My Indoor Worm Adventures

I've been a bit busy and haven't felt motivated to participate much in the online discussion, but here's a quick vermicomposting update. I went from 3 red worm bins down to 1. What happened?

I mentioned in a previous blog entry that I ordered some extra eisenia fetida (red worms) from trinity-ranch.com even though you can get worms for a few bucks cheaper elsewhere. If you have read as much of the online vericomposting forum archives as I have, you'd f… Continue

Over the weekend, I ended up dumping about 15 pounds of kitchen waste into my backyard "hot compost" pile because my indoor worms haven't been able to keep up. Lots of watermelon, cantaloupe, and coffee grinds accumulated from the past two weeks. (I recently read an online comment from someone who asserted that any family that produces over 5 pounds of compostable kitchen waste each week is too rich to contemplate worm composting... I was bemused by that comment. I am certainly not rich. I am al… Continue

Nothing major happened this week. My worms in all 3 active bins seem happy. I still have a large population of those brownish-reddish pinhead sized mites in my Bin 1, but since merging my worms from my initial 1 lb. purchase back together into this bin there seems to be less of the mites crawling around. I slightly overfed my ENCs in Bin 3, but quickly remedied that by moving a large piece of watermelon rind that had gotten quite brown-green and limp into Bin 1. Today, I saw there were several j… Continue

A lot of things happened since my last update, so just some rapid-fire thoughts from the past week in chronological order.

My 1 lb. red worm order from Trinity Ranch didn't ship last week. No replies to my e-mails, but finally called on Friday and reached someone. Didn't ship due to hot weather in Missouri. Wish there was any communication!

Had my empty Wriggly Wranch pre-seasoned for the Trinity worms for 2 weeks... mostly hand shredded newspaper strips with some machine shredded amazon.com b… Continue

I am amazed. My 1 pound of european nightcrawlers completely devoured about 3 pounds of previously frozen food in 3 days. Watermelon rinds, tomato, broccoli, and asparagus bits are all gone... well, except for the really cool paper-like skins that the worms can't digest readily. I'll have to toss in some more defrosted food from the freezer cache tonight!

I would estimate that my red worms are probably eating much less than half of their mass in food each day, but that might be explained by the… Continue