Driftless Ramblings

I have been following Bentley’s blog on vermicomposting over at Red Worm Composting
and thought it would be interesting to try his four worm experiment. I’m not nearly as experienced as him on vermicomposting but I thought the experiment would help expand my experience with a worm bin.

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.