Freeze = Outside Worm Bin (Update 3)

The day has finally come......

Most of my gardens are dead and it's thanks to Mr. Freeze!

 

 This bucket is filled nearly to the top with Roma Tomatoes I was hoping to turn into sauce in the next few weeks, but I planted them too late and didn't give them enough attention until too late in the fall and the plants died today, so I picked a bucket of tomatoes!

 There were a few other vegetables I added from the garden as well, as my summer garden is essentially dead and my winter garden will soon thrive in its place. I never picked the peanuts I grew this year either, only a few and they were the same size as store bought, but I probably wont get around to getting them as it was basically an experiment to see if I could do it and with my health an uncertainty, I doubt I'll have enough energy to harvest them like I planned to. Oh well, next year perhaps.....

 I dumped the bucket of veges into a corner of the outside worm bin. I'm hoping that by doing it this way I can prevent the entire bin from becoming too acidic since tomatoes were the primary green these worms have been eating since I received them.

 Here's another shot of the bin. The last thing I did was to add some more paper and cardboard on top of what you see in the picture, to help speed up the process, keep pests out, protect the worms, and help with insulation. I'll keep you all updated!

Worm Inn Update 4

My last post was about cutting my worm inn in half, so that I could add some of the worm population to my outside bin, but also because of fermentation and smells that were getting a bit extreme and making my house smell bad.

So I took a few spatulas and started digging. I removed the top 70% of material and put it into buckets to separate what would stay and what would go outside. I also took this opportunity to find out what the vermicompost looked like, if I had any yet at all. I assumed I would have some castings because it had already been about 5 weeks since the worms were introduced to the inn and I figured a working system would show results by now.

 I wasn't disappointed. The castings were the darkest, nicest looking castings I've ever seen. This is no exaggeration, the castings literally shocked me!

I made sure to dig some out and place it in the bucket to help "jump start" the top layer when I added material back to it.

So I tore up some paper and started adding paper and cardboard and leaves on top of the castings and worms.

 I added some paper bags that we had laying around and tore up some cracker boxes too.

 Then I poured the bucket with the castings and vegetables back on top and mixed it up the best I could.

 I also added some corn meal to the top and was quite generous with it, making sure to get it everywhere, as the worms love this stuff!

 I then added more leaves from outside and mixed them in.

And finally, I covered that layer with more paper and more paper bags that I shredded up and added to the top! I haven't seen many worms around the top layer yet but I figure I will in a week or two, as the paper breaks down and decays and the process continues!

Outside Worm Bin (Update 2)

So after adding food to my indoor worm inn, I started to notice the smell of fermentation and decided I'd better act if I wanted to keep my wife happy! :)

My solution was to cut the worm inn in half essentially and move the top layer, which is where all the newly added decaying food was, to my outdoor worm bin, which has been sitting for weeks, as I tried to add enough material to it in preparation for the worms.

I grabbed two buckets. The gray bucket on the left contains the top layer of newly added greens from my last post. It also contains quite a bit of worms, paper, and basically anything else that was contained in the top 5 inches of my worm inn. Everything in this bucket will be added back into the worm inn later.

The red bucket on the right contains the middle section of my worm inn. This section was primarily paper and was probably the cause for most of the bad smells coming from the inn, as the paper had clumped up together and "soured." I made sure to add a lot of worms to this bucket as well, as these will be the new generation that will be added to the outside bin.

 Thanks to Halloween, plenty of my neighbors had "donated" their pumpkins to my worms. After going through the fun (sarcasm) and tedious process of removing candle wax from rotting pumpkins by hand, I added a few pumpkins to the outside bin.

 Then I went ahead and dumped the red bucket into the right front corner of the outside worm bin. I wanted to leave a lot of it clumped together, as the weather has been cold (mid 30's at night) and I wasn't sure if the worms would survive the cold weather or not.

 I spread some of the decaying material out so that it wasn't clumped in one area, hoping that I didn't spread it too thin.

 Then I covered the decaying material, maggots, bugs, and of course worms with some decaying cardboard to help keep the pile insulated.

And then I added a few buckets of leaves and mixed it up some more with cardboard and paper. I checked on the worms the next day because it essentially froze the night I put the worms outside. To my surprise, the pile was warm the next day when I touched it, even though there was frost on the ground. I moved a few pieces of cardboard and there were a few worms moving around on top, so I breathed a sigh of relief.....for now.

Worm Inn Update 3

It's been a while since I updated my blog, but I just wanted to provide a few updates while I can. The worm inn has been doing great, so all I did in this post was add some more food as you can see from the pictures.

 Before adding newer food to the inn

 You can see that a lot of the waste is finally starting to break down quite well.

 Here's a closeup!

 And another shot showing how everything is breaking down and mixing together well.

I read somewhere that dryer lint can be added to a compost system as well, so I started adding lint to the pile. We have a small trash can in our laundry room that we normally toss our lint into, so I already had quite a bit built up and I just added it to the top.

 I also added bread to the pile. This is the first time I've added bread and wanted to see how the worms reacted to it and if it would break down fast, as I've read it does.

 Thought it was also funny that the bread was so moldy, it started to kind of look like watermelon!

 I added some more rabbit manure and then mixed in more green vegetables.

 And it looked like this when I was I was done, though I probably should add some paper and mix it in to help keep the air flowing!

Until next time!