The first thing I did was have the boys drill a bunch of holes, don’t know the exact sizes, but somewhere in the range of 1/4 to 3/8, on the sides and bottom. There probably should be more holes but my help got tired or lost interest. We then gathered up the fresh grass and scooped the paca poop. We then layered it into the barrel. I had been hoping to get the barrel half full, but in reality it was full to overflowing. It would probably work better if it was only half full so could get mixed around when the barrel was rolled, but I left it full. The extra grass I sealed into the second barrel that had no holes drilled in it. I did also dump several gallons of water in with the grass clippings and manure. All the water must have gotten absorbed by the grass and manure though since none or very little of it has drained out.

Today (5/26/08), we checked the barrels and the one with the holes in was cooking pretty good. It was composting quite nicely. We actually busted up a couple dozen guinea eggs that I didn’t have room for in the incubator and added them to the mixture. It was actually probably reduced down by about 10% or so already. The mixture will work better if it does get mixed more thoroughly. The boys do enjoy rolling the barrels around. The sealed barrel with only grass has done virtually nothing in the way of composting.

Now that I have some garden planted it sure would be nice to find a way to process the alpaca manure into a more useful compost. I had been just dumping the alpaca manure into the garden and just got it tilled in (no I won’t be doing any root crops this year), but since I’ve started planting in the garden I need to do something else with the poop. What I would really like to get worked out would be to process the manure through a quick composting then process it through a worm bin. I think the output from this process would be a wonderful soil addition, a mixture of vermicompost and regular compost.

I think the next barrel will get used as a big worm bin. Attempting to get it setup as a layering bin, at foot or so of material for the worms and more added on top once that portion has been processed by the worms. I’m just not quite sure how many barrels I’ll need to get going to process the poop from seven alpacas.

Allen

My older boy’s bin was the first one I checked out. The contents had settled down to about half the original size, but I quickly found some worms. The final count in this bin was 2 adults found and 7 juveniles, so they did reproduce some. I did see at least one cocoon, and I’m betting there were more but I wasn’t really looking for them.

The second bin was my younger sons. I was a little disappointed to only find two adults and no juveniles. I think this one may have just been too wet.

These two bins were in the small clear snack food containers so in the process of searching the bins I moved them each over to a bucket. The larger bin should enable the worms to hopefully find an area in the bin that is to their liking.

The final bin that I checked through was my bin which has been in a bucket the entire three months. I only found one adult, but did find 7 juveniles.

I may have set the bins back a little by my digging through them but hopefully they’ll all make a come back and continue to grow. My biggest concern is the bin with only two adults, hopefully there were some cocoons or small worms that I missed.

While doing my digging I did check on my main bin and found it quite active with LOTS of worms and much of the contents in the bin converted to worm castings.

Allen

Allen

Question: Can worms get drunk?

I was actually quite concerned for quite a while, i wasn’t finding any worms. I did ultimately find three so I’m hoping I just missed the fourth and that I threw him back into the bin with some bedding. It actually was going back into the bin much looser so it didn’t all fit back in. The extra I threw into a bucket that I’ve been aging for starting a new bin. What I’m hoping to discover was that there were some worm cocoons in the bedding and that it will self populate with worms. I wasn’t able to identify any cocoons. Ground corn can look an awful lot like a worm cocoon.

I think I’ll let the boys go for a little while before search theirs. At least we didn’t put chicken feed n theirs so they shouldn’t have the fermenting problem.

Be sure to check up on Bentley’s four worm experiment over at RedWormComposting.com. He is the one that gave me the idea for the experiment.

Allen

Allen

Each boy setup their own bin with my help. We tried to layer the different materials so they can see how the worms mix up the layers. The layers from bottom to top were card board, composted alpaca manure, grapefruit peel, shredded office paper, more card board, fiber egg carton and finally some more shredded paper on the top. All were nicely soaked before putting in the container. I also set up an bin for myself using the same container, but instead of the grapefruit used some chicken feed. I didn’t want to use the chicken feed in the boys as I’m not sure how the worms will do with it.

Then came the fun part, searching the existing bin for that specific worm! Actually I wasn’t too particular but the boys were, they had to be just the right ones, which usually meant the biggest they could find. This was actually an educational experience for me. We actually wound up dumping the entire bin/bucket out and sorting through it, hopefully the major disruption doesn’t set it back too far. I do think I finally found a worm cocoon and there were lots of young worms in the bin.

I did convince the boys to only include four worms in their bins, so now I have a total of four different four worm experiments going on. It will be interesting to see how these work in the smaller containers.

We did drill several holes at the top of the containers for air, but the bottom is still closed so hopefully not too much water accumulates there. I was a little disappointed to learn that the bonus feature on the Shrek movie didn’t talk about cover the outside of the container with anything. Worms like it dark so when using a clear container it should be covered for the comfort of the worms. Our containers worked nicely for wrapping a piece of newspaper around them to keep them dark. This will be nice because we’ll hopefully be able to monitor the progress of the bin some with a minimal amount of disturbance.

Allen

My setup is very rudimentary, my first bin is just a 3 gallon bucket picked up at the local bakery. I filled it up with soaked cardboard and some fiber egg cartons and some old fruit we had around the house, I then added apx 180 red wiggler worms I bought at the bait shop. It’s now been active for several months and I have successfully had cocoons hatch because I have found the young worms, although I don’t think I’ve clearly identified any cocoons in the bedding. (As an aside note here, my wife thought I was nuts when I got excited about seeing the little baby worms.)

My four worm experiment bin is similar to my first bin, a three gallon bucket filled with soaked card board and fiber egg cartons as well as some shredded office paper I had laying around. For food I put in some potato peels and old peaches and sprinkled some crushed eggs shells in too.

It would have probably been better to let the bin age longer than the three days that it did, but I was a little impatient to get the trial going. I pulled two young worms and two larger worms to put into the new bin on 12/30/2007. Some reading I’ve done implies that this might not work because there won’t be enough worms in the bin to reproduce effectively. I think it will work, assuming I can maintain a viable bin environment, it will just take longer to reach a critical mass of worm population than starting with more worms would take.

I will try to get some pictures of my bins posted in the near future. Should be interesting to see how this experiment turns out.