I got worms!

Howdy all,

We decided a while back to start a worm composting bin. Some of the best compost you can get it from worms, and we decided to do it after talking to my (M's) sister Chris, who has had worms in her garden for a long time. A lot of cities have programs where you take an hour or so long class, and then they give you a discount on worm composting bin with worms. My wife and I are both graduate students, and so have little time to spare, and decided to try and make our own! A friend of mine named Tony has been giving me his worm castings, and we decided to copy his set up, using a bit of the worms left over. Here you can see Nicky going through the castings from Tony, looking for some worms:

She turned out to be very good at it, and filled half of that red cup with worms!

Here you see the makings of our worm composting bin. We used two large rubbermaid plastic containers in which we drilled lots and lots of holes so that the worms could breath. We also used lots of recycled paper, which I shredded in a paper shredder. I am a graduate student, as I said before, so it was fun feeding old graded labs to the worms.

Here you can see a bunch of N's rescued worms, hanging out of the shredded paper. I **should** have soaked the paper in water first, but that was quickly fixed with a hose.

I forgot to take a photo, but we then put in some kitchen scraps and some mature compost (to get the ecology set up). We set up the worm bin in May, so here is a photo of the current set up in March.

We have a large tub on the bottom of the worm bin to collect the compost tea, and to prevent ants from getting into the bin, and killing our worms. The hose runs the excess compost tea into a smaller tub, that I then use in the garden (or I feed to my duckweed). 

The bins worked great, except for one huge problem. They were impossible to flip! The bin was just too heavy after 10 months, and I couldn't manage to pull the bottom container out from the upper container! Eventually, we broke down and bought a real worm bin.

Each foot was placed into a coffee container, filled with water to keep ants away. Unfortunately these eventually got mosquito larva in the them, so we placed broken up pieces of "Mosquito Dunks" into each which seem to be doing the trick. The rectangular bin shows the compost tea.

Happy gardening!

M&N&G