A Year Later...

We've had various upsets to our household in the last year - hospitalizations and changes in employment.  As a result the blog has been TOTALLY neglected and the worms have been rather neglected.  I have several things to share - photos and stories of the ups and downs of the worm bin; though not today.
Things that have changed in the way I've managed the bin:

• I am much more casual about the amount of food and frequency of feeding.  They work their way through everything in their own time anyway.  I ended up not feeding them "new" food for nearly a month and I didn't find a decrease in the numbers of worms, or any worm carcasses nor did I have any worms trying to escape the bin.
• I ALWAYS freeze their food (my scraps) for at least 24 hours and thaw it thoroughly before I give it to them.  I got a bit cavalier last summer and started tossing food to them as soon as I was done with it.  Unfortunately that corresponded with a subscription to an organic food delivery service which gave us fruit flies!  NOT happy to find flies clinging to the lid, maggots in the compost and pupae stuck various places.  I ended up taking the whole thing out side. Salvaging all the worms, rinsing them off, and starting fresh - putting the fruit-fly-infested compost in my outside yard waste bin.  I'm sure the worms were wondering why the sudden flood/swimming lesson!
• I'm just doing one tray at a time - it was too heavy for me to manage with two trays.
• I'm using shredded paper to keep the bin a bit dryer than before, so I don't get worms drowning in lechate.
• I'm rinsing and drying eggshells and then crushing them as finely as possible before adding them to the bin.  They don't break down appreciably in the time it takes everything else to break down and actually become a bit of a hazard when it comes time to sort through and recover the worms at harvest time.  A couple of worms accidently got cut by the sharp edges and I accidently cut a hole in my glove and underlying skin!  Having said that, they seem to like a few 'whole' egg shell halves - they were curling up together in them.

So that's the summary.  I'll be posting photos, etc in the upcoming weeks if all stays on an even keel!

OTHER life forms in the bin

I went away for a holiday and left the worms.  I did have a friend stop in to feed and check on them part-way through the week, though they probably would have been fine.

While I was away, however, I finally had a chance to read the rest of Sandra Wiese's book: The Best Place for Garbage and I can recommend it again as a book to read BEFORE you get started.

It turns out that those little white "babies" that look like little rice noodles and that I was working so hard to 'save' from the collection tray are actually called 'potworms' and do help the composting process, but are not as essential as the larger red wigglers.  They are not baby red wigglers and I do not need to save them! When I returned from holiday, I had a quick look through the bin and found that I also did have plenty of pink baby wrigglers which was a relief.

Wiese says the potworms flourish in bins that are too wet.  Accordingly I have purchased a paper shredder and have been adding dry shredded paper periodically since I am still getting about a 1/4 cup of fluid draining out the bottom every couple of days.

From left to right: white potworm, red baby wiggler and a US penny.

The other 'normal' box inhabitant I have identified is mites.  I first noticed a cluster of little spherical dots on a pile of pea baby food I had put in.  I assumed at the time it was some kind of mold.  When I returned from holiday, I put in some cantaloupe rind and noticed the next day that it also was covered with these little dots.  If I sat still and watched, they would move re-e-a-a-l-l-y slowly.  These mites also are part of the decomposition process and, apparently, are not a problem.

About a million mites on a piece of melon rind.

Mites on a bit of shredded paper. I think the type is about 12 pt.

Wiese also mentions an insect-like creature called a 'springtail'.  I haven't gotten a good photo of these yet, but I'm pretty sure I've seen them floating on my leachate.

Addams Family Moment

My mother's day roses were finished by the end of the week, so I cut the dry blooms off the stems and gave them to the worms.  (I put the stems outside on the yard-waste pile.)  I felt a bit like Morticia Addams from the Addams Family TV show cutting the heads off the roses.

Babies in Peril!

I have been (slowly) reading Sandra Wiese's book, The Best Place for Garbage (see previous post).  [I'm not a very fast reader and with 4 kids don't get as many quiet moments to sit down with a good book.] One of many things I love about it is that the enthusiasm she conveys for her topic is TOTALLY infectious.  Reading the first couple sections I started to get all excited about various applications for vermicomposting and even started wondering what the grocery store at the bottom of the road does with all their waste fruit and veggies!  And then wondering what the lady across the road does with her goat, chicken and goose manure.  And then I came back to the reality of my situation - a brand new vermicomposter with family and work responsibilities and more hobbies than there are hours in the day.

And then several days ago I had a bit of a panic.  I drew off the lechate (what a great word -- the liquid that's being generated from the vermicomposting process) and as I was diluting it to use on my houseplants I realized there were a bunch of dead baby worms in it.  AAAkkk!  It had been 3 days since I'd drained any off, so I worried that I was doing something wrong that was driving them out of the food/bed or that I wasn't draining it quickly enough and they were drowning.

  Unfortunately I have already done some of the things Wiese says newbie vermicomposters shouldn't do.  Specifically (1) purchasing one of these commercial tiered bins, (2) including urine in the bin (potential for too much nitrogen and therefore too much heat for the worms), (3) using something other than shredded paper for bedding (I've added drier lint and several handfuls of leaves from outside).  I also worried that by pureeing banana peels and so forth I was reducing aeration and suffocating them.

