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.