My sour bin

[Steven Chow]

I've finally come to terms with what happened to my worm bin for a couple days last week. I had been throwing caution to the wind and putting stale cooked rice into my bin even though I read somewhere that you shouldn't. I think I was a little shaken by the fact that anything could go wrong with my bin... then Asha messaged me asking why I hadn't been around on the site lately and I realized I should have written a blog post about my little episode.

When I put rice into the bin the following couple days it can smell a little yeasty and moldy but I hadn't paid too much attention to it in the past. Last week though when I opened by bin I noticed that there were a lot of works hiding out of the bedding up at the top edge of the bin wall. At first I was in denial thinking they were just exploring, but then I realized there were large clumps of worms...and more worms "running away" from the conditions in the bin than I could really attribute to worm curiosity.

I put a try sheet of newspaper in there and left the worm bin open for an hour to try to reduce the moisture level a little and also I put in a couple finely ground egg shells and things seemed to return to normal the next day. In fact, they were going crazy on the rice after that. Actually my circle of worms photo was taken of rice in this "after fermentation" stage when the worms seem to love it. Now, I could be jumping to conclusions with all this.. but it does seem that worms really like the rice several days after I put it in... after the yeasty / moldy phase subsides. I've only put rice in there 3 or 4 times so far so I don't have that much experience to draw from. Anyone else experience this?

I think I'll probably continue to put rice in... I think what i did differently last week is that instead of putting the rice in one spot (hence the circle of worms) I sprinkled it around all over the bin last week. I think with in-one-spot method even if the conditions get bad right around the rice for a while the worms can retreat to other areas of the worm bin bedding.. when I sprinkled it throughout though they had no wear to go to wait out the "fermentation stage" as I call it. Again this might just be me coming up with crazy theories with limited experimentation.

[Stacy]

Thank you for sharing about your rice. I've been afraid to add carbohydrates to my worm bins. It is nice to find out how it works.

[Asha]

Hi Steven, Good to see you and your post:)
Before I started my bin, I had gone to about 3 places/people who were already doing vermicomposting to check on how they went about their process...(two of them were organizations that used manure along with dried leaves etc, one was a lady who used kitchen & yard waste) they all seemed to agree that if you had a lot of wastes to add, it was better to leave it to decompose for at least a week before giving it to the worms. The logic was more about the heat generated in the initial stages of decomposition than the smell.
But in the case of kitchen waste, since the volume is usually much smaller, so it should not matter so much. I really don't know if this holds true or not, but thought I would share.