Nature and Gardening

Yesss a place to talk about the little poop noodles! I've had a bin going for about 2 years. I use a stacking bin with 5 trays. After starting it, I realised that the whole CFT idea doesn't work as well as I was expecting, so essentially I treat them as independent bins that the wormies are able to move between freely.

I've found that a pretty laid back approach to feeding them works the best for me. Whenever I have kitchen scraps, I toss them on top. I add a small part of our coffee grounds (we drink a good amount), the rest goes straight into the garden. And whenever I feed I toss in a similar amount of dry shredded cardboard. When a tray is full, I move another one to the top and start feeding that.

For bedding, I just use the cardboard I toss in continuously, and lots of small bits of browns that are too big to be composted by the worms. Like small sticks, some corn cobs that went in whole (the worms love to chill inside them), a load of pistachio shells that have been in there for a year that the baby worms always sit in, etc. Whenever I sift out a tray all that stuff just goes right back into the new one I'm filling, the worms seem to love it.

Seems to work well for me! Only problem I ran into recently was we had a lot of rain, and apparently so much moisture got in through the air holes that parts of the bin turned anaerobic. Which apparently attracted a whole lot of ants. Fortunately I managed to dry out the bin a bit, and got rid of most of the ants. So all's well in noodle town again.

Getting a compost bin this weekend... looking forward to getting started. Thanks for discussion.

I'll start.

I run a bathtub worm farm that uses a 50/50 method (feed/harvest one side and viceversa). Bedding is Horse Manure. I feed them kitchen waste. I add crusher dust and biochar to the new bedding after harvesting, approximately 30% biochar to 70% manure. I harvest after about 4 months. I set up the conditions for harvesting by feeding the other side until most of the worms have moved over, and I do not seive worms or cocoons from the harvested castings.

The castings, which I have deemed #vermicharpost, go into my native plant nursery and garden. They also, after harvesting, get added to 50% new char so they can inoculate the new raw char and increase co-composted char output.

Example. Freshly Vermicharpost harvested from worm farm on left, new char in middle, vermicharpost mixed with char on right:

Confusing enough?

I've got worms! I have a two bay box with a tap on the bottom one for draining. I use a soil/cococore substrate. I add shredded paper, dried leaves, cardboard and then place a peice of old woollen blanket over it to help keep the fruit flies out. I put food scraps under the woollen met. Keep their substrate moist but not wet.

Worms a one big mucus membrane so think of thay when you're deciding what to put in your farm. Avoid anything salty, spicy, greasy, oily or fatty and plant waste like garlic, onions, or other alums. Don't give them poisonous plants like sumac or anything with pesticides on it. you're best off hot composting things like the above and just avoiding salts in your garden and also pesticides.

Do feed them a balanced diet of green and brown waste. They need both.

Don't release your worms as most commercial farm worms will not match the wild varieties.

My basement bin setup attracted roaches, so I pulled the plug on it. Disappointing outcome, but I love the concept.

Experimenting with a very modest bucket, which resembles a small continuous flow through setup. I've cut out the bottom and put some thick wiring from side to side, mimicking the pvc or galvanized steel tubing you often see folks use.

My bedding is a mix of shredded cardboard and rice hulls. I think the whole setup is two months old now so I haven't harvested yet, nor am I sure this is really going anywhere.

(Also, shameless plug perhaps, but I've started !composting@slrpnk.net for all types of composting including vermicompost !

Edit: I just noticed you actually already crossposted from there, but for some reason Jerboa does not show that here for me)