I Love My Worm Bin - Yay Worms!

[praying mantis]

The last posting of this thread was in Nov but I love my worm bin and wanted to find out how many of you have your own worm bin.

I got my worm bin 10 weeks ago and it is busting with worms. Half a watermelon's worth in rind disappeared in 6 days. I rigged up a bin with some of my worms for a friend and she is anxious for her worms to take off too. We talk about our worms at work daily. I am not sure if she can handle the occasional squishy state but she seems to really care for the state of her worms. I am fairly certain I will have to harvest some worm castings and give the bin an overhaul soon.

Yay, worms.

[Jess]

I have a worm bin but for now it is empty.

My lovely 3 year old niece came to stay and when no one was looking she decided to do some rearranging of my stones, pebbles, shells and other decorative toppings on my pots. I opened my worm bin to add to it a couple of days later and found a lovely mixture of toppings in there.

I could have taken them out but it would have taken sooo long and I couldn't bear the idea of squishing any of my worms so I tipped the entire contents in my compost, stones and all!
At some point I will contact the wormery company and get a new bag of worms to start again.

[Carre]

I love my worms, too. It's funny how my affection for them has developed. They make great dirt. They keep the nutrients from my kitchen waste from being locked up in the landfill.


I've been worm composting my kitchen scraps since 2002.

I think it was plato who said that the worm is the earth's gold. which makes sense becuse if you've got worms, you've got nice rich soil.

[Tiller under]

I've been worm composting in my kitchen for about 6 weeks. No odors at all, I use a Rubbermaid storage tote, (10 gal). In the 7th week I've noticed an ammonia smell when I took off the lid. I removed most of the newspaper strips and replaced with fresh wet ones as well as more veggie scraps and egg shells, with top soil and clean sand.

Any tips about the ammonia smell? I only smelled it when the lid was off, but I'm worried about my worms. Will it hurt them?

I pretty careful about what I put in the bin. No meats or dairy, only plain news paper, additive free topsoil, sand, and cleaned fresh egg shells.

I'm a chef and cook all my food at home from raw, mostly organic. I skimp on the onions in the bin, but lots of lettuce, cabbage, carrot peals etc. no citrus either.

[funnyguy]

For: "Ammonia smell" comment.

Worms require ample oxygen. Is your lid on too tight? You might try covering your bin with landscaping cloth, which allows air and moisture to flow, to keep out the light. Bad smells in your worm bin is an indicator that something is amiss.

[Tiller under]

Thanks, I had a ring of air holes drilled around the top of the rim of the tub.I found out I needed to drain the liquid off, so I drilled small holes in the bottom, and placed it inside an identical tub, with a brick for space, use the liquid as worm tea. It really solved the odor problem, but I think I lost some crawlers. hard to find very many. But the castings are awesome.
Thanks for the reply.

[funnyguy]

Yes, if your tub wasn't draining, the bedding can get too wet. If it is too wet, the worms can't breathe and they'll die. The worms aren't just disappearing. Gruesome but true, the surviving worms will eat the dead ones. Happy composting!