Worms eat food scraps after only five days
The worms have found the food
scraps! I know
that worms work a lot harder when they're not constantly being poked
and prodded, but I couldn't resist lifting up a few leaves and peeking
into the bin Wednesday to see what was going on. I don't know how
the worms found the food so fast, but they were already wending their
way through some hamburger buns and vegetable scraps --- success!
If
you look closely at the second photo, you can see mold growing on the
hamburger bun. Although mold on your food is usually a bad sign,
in the worm bin it means that enough microorganisms have colonized the
scraps so that your worms can feast. I wonder how long it will
take for the worms to break these scraps down into castings?
Our parking area, a
third of a mile from the trailer, used to just be a spot I passed
through. Lately, though, it has turned into one of my favorite
places to pause and commune with the worms. With big piles of
wood chips, a compost bin (more on that in a later post), and the worm
bin, I might have to
rename the spot Biomass Central!
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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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I know that you haven't had this bin that long, but I'm curious if you are able to know if you have worms escaping through the drainage holes with the compost tea as the food gets consumed or when the bedding is compressed after breaking down. (From your photos, it didn't look like you could open up the section where the compost tea is dripping from the bedding section.)
In my small worm bin (2 buckets) in the garage, I had to remove the top layer of newspaper bedding that gotten really moldy. It was cold enough that the worms were not active enough to consume the food that I had left. The next day I separated the worm bucket from the compost tea bucket and half of my worms had crawled through the drainage holes into the compost tea. I suspect that removing that much bedding material all at once made them want to dig deeper where it might be "warmer". Luckily I found them before they drowned.