1,000 worms on their way....

My compost worms have gone crazy . Back in late February the initial 11 I started my composting with seemed to die off , so I added another twenty and a week later another 15 .. all my worms have been taken out the composting pile or composting bins . Iad a look in the wormery this morning and there are literally hundreds of them.

An even bigger surprise was each of the four finished compost bins has a two inch thick band of thousands of compost worms having a ball just a few fractions of an inch below the surfaces .

This first one is a small fork full of the top layer and the second picture shows me pointing to numerous worm eggs.

Hey Plantoid that looks wonderful, you don't have a worm farm, you have a giant worm festival going on there! Is your wormery outdoors? Do you insulate? I've been searching all over the net to find the best way to insulate an in ground wormery for freezing cold winters and over the top hot summer extremes around here.
(minus last winter as we never used a snow shovel or the snow blower)

Kelijan
I have always worried about having worms in my tumbler because when it gets hot, they have no where to go....THen again perhaps they like it??
With my other compost when it gets hot they go down.
Also my first worm farm was one of those black plastic com posters.
My husband put a whole bunch of sawdust in the com poster on top of all the veggies and lo and behold 6 months later it was totally thick with worms, in fact it was almost all worms.
They go up and down the pile depending on the weather.

:boohoo: I won't be spitting the worm bin this evening, I was going to do it on a table with my garage door open to let the sun inside to drive the worms down into the mounds of compost. I didn't count on the furious rain and near 50 mph wind storm that came through here the same time I planned this little activity. I have other obligations this evening so tomorrow will be pictures and report of sorts. Oh well!

llama momma wrote:Hey Plantoid that looks wonderful, you don't have a worm farm, you have a giant worm festival going on there! Is your wormery outdoors? Do you insulate? I've been searching all over the net to find the best way to insulate an in ground wormery for freezing cold winters and over the top hot summer extremes around here.
(minus last winter as we never used a snow shovel or the snow blower)

LM
I do have a separate wormery on the go as well as the compost bins and it is coming along fine. It is a three foot by 18 inch by 18 inch lidded plastic chest & it is on the office verandah .
It was started with a few worms taken out of the compost bins , had a few more added from the same source and is going great.


As I'm in the UK I'm non too bothered about the worms snuffing it when it gets cold .... the eggs will survive and new worms will come once things warm up again so the compost bins & wormery will stay outside all year round .

I bought some red worms and was wondering if I could put them in a compost tumbler. Any thoughts?

took a closer look inside our compost tumbler to see really whats going on in there......what started out last year with a couple of worms taken from our back yard garden and put into our compost tumbler and forgoten about....

each time we dug in there and moved some of the muck (black gold with worm castings) we found more....

big fat WORMS



and more WORMS moving fast trying to get out of the sun



and WORM EGGS



so as far as keeping worms in a compost tumbler....i would say it all depends on the conditions the composter is kept in.....we are in the PNW so are weather is pretty mild compared to other places....we dont have a lot of long hot days of summer and......

our winters....even though we can get snowed in and be with out power for 9 days or so do to ice storms....i would say that are winters are not that harsh either.......so for our neck of the woods it seems that compost worms like being in a tumbler :drunken:

hugs
rose

How often are you rotating your tumbler? I usually rotate mine every day.

songstriss wrote:I bought some red worms and was wondering if I could put them in a compost tumbler. Any thoughts?

Depends on how you're using your compost tumbler.

If you're using it basically as a cold composter that you turn occasionally to mix ingredients, you'll be fine.

If you're using it as a fast composter, you'll cook your worms. I batch my compost tumbler now, I basically empty it, fill it and turn every few days to mix aerate and cook. It sits were it gets sun and upon opening on a sunny day I can literally feel the heat well up out.

I finished splitting the bin into two and separating the castings.
What a long and tedious job.
The castings weighed over 11 pounds, the worms produced it in 5 months and a week. I didn't do a head count on the worms or weigh them either, after looking at squirmy worms for several hours of hand sifting (w/gloves of course) I just wanted to get it over with! There were so many babies it was impossible to save them all, and the adults were everywhere. I tried to pick out pure worms to weigh them but more often than not castings were moist and lumped around the worms so I couldn't get an accurate worm weight that way. The job took over 4 hours, rather tedious. So if someone says you can make your own free worm castings, I'd have to disagree! Time-wise it is not free but I expect it will be worth it. Here are a couple pictures:
The left sorting bin was from the top of the worm bin so it is lighter in color and has some bedding still in it.

