If you’re a worm voyuer and peek at your worms every other day and feed once a week, the peeking is releasing moisture. So getting someone to feed the regular amount once a week is actually adding more moisture than usual to the bin, as you don’t have the every other day inspection allowing dryer air in.

With a more breathable system, it just needs watering, no feedback possible. If you’ve got someone house sitting, plant watering, would be a easy way to go. You WILL get some very funny looks though when you make the request ;). Maybe hook up one of those plant self watering systems….

If I left them for a month, they would be long gone.

To reward them for…uh surviving… I gave them watermelon rinds to moisten up the bedding and revive them. This weekend I was greeted with gobs and gobs of rehydrated worms. This is good because my nephew is interested in starting his own bin so it’s time for me to build one for him.

I had harvested a few weeks prior to ‘neglect’ and had been feeding very moist foods and had filled the whole bin with bedding, so I suppose that was a best case scenario. Wooden bin 1X2X2′.

I’ve had the tiny white worms, crawling over food scraps, wet newspaper and cardboard, and for me, those are usually pot worms (Enchytraeidae), not baby red worms.

I think others have had springtails but I’ve never seen one of them in my bins, they must not be natives here, or maybe come with manure (which I don’t use).

For the pot worms, I was concerned for a long time, as every time I would look in, my food scraps would be completely covered in those, and I was wondering if that was bothering my worms, and if anything would be left for them, but they’d be around in the bin and looked fine, so I stopped worrying. After about a year, I’ve found less of those pot worms in the older bins, but they do not disappear completely and they are usually the first to appear and populate whenever I start new bins.

If I figure out how to harvest and where to sell these pot worms, I’d probably make more money than with red worms 😉 but everyone is co-habitating well, so far, and populations might rise and fall, but they are still contentedly getting rid of my food and paper wastes.

I live up north, so not as hot of a climate most of the year. It’s very humid though. I have one outdoor plastic bin but I never go look in it . Of the indoor ones, some are covered, some are not. I also have many open plastic containers of various sizes, and a worm inn. In everyone of them, I usually do the same thing.

I have a very uneven feeding schedule for my worm bins. Sometimes I’ll put just a handful of food scraps, and wait a week or sometimes I’ll drop a pound or 2 (bigger quantities in the worm inn– my plastic bins don’t handle the big quantities very well). Sometimes I won’t feed for a couple weeks, sometimes I’ll do it every couple days. Completely random. Population seems ok. It might not be dense enough to sell and replenish fast (if you are doing a worm selling business) but the population and the bin never goes out — so far at least 🙂 And I’ve harvested part of the colony to start new bins as well.

I’ve gone away for 2-3 weeks without feeding, and not necessarily leaving extras before I go, and they seem to like that, as my bins are usually much nicer looking, left undisturbed, instead of me checking in every day. When I come back, I usually find lovely drier denser vermicompost and the worms are down at the bottom mostly, and see lots of activity back on top when I put new food in. I’ve had worms survive on newspaper only for weeks, if not months or more. Usually the closed plastic bins do ok, and can be left unfed longer (I think because of the humidity, and the size) than my smaller open containers.

One thing that most of my bins have, is always a couple inches (most often with even a bigger layer) of shredded newspaper on top. If that disappears, I just add more of that layer. So, even if there is no food scraps, there is a dark, airy cover on top of the dense vermicompost underneath.
I haven’t scientifically compared to a bin with just mature vermicompost and no newspaper cover on top, I only have one of those… so I can’t really tell if this is a factor influencing anything at all…

basically, I’ve left indoor (plastic, covered, and not covered) bins unattended, unfed for long periods, and then randomly feed them, and have not noticed migrations out, or dying out of entire populations. I haven’t individually counted them though.

There are a bunch of little white worms, so I don’t know if these are the next generation or just some other critter species that likes to sit around in compost.

Before reading your post here, Bentley, I actually did what you suggested to Tom and put some fresh scraps in the bin. After two days of not checking on it, I opened the bin just before typing this and no new takers on the scraps. There are, though, just a tonne of these little white worms and it looks like they’re eating the older scraps. Do you think they’re babies? If so, do I need to be more cautious in my feeding frequency or should I just maintain my usual schedule of once every three/four days?