I left town for nearly two weeks and I was super worried about my Worm Inn system since it breathes well and therefore won’t hold moisture as much…I was right! I came back and nearly lost my population…if I had a rubbermaid system, there’s no way that would have happened!

It’s hard vacationing when your worms are at home by themselves hating life in a 100F+ humid basement! I actually think the humidity might have helped them live just a bit longer, though.

I have an outdoor composting bin that has sort of turned into a worm bin on its own; now that it is pretty late in its aging process, I notice it gets a fair bit of white mycelium when left alone, which tends to concentrate in lumps of hard-to-digest bits (packed paper, cardboard, cellulosey-plants, clumps of dried matted grass, etc). Anything the white has infiltrated thoroughly tends to break apart by touch pretty easily and the top layers smell very, very strongly of mushrooms. Only small bits of wooden branches seem to resist this much. More obvious in drier bits at the top but not sure that means anything.

My working assumption is that the fungus is helpful to the final aging process, and I only disturb it when I am harvesting a bit for the garden or checking for really undigested clumps (or just really want to get my hands dirty). The worms seem to love it all and are spread throughout, although sometimes concentrated in pockets (one of the reasons I do muck around a bit). My impression is that the only thing the worms like more are wetter clumps with more ‘fresh’ food, but that they’re eating the fungi and mycelium don’t really represent a problem to them.

So yeah – generally speaking, don’t panic (lol), but at the same time it’s never a bad idea to mix it in before it becomes really well established.

I agree, these growths aren’t always going to be fungi. Aside from the actinomycetes you can also see outbreaks of slime molds sometimes as well.

B.

Does it need to be mixed up? Apart from the other reasons to mix it up – I mean specifically because of the fungi.

It seems to me a pretty normal occurrence and mostly won’t bother the worms at all – in fact, they’re probably eating the fungus, and in the meantime, the fungus will start breaking down some stuff that would be slow to break down otherwise.

Oh, and what looks to be fungi might be actinobacteria, some of which form filaments like fungi – and also the beasties that produce the ‘earth smell’ chemical, geosmin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actinobacteria