This is the 3 final piles of worms that I flipped over to show them congregating:

And the final picture shows the bucket of castings, it was 11 pounds plus more castings that were stuck with the worms and went back into the 2 bins. I am betting at least another pound of castings from that.

Only you and me would do something like that llama momma, I counted my worms, I even sprayed them off with a fine mist of water to clean them off, I hand picked out the worms and cocoons before I would use the compost out in the garden, and it took forever to do it, but I wanted to know exactly what was going on, how much compost they had made, how many worms multiplied.

But then I stopped doing that, I just started putting food over in one corner for several weeks,something that they would really like, most of the worms would move over there to the food, then I took the lid to my worm bin and took the casting/compost and spread it out pretty thin, leaving a pile of compost on one end, it didn't take long for the worms to move over to the pile of compost to get out of the light. Then I didn't worry about the few worms in the compost that were left behind, or the cocoons, because when I added the compost to my SFGs the worms survived in the SFG and the cocoons hatched out and lived in the SFG.

LLM....sounds like you put in a good day of work those casting look great and 11 pounds of them... wowzers

not sure what we are going to do when its time to get our castings and give our worms a new start.....i really wanted to use the worm castings in compost tea.....but the thought of baby eggs drowing or do they??....... .

maybe by the time we harvest i wont care so much.....

hugs
rose

Plantoid - you are fortunate to have what I would call a large 3 ft set up right outside your door. For my frigid winters here I found information for a 4 foot square box, 2 ft. high that is lined with 1 inch Styrofoam and has removable sides. The bottom sits on soil. The top wooden piece is lined with a moisture barrier material and more Styrofoam. And the worms reportedly survive Toronto, Canadian winters in it. This set up would work here in Ohio. Strongly considering this for a nice Autumn project. I don't mind the worm bins in my house but I would like to add manure and can't fathom bringing that stuff inside my home.

Rose - Maybe after you see thousands of eggs and worms the saving issue is not as great. I saw a video of a guy sifting with gloved hands and he was going so fast there was no way he could save everything. The other option I read is to hold your castings for a few weeks and add some grated carrots, or some melon into an indented line across the top of the castings, the new babies will head right for it then you transfer them back to the bin. At least it gives the remaining eggs time to hatch and you get save more worm kids.

Josh - yes, it was a chore for me, even for the first time "excitement" of harvesting. Before the 4 hours were up I was kinda tired of trying to save every baby and cocoon. But I needed to see how many worms were there! But then I got way more than an eyeful. To last a life time..
Really liking the idea of giving them llama manure (not in the house!)for a richer diet that should result in even stronger fertilizing properties. An outdoor set up will be the way to go in the near future. For now I'll tend to the 2 indoor bins that will eventually help seed the outdoor one. It would be great to have enough castings to make into worm tea for sf and non sf gardening areas, some trees, and the lawn.

Today I started going through my compost to see how many worms I could get to start my own Hilton.
I managed to get over 200 before taking a break until this evening.

That means your worms have very comfy suroundings, congratulations!

llama momma wrote: That means your worms have very comfy suroundings, congratulations!

It was interesting going through the compost to see how the worms congregate in clumps. They seemed to appreciate the walnut half-shells that were there. I picked out about a dozen shells and they all contained clumps of worms in the compost that was embedded in them. They also liked to be buried between the leaves that were only partly decomposed from last year and the clumps of lawn grass that I had put in a short time ago. I had to tease them apart.
The compost comes from my tumbler.

Yes I noticed they like to clump together too. I had a patially filled bucket of worms and compost that I took out of a worm tube. Some time later when I took them out they were heavily clumped along the bottom edges of the bucket.

I finished making my Wiggler Hilton this morning, bottom and first tier, and dumped my 200 worms in it, then spent time this late afternoon teasing out another 400 from the compost bin so now I have a total of 600. I expect another 100 or so from the small amount I still have to tease through.
I dumped those 400 on top of the others and within ten minutes there was not a sign of them. I hope the initial 200 do not mind the newcomers.
The worms ranged in size from about 1/3 inch to three inches with most of them about 2 inches.
How big do they grow? How long do they live? Anyone have an idea.
Sorting through the compost for the worms has really given me a feel for the conditions they like so I am hoping that I will be successful this time.
My Hilton is located on my north-facing deck which is always in shade so I am hoping they will not get too heated during the summer. I can bring them indoors to the utility room so that should keep them happy during the winter.
As I have found out that they like the clumps of grass I put in the composter, I have three garbage bags of dried green grass which should supplement their diet during the winter.
I feel I have done a good day's work today.
The third tier I will eat my leisure.

