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!
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.
Hi Everyone,
On a whim, I created a new video this afternoon. As the title implies, the aim is to provide an overview of the fundamentals of worm composting. It all started with me playing around with my favorite mindmapping software (Freemind). I love using this software since it’s a great way to get ideas out of your head and organized in a “big picture” manner.
This will probably seem like a bit of a dry offering in comparison to some of my other (more visually-appealing) videos, but hopefully it will serve as a good lesson for those just getting started, or thinking about getting started. In fact, I plan to add it to the “Getting Started” page for that exact reason.
Keep in mind that this was created for a YouTube audience – hence my mention of the Red Worm Composting website (obviously everyone watching the video here will be more than familiar with the site – haha).
Something that occurred to me today (as I was digging around in the bin, trying to locate the worms) is the fact that choosing such a large bin might not have been such a bright idea, since it is almost certainly impeding the development of the worm population.
Despite digging around for a while, I was only able to located one or two worms (still not sure if it was the same one twice), and found no cocoons at all. It is safe to say that the worms have reached adulthood by now, but I just don’t think they are having a very easy time locating one another.
I still haven’t added any more food to the system since setting it up. I may do so fairly soon though since there is very little in the way of recognizable food waste left in the bin.
I’ll likely start looking for cocoons a bit more often now that I know that the worms are mature. I will also see if I can confirm that all four worms are still present in the system as well.
Seedlings starting to emerge in the vermiponics bed
I guess it’s update-post day here on the blog (haha). Just wanted to let everyone know how the vermiponics system was coming along. As you can see, we’re starting to get some seedlings emerging in the bed! I wasn’t sure how quickly this would happen (or how quickly these plants typically germinate), but 2-3 days seems not too bad to me!
Radish Seedlings
Lettuce Seedlings
Spinach Seedlings
The garlic plant has grown a little as well!
I’ve been curious to know how the worms are doing these days, but have resisted the urge to poke around (at least until the plants are fairly well-established). I have a sneaking suspicion that they are doing just fine.
