Worm Inn Journal-02-21-10

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Has Bentley lost his mind!?! ~15 lb of food waste added at once!


I decided to really go off the deep end with my Worm Inn on Friday! I had a three bags of food scraps sitting out on my deck and I figured I might as well see if I could fit them in the system.

I even made a short video about it! As you’ll see, I decided it was also time to start harvesting some material from the bottom.

Before adding all this waste (14.87 lb to be exact) I did some digging around and was REALLY impressed with the incredible abundance of worms in the system. It’s amazing how a population of Red Worms will rise to the occasion when there is a serious quantity of food available. I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone should go out and totally over feed their bins though! I would NEVER do this with any sort of enclosed plastic tub system (unless it was huge, with plenty of air flow), and it may come back to bite me even with this system! We shall see.

As you can see in the image below, I added some peat most and a fair amount of mature compost material over top of all the waste – just to help suppress any odor that might develop while the worms are working on all this material.

So far so good – but we’ll see how things look a little later in the week!
🙂

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Comments

  1. Hi Bentley,

    how many lbs of worms do you guess you have in there? Must be a bunch if you think they can eat 15 lbs of food! I look forward to the results.

    …and all your U.S. vermifans want to know…What happened to Team Canada last night?!

    • Bentley
    • February 22, 2010

    Hi Heather,
    I am definitely pushing this system to the limits, so I likely don’t have remotely close to enough worms in there to handle these materials (fairly quickly) on their own – couldn’t even begin to estimate the numbers. There ARE loads of other critters (springtails etc) in there as well, so that helps, and just the fact that there is so much airflow is certainly having a big impact as well.
    Anyway, it will certainly be interesting to see how big the worm population grows! Perhaps at some point I will harvest the system completely and see what sort of quantity is in there.

    As for hockey…let’s just stick to vermicomposting, shall we?
    ;-p

  2. That VC certainly looked like nice stuff. I am hopeful the system can handle that food mass, that would be amazing.
    ***
    I think vermicomposters do more for world peace than the Olympics anyway, lol.

    • Bentley
    • February 23, 2010

    I have no doubt that the system will handle the food waste – the only question I have is how long will it take? haha
    I’ll certainly provide an update at some point!
    8)

    • WEndy
    • May 17, 2010

    Any updates on how much you were able to compost?

    • sam
    • May 25, 2010

    Hello, I like the look of your bag! can you explain where you got it and/or where one can order such a bag?

    • Bentley
    • May 25, 2010

    Hi Sam! Guess you are new around here. Hehe
    There is a Worm Inn banner over to the left sidebar and a “Worm Inn” red link in the upper navigation. Follow either of those and you’ll end up on a page that tells you where you can order them (wink wink).
    8)

    • Mary
    • October 24, 2014

    Can you put red worms and red wigglers in the same habitat?

    • Bentley
    • October 25, 2014

    Hi Mary
    Red Worms and Red Wigglers are the same thing (typically referring to Eisenia fetida/andrei worms).

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