Wednesday, November 2, 2011

The first casting harvest from the worm bin

It was time to look in on the worms and potentially harvest some castings so I spent my evening with them last night.
Here they are when I first went out

I dumped the whole thing on a sheet of plastic
The worms will migrate to the bottom of the pile to get away from the light. While I waited for them to do that, I replenished their bedding. Last time I used brown paper bags to make the bedding but this time I decided to use cardboard instead. I put the new cardboard on one side of the bin so I could put the old bedding material and my worms on the other side.

Bin with new bedding on one side of bin
Then I added a meal to the new bedding.

Kitchen scraps and coffee grounds

I put the meal in the corner of the new bedding 

And then buried it and added just a little bit of water to the cardboard so it was lightly damp
Hopefully this will make it easier for me to harvest the rest of my castings because the worms will leave the old bedding and move over to the food in the new bedding.

Before putting the worms back in, I took some of the casting off the top
I ended up with about 5 cups of gorgeous castings
Then I put all of the worms and old bedding back in the bin 

I covered the worms with paper bags 
And replaced the lid
In a week or so I should be able to harvest more of the castings without disturbing the worms too much because they should have moved to the other side of the bin, leaving the castings free for me to harvest.

Gidget says, "Open the gate. I can't take anymore worm and vegetable talk, I'm going to find a  rabbit."

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