We checked on the old worm bin—the one we haven't been feeding—and were amazed to see that it's full of worms. Huge ones, too!
If you remember, we had separated the worms from this compost and started a new bin with them. We were quite thorough—more so than I think I would be in the future—so these worms must have come from the few cocoons or baby worms that slipped through. We haven't even fed…
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Added by Brenda Pike on November 19, 2009 at 12:34pm —
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Added by Christian MacInnis on November 18, 2009 at 12:53am —
4 Comments
My wife is very supportive of my vermicomposting efforts and helps me with sorting worms from compost from time to time. Tonight we were sorting a tray in my vertical bin and she was waiting for me to separate the trays and pull out the bottom tray we wanted to separate. (Keep in mind that she hasn't seen the worms for awhile.)
I took the top lid off. My wife said, "Wow there's a lot of worms in there."
I lifted up the first tray. My wife said, "Oh my. You've got a lot of worms."
I pulled out…
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Added by bpearcy10 on November 16, 2009 at 7:00pm —
5 Comments
At my prior apartment, a small batch of worms died horribly. I added them to bedding with nothing but shredded office paper. Bad move: all the chemicals in the paper made a chemical soup that was toxic to my nostrils and the worms. Two weeks after adding coffee grounds and a scrap wheatgrass mat from Jamba Juice, they fled all over the carpet floor and died. I got a lot of flack from my roommate about not being able to keep living things.
This lease, I started over with a new setup. Bye bye, bl…
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Added by Kenneth Westervelt on November 15, 2009 at 8:50am —
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That Dar... ah, sweet lovable kitty
Today we had the first good snow storm of the season. There have been others but they didn't amount to anything.
When i got home the power was out. And, The kitten had turned over my five gallon tote of finished compost. I had put it in the house to keep warm. There was compost all over the living room and kitchen floors. He apparently had a ball dive bombing through it all day. The compost was almost dry so at least it was easy to sweep up. But i was surpri…
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Added by Eve on November 14, 2009 at 1:00am —
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Last time I wrote I had added bread heels to my home bin, and got interesting moldy growths. I'm embarassed to admit I did something very dumb sometime in early September. I was cleaning the kitchen pantry and found an old bag of a protein drink powder that my jogging son used to drink. I assumed (always a bad thing) the powder was made of soy, and dumped it in the worm bin.
It only took a day before my bin was a stinking death zone for worms, and not good breathing for me, either. I don't know…
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Added by Nancy on November 8, 2009 at 12:13pm —
2 Comments
I checked out the bin today expecting to have to bail out a sea of mud and was surprised. The whole thing is drying out a lot faster than i would have expected. And i had gotten the new tote and screen all ready to filter the water out too.
But it does look as thou it got wetter before things started getting dryer. The hole i made and the extra cardboard up top did make a remarkable difference.
First i put 4 layers of cardboard on top of the cardboard that was already there. To try to keep mor…
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Added by Eve on November 7, 2009 at 12:36am —
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I had to chuckle when i reread one of my own comments on my last blog. "So i added water to the catchment area, i don't plan to harvest again until spring, so extra water down there won't hurt anything"
That has to be one of the worst predictions i have ever made. As you may recall I put a coil of heating hose in the catchment area. With so little air movement everything is very wet. Steam? rises up through the compost wetting everything in the FT.
The whole thing is wetter then any tote i hav…
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Added by Eve on November 2, 2009 at 11:30pm —
5 Comments
In addition to my indoor worm bin and my big outdoor regular garden compost bins and my new vegetable garden, I've now become a beekeeper as well. (!)
A friend gave me her established active honey bee hive which we moved to my yard 27 miles from her farm.
Here it is set up behind my veggie garden:
…
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Added by Strumelia on November 1, 2009 at 8:00pm —
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I was invited to attend a new member orientation at
Gamble Creek Farm in Parrish, Florida on Saturday morning. We joined the farm membership program to ensure that we have a reliable source of locally grown vegetables.
…
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Added by bpearcy10 on October 25, 2009 at 4:13pm —
6 Comments
I spent 5 minutes at the local grocery store this afternoon conducting an informal survey. This survey was meant to validate an article I read on
Huffington Post earlier today.
