Driftless Ramblings » Worms

Four worm experiment update

astoner — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:58:39 +0000

The ‘four worm experiments’ that I setup with my boys are now a week old, so I figured it was time to take a look at them. I didn’t want to really dig through the small ones that I had put together for the boys so I just took the newspaper off the outside and examined them through the clear plastic. I was only able to see one worm in the one, but there seemed to be plenty of evidence that they’ve been at work.
The bin I had put together with the chicken feed wasn’t looking too good. I hadn’t moistened the chicken feed and it just acted as a dry barrier which kept at least two of the worms in the top couple inches. I dug a stick down through one side and put some left overs down the hole, hoping it will at least give some way for the worms to make their way down to the lower parts of the bin.
I wasn’t able to find any worms in my larger bin with the four worms. Again, I didn’t dig through the worm bin to much to avoid disturbing it too much. I added some more food and closed the bin back up. I’ll check it again in another work or so. I didn’t find any cocoons, although I didn’t really expect to find any after only one week.

Allen

Four worm experiment – addition

astoner — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:53:38 +0000

After setting up my four worm experiment and telling my family about it, they informed me that Shrek the Third has a bonus feature that talks about being green, not like Shrek, but Earth friendly green, by making a small worm bin out of a soda bottle. I haven’t actually seen the bonus feature, but thought it was great that it got my two boys interested in setting up their own worm bins. We didn’t have any empty soda bottles around so I helped them setup bins using some old snack good containers.

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

Four worm experiment

astoner — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 18:55:53 +0000

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.