I harvested my worm bin a week or two ago. I took out a bunch of castings to put in my garden and put the rest of the worms back into a new bin with composted horse manure as the bedding. Sorry I don’t have any pictures from that.
I harvested the castings the long, boring, hard way. I sorted everything by hand. I have really neglected the bin for a long time and it really needed to be harvested. It had been about a year since I started it and I had never harvested it!
I’m starting to take a lot better care of my worms now and am no longer neglecting them. When I harvested, I only had 1/2 lb of worms when I started with 1lb. YIKES! Looking at the bin now, there are a ton of baby worms and I’m pretty sure my population is growing. I’m going to keep track of their weight next time I harvest to see how fast they are reproducing. I don’t totally remember when I harvested, but I am going to say it was on 6/6/09 just so I have a fairly accurate reference point and I don’t forget later on.
So here is a look inside my bin:
Inside my European Worm bin
There does seem to be a good amount of fungus gnats, I may try to let the bin dry a little to try to get rid of them as the bin was on the wet side anyhow. There were also a few seeds that had shot up pretty quickly, I just plucked the fruit out of the dirt and let the worms eat it.
Up next I will write about my experiment to see how many worms hatch from a European Nightcrawlre cocoon.
