annieology

This is the infamous worm bin.  Shorter than a kitchen trash can or dishwasher.   There are three separate bins.  The bottom is where all of the water drains to so that the worms don’t drown.  It is the only part of the operation that smells.  The bottom bin has a spigot to drain off the worm tea.  The worms are in the middle.  The top bin is where I keep cardboard, and dry matter.  I also have an icecream bucket where I keep vegetable matter to pre-digest.
These are the bins separated.  The top bin and the middle bin are interchangeable.  Six weeks ago, the middle bin more closely resembled a receptacle for shredded paper.  As you can see it is mostly dark and dirty right now.  I had just stirred it up.  Burying some of the shredded paper and this weeks vegetable matter.  The bottom bin has some worms and some castings and you can see where the tea is collecting.  I would say that represents about 10 ounces.
This is a close up.  I apologize, there is only so much you can do with a phone camera.  But what you are seeing there is some cardboard  with worms crawling all over it, and a lot of castings.  I believe that this is where I fed the worms two weeks ago.  Where I fed last week, still has some vegetable matter.  This here is free of shredded paper and vegetable matter, leaving only the bits of cardboard.  Which is good because the bigger bits of cardboard are there to aerate so that the wet matter doesn’t get too compact.

So, that’s what we got going on.  It’s been six weeks.  I would say to get that thing completely full we’ll need another six weeks. At which point I will fill the top bin with shredded paper, shredded cardboard and fresh vegetable matter.  I will move the top bin to the center position and stop feeding the worms in the top bin.  The worms will migrate down, and it should take a week or three for all of them to migrate.  At which point the top bin should be dry and ready to fertilize my garden.

I am thinking that I will pull some of the castings off to start corn seeds inside and then some more when I transplant them outside.  I also need to get some strawberry plants, lots of tea to give them.

If you want to read more about the beni’s of worm compost, go here.

p.s. How do you like my kitchen floor?  I love it.  Hubby and I did that ourselves.  Aren’t we awesome?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Kindle, My Man, Vermicomposting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.