I have had problems with worm survival when I tried putting worm bins or worms themselves in my regular compost (I think it was too hot for them and not evenly moist), with worm beds that weren’t in deep shade, and with worm bins that were kept in the garage (it gets very hot in there in the summer – apparently much hotter than in Jim’s garage in the Mohave Desert).

In the summer, I cut back on how much I feed the worms (I think they may become semi dormant?) and try do dry their environment out a bit, mostly by mixing dry shredded newspaper into their bin material to absorb some of the excess moisture and also by feeding them less wet fruit waste. If the worm box material is too wet or too full of very wet organic matter, in the summer here, the worms will cook in the hot moisture.

Chuck

We live in SE Arizona at an altitude of about 4100 feet. The temperatures here are cooler than Tucson and Phoenix, but it gets hot just the same. We have had humidity as low as 5%…in the summer.

I have worms in three locations: two 18 gallon plastic totes in the office, an 18 gallon tote and a black footlocker on the patio and a windrow out in the horse’s “playpen”.

The bedding in the office totes consists of shredded junk mail, newspaper, corrugated cardboard, and Pepsi containers. The worms in these container feast on food scraps. To keep the smell down and the flies away, we bury the scraps under several layers of papers. The worms LOVE it! We also “flip” the contents of the container every few days to keep everything on an even moisture level.

The two containers on the patio have Euros in them. They feed strictly off horse poop. We thought we lost them all in the recent deep freeze we had, but inspection the other day revealed that most have lived.

The compost worms in the windrow have enough room to move around to warm/cooler areas. When the top of the pile gets dried out, we set the water sprinkler on them for an hour or two. These guys, too, get straight horse poop.

Hope this helps!

It might be worth a look at least.

http://vermicomposters.ning.com/profiles/blogs/growing-my-own-food

Living in the Pacific Northwest (Portland, OR) I deal with the opposite extreme of having a high humidity, cool climate that forces me to deal with excessive moisture. In my plastic barrel FT bin I literally have not added additional moisture (like sprayed water) since October of last year. The moisture from the food and damp bedding I add, plus the insulating layer of dry leaves (12 inches worth) on top of the bedding seems to actually cause excessive condensation.

if you go pick them up, you can take a peek at their set-up, and ask questions pertaining to your specific climate….and maybe share back with us the particulars 🙂

I’m not sure yet in what all situations, but I think cardboard dries out faster than newspaper. Or, it’s always too dry too fast, or too wet and smelly, and anaerobic.

Maybe in this situation,if you don’t have access to compost or vermicompost material, add in a portion of sand and dirt to start up the bin, or on top, to cover the food scraps, so that it retains some humidity from that and from watering? Once the bin is a bit more mature, add vermicompost from down below on top?

I’ve only tried cardboard in an open tray (in my basement in winter which gets really dry -for here around 30% humidity), but the 3 top inches are completely dry an hour after I wet it, and the bottom is soggy and anaerobic and smelling (but the worms love it, they all congregate in the very bottom of that tray in the wet soggy smelly area).

Newspaper, on the other hand, in both open trays and closed plastic bins, seem to hold on to humidity. Except in the worm inn, in my basement, it dries in a very short time, no matter how much I wet it , and I gave up on the first 3-4 inches, it’s just crackly newspaper-concrete. Lower it’s still dry, but if I keep giving it food, it doesn’t seem too bad. If I stop putting food it dries up further down. I wet it thoroughly once in a while and hope that some water trickles underneath.

Also, I had a plastic worm bin outside in the shade and somewhat protected area all spring/summer/fall (here in the great white north- so doesn’t apply to your temperatures). I didn’t add any more newspaper in there after the initial bedding, just put a large piece of cardboard to cover the food I was feeding, fed in grass clippings twice only, maybe some dried corn leaves, or dried plant stems, and left it unattended for long periods of time. I “unleveled” it, so it wouldn’t accumulate water , one side being very slightly lower than the other (mere millimeters, barely noticeable slope) Still, the worms would stay in the soggy wet part and not really go up to the somewhat drier spots… at least when I was looking. There were no holes in the bottom, so no water was lost that way. Lots of ventilation in the cover and top sides. The temps from night to day would vary from 30F to 60F in the fall or from 40F to 95F in spring/summer (and not vary many of those 95 – and a few days only pushed to 100F with humidity)