Anyway – try the aerated scrap/bedding aging approach, and keep a closer eye on the worms. You should do just fine.

Strange that you haven’t see an increase in worm population – where were the worms purchased from? Hopefully you ended up with the right ones!
(If not, it could certainly explain why they might disappear)

My feeding usually went like this: open the bin, see if the worms are rummaging around in the last feeding, and if so, add a handful or so beside it so they can keep on moving around the bin. After adding the new stuff, I’d usually check in on it after a few days to see if I should feed again or wait until a full week had passed from that last feeding. Once it seems like a routine has developed with the frequency of how often they seem to be processing the waste, I go by that schedule and usually only check when I feed them, which has been around once every 5 days or once per week.

I’ve never got my worm population to increase to the point where a second tray has been added. As far as bedding in the first and only tray is concerned, I don’t intentionally mix it up into their food, but when I scrounge around and check in on them, the bedding tends to mix in. I should be doing more mixing of the paper with the food scraps?

The WF360 has been indoors in my kitchen with a fairly steady temperature of around 20*C, sometimes as warm as 26 when I’m baking, or when my radiators really kick in on those blustery winter days, but that’s not too often.

That’s definitely a good tip that I’ve never heard before about airing out my scraps and adding bedding to them before putting them in my bin. I’m hoping to take a master composter course here in Winnipeg in the spring, so hopefully I’ll learn more and stop accidentally killing worms. I certainly feel bad each time it has happened, but I also seem to be learning more. To be perfectly honest, I’m very much looking forward to having my own yard in the not-too-distant future so I can just compost outside.

To answer your question – yes, it is conceivable that you could kill worms with really foul waste materials. Generally speaking, you will however see that some are dying or at least stressed out before you end up with a total bin meltdown.

Have you been adding a lot of this foul stuff then simply letting the bin sit for quite awhile without checking on it?

Have you been keeping lots of bedding in each tray as habitat material as well (i.e. not just a covering over top)?

Where have you been keeping this system? Outside? Inside? Any temperature fluctuations?

What I would definitely recommend, moving forward, is to mix your wet food scraps with bedding materials, and make sure they are getting a decent amount of air flow before they get added to your bin. They really shouldn’t be foul smelling at all.

I’ve figured out ways to “get away with” adding these sorts of wastes to my systems – but it not a practice I recommend for new vermicomposters.

Then I searched for what you had to write about the 360, and the Worm Inn journal from Feb. 8 struck me: I used to always freeze my waste too, then let it thaw in my fridge, then feed it to my worms. But you mention in this journal entry that the foul stench and liquids are harmful to the worms… I’ve been dumping this stuff directly into my bin, figuring that it should be no problem. Perhaps this is the reason they keep dying?

My moisture level is just fine and I use a lot of paper scraps on top. I could probably cut the wastes into slightly smaller pieces, but I’m definitely not over-feeding them. In my mind, nothing can explain my worm disappearance except this latest thought about the putrid-smelling and liquified rot I’ve been dumping into my bin.

Any thoughts on this?