To answer your questions, if I recall correctly the adult size is about 3 inches. Someone else please chime in if I'm wrong. They are not the biggest worms out there but their cast productions are the claim to fame. I believe the typical life span is around a year but controlled experiments I read about show them to live for 3 years. You can search and also ask questions like that on redwormcomposting.com A wonderful extensive site I go to many times for worm info. Best wishes on your new worm farm! I wish I had started this time of the year in 2011 for a boatload of ready castings this past springtime planting. At least I have plenty for fall planting now. Had to start somewhere

Thanks for your answers, LL. What would I do without this forum?
I do know, I would have to look up the Internet myself. lol.

I have another question:
I checked in on my little guys this morning and some of them are climbing the walls. Is this because I have the lid on and it is dark, or should I not had the lid on and the light will keep them under the bedding?

Roaming worms can be a sign of getting settled into new surroundings, I would be more worried if you had a mass exodus, that is suppose to signal something is very off in the wormery. Since you just added them I would not be concerned. When I split my bin into two I had one escapee who dried up on the bathroom floor. And when I received the order of initial worms back in March I think I had a total of two take off and croak outside the bin. And yes, a light would keep them down but personally I prefer a lid and put little weights on top of the 4 corners of the lid like a flashlight and shampo bottles, whatever I have on hand, just something to weigh it down, encourage them to stay inside.

This morning I checked on my bucket of harvested worm castings from last week. I kept it moist and added a banana peel, and found 25 babies chewing away. That made it easy to transfer the banana peel with worm kids back to the worm bin. I read to use carrot peelings and it did not work at all to attract worms. Then I dug down to the bottom of the bucket and found a couple more adults bunched up. So off to the worm bin they went to join the others. Ican't decide what has become more fun, eating all the lovely home grown organic vegetables and fruit, or seeing how far this worm experience goes!

No sign of roaming worms this morning, and today I added another 350, the last from the compost tumbler. Total 950.
I doubt that I will ever count worms again.
After sifting the tumbler contents, I have about 5gallons of lovely compost, the rest went back into the tumber along with any worms I have missed, so I will see how that goes.

Congratulations on those worm castings!! And no more roaming worms. Or counting! Besides the winning number is the pounds or gallons of castings right? I plan to use some of my castings this weekend with new transplants of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and brussels sprouts. Give the cumbers, squashes, tomatoes and pumpkins a booster of castings too. I'm keeping a banana peel and watermelon rind in the top of the stored castings in the bucket to attract any new hatchlings and older wormies that might still be lingering. Then transfer them back to one of the 2 bins.

These past few days I have been making little packages of conveniece food for the future worm feedings. I have dozens of little plastic containers in which dog food comes in, Purina Beneful, and I am too frugal just to throw them away so I use them for all sorts of things. (Like spaghetti sauce in one-person portions and dog meals on single portions.)
So I decided to fill each one with a little dried green grass, chopped veggies such as chard, kale etc, dried banana peels, egg shells, compost, tea and coffee grounds, and a little water. Allowing them to sit for three days outside, then freezing them for use as and when required. Completed six "meals" and have another ten done today and put outside to start the decomposing before freezing.
I want to get ahead as I don't know how things will go in the winter. Then as needed, I will wrap the meals in damp newspaper and feed my guys.
So now I have several jars lined up containing dried banana peels, dried green grass, tea and coffee grounds, crushed eggshells, etc. As I get the fresh green stuff I will add these ingredients and continue making prepackaged "meals". I am also accumulating quantities of shredded newsprint and egg cartons.

I got a kick out of reading your post. You've got an assebly line all figured out just like McDonalds, but McWormys. Lately, the night before feeding I take some frozen stuff out if I remember, otherwise I put the frozen in the package and let it thaw and age in the bin for eating later on. I also add fresher stuff from under the sink compost container. Almost always add oatmeal or yellow cornmeal for protein too and more eggshells in the food and around the bin.