Coffee Cup Challenge – Day 6

[NOTE: I meant to get this up on May 15th - and have back-dated it accordingly]

I decided I might as well write my first update post for my fun little coffee cup experiment. Before I do that I should mention that my first post should have been (and now has been changed to) “Day 0″, not “Day 1″. Not exactly critically important stuff I know – but easy enough to correct, so I decided to do so!

As you can see from the photo above, after 6 days nothing looks all that different from when we started. Upon closer examination however you can see that we are in fact making some progress.

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The underside of the coffee cup is clearly starting to break down. You can see a decent amount of worm ‘turd’ (aka castings) as well.

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I was surprised to find quite a few worms not only under the cup (next picture down), but actually in the cup and in the rim of the cup.

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Nice little collection of worms below. What’s interesting is that there were far more worms below the coffee cup than below the watermelon rinds! As you can see, I have a VERY healthy springtail population! In fact, all my bins have massive populations of these little creatures! Check out the next pic for an extreme close-up!

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Watermelon rind – up close and personal. I was actually really impressed with my close-up abilities of my digital camera! You can see microbial colonization of the melon flesh (dark dots), springtails, and even a mite. Pretty cool!

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Anyway, should be interesting to see how things pan out over the next few weeks!

Previous Posts in the Series:
Coffee Cup Challenge – Day 0

Technorati Tags: worm bin, worm composting, vermicomposting, red wigglers, red worms, composting, composting challenge, watermelon, coffee cups, mites

Written by Bentley on May 15th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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