thing any organic grower could do. Much better quality then in the stores around here.

My teas have vastly improved since making my own vermicastings.

 

[The Revolution]

Is it possible for African Night Crawlers to exist in North America? Ive found some Massive earth worms about 5x the size of the largest european night crawler, crawling around in my outdoor compost. Ive brought in a few of them into my indoor worm bins which consist of just European Night crawlers.

 

[stickydank]

If worms have a high protein diet they can grow huge

 

[stoned-trout]

I am gonna sacrifice a batch, add some stuff to make em glow and go fishing....yeehaw

 

[The Revolution]

I am gonna sacrifice a batch, add some stuff to make em glow and go fishing....yeehaw

LOL that sounds awesome, what would you add to make the buggers glow?

 

[rik78]

If worms have a high protein diet they can grow huge

I always though that proteins were something to avoid in our worn bins

what kind of proteins do you give to yours!??!

 

[hoss1111]

He's got them on those vanilla protein shakes