Things have continued to move along fairly slowly with my plastic worm bin. Yesterday (when I added food and took the pictures you see below) marked day 55 of the project. Pretty crazy!
Hopefully this at least helps to emphasize my typical recommendation for taking a mellow approach with your new plastic enclosed worm bin. There’s certainly NO chance that I’d “starve” these worms, but it’s during these early days when overfeeding can often cause headaches.
One thing worth mentioning is that I DID add new bedding material sometime between my last update and yesterday. As mentioned previously, it’s never a bad idea to keep this upper layer of bedding topped up since it can soak up excess moisture and just generally help to keep things balanced in the bin.
Yesterday’s feeding was pretty typical. I thawed a bag of frozen food waste – 1016 g (2.24 lb) worth – then chopped it up before adding it to the bin.
Even though it’s been a while since my last feeding (and there isn’t much evidence of that feeding), I thought it might be interesting to add the food in a new location. This is definitely a recommended strategy – especially when you are feeding a little more often then I am! The idea is to create pockets of waste material throughout the bin, added in a staggered manner so that (hopefully) by the time you run out of spots the worms will have mostly processed the wastes in the first deposit location.
I realize my “pocket” may seem pretty big – but keep in mind that I’m probably adding more wastes than would be typical of a more-frequent feeding schedule.
Once the waste materials were added, I mixed in some of the older bedding materials, and then topped up the bin with a decent layer of brand new bedding.
Before I sign off here I should mention that everything is looking great down below. I found loads of healthy-looking Red Worms, and it seems as though they’ve really been processing a fair amount of the original “habitat” bedding.
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Previous Posts in Series
Plastic Worm Bin Follow-Along
Plastic Worm Bin-07-12-12
Plastic Worm Bin-07-23-12
Plastic Worm Bin-08-01-12
Plastic Worm Bin-08-13-12