Worm Factory 360 | 2-14-12

Bentley
#4. February 15th, 2012, at 3:26 PM.

THUAN – You could certainly use this in your garden, but yeah it won’t be quite as potent as material that’s been processed (and likely re-processed) for a longer period. Just the fact that there is so much cardboard in general, probably means it won’t be quite as nice as something like a finished manure vermicompost.
I’ll be sure to test it out and let everyone know, though!

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RICH – Congrats on the success with your trench! I agree that it’s fun to try different set-ups – educational as well!
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BOB – I don’t blame you for being confused. The term “over-feeding” is pretty hard to nail down at the best of times. What exactly does it mean?! Unfortunately there is no simple answer. One thing I should point out here, though, is that as you become a lot more experienced as a vermicomposter, you start to develop a certain “feel” for what a given system can handle. It’s VERY important to look at how I arrived at adding that “fairly large amount of food” – it certainly wasn’t the first thing I did. I started by adding small amounts and watching what the worms did with it. When they showed they could handle more, I added more.

Where newcomers often get in trouble is attempting to add food (often materials that haven’t even been optimized at all) based on some sort of formula (eg “I have 1 lb of worms so they should be able to eat 1/2 lb of food per day”), or just on the assumption that the worms can handle whatever they throw at them.

Hope this helps to clarify.