Worm Inn Journal-02-21-10

Has Bentley lost his mind!?! ~15 lb of food waste added at once!

I decided to really go off the deep end with my Worm Inn on Friday! I had a three bags of food scraps sitting out on my deck and I figured I might as well see if I could fit them in the system.

I even made a short video about it! As you’ll see, I decided it was also time to start harvesting some material from the bottom.

Before adding all this waste (14.87 lb to be exact) I did some digging around and was REALLY impressed with the incredible abundance of worms in the system. It’s amazing how a population of Red Worms will rise to the occasion when there is a serious quantity of food available. I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone should go out and totally over feed their bins though! I would NEVER do this with any sort of enclosed plastic tub system (unless it was huge, with plenty of air flow), and it may come back to bite me even with this system! We shall see.

As you can see in the image below, I added some peat most and a fair amount of mature compost material over top of all the waste – just to help suppress any odor that might develop while the worms are working on all this material.

So far so good – but we’ll see how things look a little later in the week!

Written by Bentley on February 21st, 2010 with 7 comments.
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VermiPonics System-02-19-10

As you can see, the plants have continued to grow in the vermiponics system. One correction to mention right off the bat though – in my last post I mentioned spinach seedlings coming up. As it turns out, those were actually more lettuce seedlings. The spinach has in fact been very slow to emerge, with only a few seedlings visible at this time.

I get the feeling my lighting set up isn’t powerful enough since the plants are looking a wee bit spindly. I AM using fluorescent “grow bulbs” but they are also very old, so maybe it would help to replace them. I should obviously start thinning the plants out as well since the overcrowding certainly isn’t helping the situation!

I’ve been digging around in the bed a little bit just to see if I could locate some worms. While I haven’t had much luck in that department, I did notice that there are a LOT of White Worms (aka “Pot Worms”), and the springtails seems to be doing very well also. I am pretty sure the worms are doing just fine – but I’ll have to wait for a while before I can do a real assessment.

Written by Bentley on February 21st, 2010 with no comments.
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