Friday, the sun finally came out and the cold weather broke.  A perfect day to check on our invertebrates!  The honeybees were flying busily in and out of their hive and even visiting the crocuses.  But three of our four worm bins were less vibrant.

I'll start out by telling you about the one worm bin that's thriving (pictured above and to the left).  This is our first bin, located at the parking area with a lot of winter sun.  The plywood lid bowed down on one side, so water tends to pool there and seep into the bin.  Sure enough, the area under the pool is full of thriving compost worms, but the rest of the manure has dried out too much to host worm activity. 

I'm sure not sure if the problem with our other three bins is lack of moisture, cold, or both.  We built the lids on those bins at a slant so rain would run off and the wood would last longer.  I started out the winter by saturating the manure and sawdust bedding, but sometime over the cold months, all of the water drained away and left the contents quite dry.  Even after I opened the lid this week and let rain pound down on the manure, there were still lots of dry pockets when I poked around Friday, and very few worms were left.

The three bins in our core homestead are also in heavy shade during the winter, so the contents probably froze solid a few times.  And there are several other differences between our oldest bins and our three newer bins beyond moisture and temperature.  Looking back at old photos like the one to the right, I notice that the vibrant-worm-area is on the side of the bin where I raked all of the finished compost and worms last August, so maybe they just haven't spread beyond home base due to the cold weather?  Or maybe they don't like the horse-manure-in-sawdust as much as they liked the original horse-manure-in-straw?  Or maybe variety is the deciding factor since the worms that went into the core homestead bins were purchased from a different location than the locally-adapted worms that went into our original bin.

Still, moisture is my best guess, and I have a way to test my hypothesis.  As I empty out the core homestead bins to add manure to the garden, I should eventually hit a wetter area near the bottom of the bins.  If the damp zone is full of worms, I'll know water was the difference between the bin that thrived and the bins that didn't.

Mark's already talking about ways to let rainwater soak in without losing the shade effect of the lid in the summer --- perhaps drilling holes at intervals throughout the lid might work.  Other ideas for hydration that don't require running hoses during freezing weather are appreciated.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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