So here I am panicking because I have dead babies and a list of no-no's.  So today I pulled the top bin off and checked the collecting tray.  Sure enough there were dead babies in the lechate again, but also lots of live ones swimming and crawling around.  I have avoided messing around in the working tray for fear of disturbing the wormies too much.  I decided I needed to check to see if everything was ok, so I started gently lifting bits of the contents of the tray.  Live wiggly babies and adult worms all over the place!  Wow!!  Some of the lower layers aren't recognizable anymore as the stuff I put in.  Hurray!

What to do?  I'm not sure if
(a) I just need more bedding so they're more likely to stay up in the working tray or
(b) if I need to just check the tray daily OR
(c) if I just need to accept that there will be some losses and chalk it up to natural selection.

Suggestions welcome! 

I will be buying a paper shredder, I think, since this is something Wiese is adamant about: newbies should use shredded paper as bedding.

Limitations of the Worm Box

So I noticed early on that a number of the worms had found their way into the collecting tray.  This part of the worm box is sloped to (a) collect the liquid portion of the worm waste and allow it to be decanted off, and (b) to allow the worms to find their way back into the main working tray.  I put them back and have since found that every couple days I need to check the tray to collect the stray worms.

A couple days ago my attention was drawn to a new book by vermicompost enthusiast, Sandra Wiese.  It's called, The Best Place for Garbage and is available from most booksellers in both electronic and paper editions.  Amazon offers the first 2 sections as a "sample", so I downloaded it to my IPod Touch and spent an enjoyable time reading it!  In just this first part of the book, she already addressed my worms-in-the-collecting-tray problem. 

It was in the section about housing -- specifically the limitations of my chosen vermicomposting vessel.  She says that worms don't actually know where the food is.  They wander blindly through the substrate, eating and pooing as they go.  If they happen to drop down into the tray, it isn't unpleasant, it's actually rather nice, so they have no motivation to escape nor any inkling of which way to go.  Wiese indicates that eventually they either drown in the compost tea or starve to death unless they are rescued every couple days and returned to the upper levels of the box.

It was quite gratifying to know I wasn't doing something wrong to drive them to their death in the collecting tray and that I was right to return them to their food source!  My only concern is what happens in the future when I've got all 3 levels going.  Right now it's easy to remove the single level and fish the worms out.  It will be quite a bit heavier when there are 3 full levels ... I guess I'll have to take each level off separately and stack them in reverse order or something.  We'll cross that bridge in a couple months, shall we?

Anyway, I'm looking forward to purchasing the rest of Wiese's book and can definitely recommend it from the little I've read so far!  I particularly liked the comment she made about the instructions that come with the commercial worm boxes -- "Not to discredit those always-too-brief instructions, mind you.  The instructions definitely have enough to get you started and troubleshoot a lot of the more common problems.  But if they made the instructions too detailed, it would be a whole book, and not just "instructions" (and frankly, my book is better)." :)  I certainly found the instructions that came with my box  WAY to brief and too poorly organized to be a lot of help without reading them 10 times.

Hint: I also laughed so hard at her disclaimer on the dedication page.  My kids came running to see what the joke was!

Worms languishing in the collecting tray. The white thing on the right is the inside part of the spigot that allows one to draw off the compost tea.

Food for the Worms

Worm food!

For their first meal, I started with 4 oz of various vegetables, some herbal tea bags (with papers, strings and staples removed) and some crushed egg shells.  All of this was chopped up with some kitchen shears into smaller pieces so it would break down faster and put on top of the coir bedding and recovered with the shredded paper.

Three days later, I gave them their second meal (8 oz):

The big white thing is called a "G-Diaper".  It's an insert that goes in a cloth outer wrap and is used in place of cloth prefolds for diapering babies.  They can be flushed or composted, so I thought I'd see what the worms thought of it.  Since it had dried, I re-wet it with some of the "tea" from the bottom of the composter.

Three days later I added 9 oz more food - veggies, fruit, banana peel, flower leaves, egg shells and baby food.

The next feeding was a mixure of food waste including cereal dust at the bottom of the bag, and some dried leaves from outside, a torn-up envelope and some drier lint.

This was the progress on Day 16:

If you look really carefully you can see little brown dots all over the "waste".  These are the castings or poops that the worms are leaving behind as they go.

So on day 16, I had a collection of banana peels (we'd been having smoothies!)  Now, in my regular compost pile outside, these babies take a long time to break down, so I was concerned about giving so many to the worms all at one time.  I remembered Walter the Worm Guy saying that he put egg shells in the blender to break them down and make the nutrients more available to the worms.  I wondered what would happen if I put banana peels in the blender...

No problem!

So I added some egg shells for good measure and poured the whole lot on top of the other food.  I then covered it with some moistened shredded paper.

If my husband sees this post he'll look at me suspiciously next time I offer him a smoothie!

Photos: The Worms Arrive!

Here is the box that the postman held at arm's length.

Contents: Instructions, invoice, styrofoam insulating box, wadded up newspaper packing, carton of worms and compost, escaped worms (top left corner) and a ziploc bag with some gummy worms (nice touch!!).

Upon taking the lid off the carton you can see where the worms were escaping.

Settled into their new home!

(inspected by my 2 1/2 year old daughter)

So I spread the compost they travelled in over the coir bedding, rinsed out the carton with some water and poured that over the compost, then re-covered with the shredded paper (which was quite damp after sitting on the wet coir for a week).