A short quiz (answers below) --
1. Where does salmon come from?
2. Where do artichoke hearts come from?
3. Water chestnuts?
4. Cactus?
5. What about mushrooms?
6. Mayonaise?
Answers:
1. Thailand o…
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Added by bpearcy10 on October 25, 2009 at 3:07pm —
7 Comments
It's only been 2 weeks, but so far neither excessive moisture or smell has been a problem. Since I regularly add coffee grounds, the predominant smell is coffee-ish. It doesn't smell like worm compost, but there's nothing close to offensive about the smell...so far. :-)
I'm on the 3rd version of my DIY BSFL bin. I've modified it to a bin-within-a-bin design. The smaller bin houses the feeding area. This 5 gal. bin always has condensation on the walls. The mature grubs easily crawl up the vertic…
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Added by Andrew on October 24, 2009 at 4:35pm —
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I found my first escapee this morning. S/he was about 8 ft away from the bin, all dry and wiggling with regret. Five months with only one getting out is not that bad. Especially since we get them out a lot and we could have actually left it out ourselves. The babies are so small, I'm never sure that I have gotten all of them back in. I'm just thankful I'm the one who found it!
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Added by Paponda on October 20, 2009 at 4:43am —
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I have been worm farming for a little while and now setting up a non profit organization to form a cooperative of worm farmers in the USA. I have finally completed my website and need some input on what others think of it.
Please be as honest as you can but try not to be too brutal as I am still kind of new at this.
I think things are going well since i have the college in my area to back me with a meeting of our local government to bring this to a larger scale locally so hoping to grow real f…
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Added by mikeschieck on October 19, 2009 at 9:01pm —
41 Comments
I stopped adding food to my first earth worm bin on October 1. I've put my second homemade bin, bottom full of holes on top of it, added newspaper and a little food. Worms were actually starting to travel to the new bin inside of a week. This setup is in my unheated garage. It's cover is an old t-shirt. I'm wondering if when it gets much colder, I can put the plastic lid back atop the bin to hold in heat. I don't know whether this will happen or it will just prevent evaporation, leaving the worm…
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Added by Anna Rich on October 19, 2009 at 3:23pm —
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We have implemented vermicomposting into our household and used the vermicast to plant our square foot gardening project. Next, I'd like to add aquaculture coupled with hydroponics/aeroponics to form the third portion of our strategy. My difficulty is that I live a restrictive subdivision so I'd have to formulate a system that is compact, but effective at the same time.
I discovered
Growing Power in May of this year and I've been s…
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Added by bpearcy10 on October 18, 2009 at 2:19pm —
2 Comments
After 3 months in an indoor Rubbermaid setup, I decided to move half of my worms into a second bin in the hopes of getting them to reproduce more quickly and consume more kitchen waste over the winter. After posting a few questions on the forums, I thought I would try to just move some adults to the new bin this morning and see how it goes.
After about 5 minutes of trying to pull adults from the bedding and castings, I gave up and started pulling hunks of damp bedding/worms/castings and moved t…
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Added by Tony D on October 15, 2009 at 9:46am —
2 Comments
My curiosity about BSFL was too great to wait until next year to seed my own local colony. So I cheated and bought a "BSF multi-stage starter kit" from Jerry at blacksoldierflyblog.com. The kit includes hundreds of juvenile & mature grubs along with a "hatchery" that contains a few clutches of eggs (hopefully another 2,000 juvenile grubs in a few weeks) and the baby grubs born in the 2 days it took to get to CA from GA.
Here's an unpacking video that shows the grubs & my mini-bin. Pleas…
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Added by Andrew on October 12, 2009 at 11:30pm —
15 Comments
About 10 yrs. ago (maybe longer), I bought a county-subsidized Wriggly Wranch Worm system (WWW) and stocked it with a pound of worms. Despite (I'm ashamed to say) mostly neglect, the worm herd survived through the years. Several months ago the WWW was knocked over by an animal (dog, raccoon or possum). I didn't notice this in time and the herd was no more.
My sister, who is involved with her kids' school food recycling efforts, asked me for my now empty worm bins. I figured she'd be a better st…
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Added by Andrew on October 6, 2009 at 9:00pm —
4 Comments
I was very excited about celebrating 1 year of having worms and was just starting to think I've got the hang of things when they brought me to my knees with a great big bang.Since I've moved my bins outside into a shady spot in my vegetable garden I've really seen their numbers increase drastically and I can only attribute that to only checking in on them twice a week...Yes it is possible!But last week something extra-ordinary happened.I got up from my computer after visiting the website gigglin…
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Added by Lizette Janse van Vuuren on October 6, 2009 at 12:30pm —
2 Comments
An Explosion of Worms . . . and Flies
Redwormscomposting.com
Wife's reaction today
They survived summer!
And how was your Friday the 13th ?
Restarting my bin
additional 'earth friendly' project
BSFL bin - 2 week update
1st to escape!
The Great Migration
Splitting my worm bin into 2 bins
It's taken me a year but I've got clever worms!!
