Discover the key to a frustration-free worm bin

hey guys it's Ann welcome to my home farming worm Channel if you're looking for a warm friendly vermac compost community that helps each other through the frustration of Home worm farming you are in the right place today we're going to have a bit of a worm talk and talk about the five tips for success in worm farming so first of all what we're going to do here is we're going to give blue a complete once over we are going to get a bit of a more Harvest out of here and then we're going to make sure this is all fluffed up and get all of the oxygen in here to make sure that the moisture is equal so I can sift it later then what we're going to do is we're going to come through and evaluate the entire bin and then finally we're going to feed him up so as I'm talking we're just going to kind of go through all of those things that I particularly find frustrating about worm farming that I have gone to other people for help for well it looks like we'll get a little bit of a harvest over here but honestly I have low expectations um I've been trying super hard to get all of the uh moisture to stay high since the furnace is bone going all the time so I may have actually shot myself in the foot a little bit here with all of the plastic coverings and increasing the moisture so we'll see for all of these overs I'm going to put those in a bucket and give them some water before I put them back in the feeding end so that maybe the worms and their friends have a little bit better of a chance getting them consumed and because I did put the red wiggler Harvest on top of here I am going to be seeing more worms so I'm starting to think that if that red wiggler bin requires me to dump things on I'm not going to do it at this end anymore I'm going to do it in the middle that way uh the worms will have a a better chance of getting over cuz right now I'm actually seeing quite a few worms at this end where I don't normally see them and it has been about 2 weeks since I put all of those uh red wiggler castings up here on top so if you are wondering about these screens I do have them linked below I've had them for over 5 years now and they show no sign of uh degrading at all uh that is one of the great things about them they're made for gold panning so I think they're probably meant for tougher stuff than little old worm castings [Music] so it looks like we still have quite a bit of large items here the worms need to get through but that is totally fine I'm fine with putting it back at the beginning and then giving him a greater opportunity or longer time to uh finish that up that's fine for me and looking at the red wiggler castings when we harvested I would not have expected this many larger chunks in here it looked pretty finished so maybe I need to slow down the red wigglers a little bit in how much I'm harvesting them because if there's this many big chunks in there then it's likely they weren't ready yet but I have mentioned how impatient I am we're going to talk about the five things that will help you through many of the frustrating problems that you will come across in your worm farming Journey it doesn't matter if you're a beginner or you've been doing this for years um everybody to a degree has many of the same problems uh and you don't really get to uh solve your problems you do get to mitigate them one of my largest problems that you're seeing right now is that I am a impatient person I tend to apparently Harvest faster than I should when there are still larger food chunks around and so then basically everything kind of ends up going back to the beginning and has to get processed again because I was impatient and didn't give it enough time but you know I kind of give myself a little bit of Grace here and realize that um I am who I am and the worms are going to do what they're going to do so we do the best we can with each other but I suppose if I had to give myself a a better trait I would say to be more patient with that patience I would also say that your expectations are one of the things you need to manage in order to make yourself successful you need to find out what success looks like for you in my case getting rid of all of my food scraps is a goal and then I also want to have nice worm castings so my expectations are a little bit faster than what the little worms can do so you know I'm not I'm not mad about it but that's not going to apparently stop me from year after year maybe harvesting things a little faster than they should be because I'm impatient to get those castings so that's one thing kind of give yourself a little bit of Grace and then also you have to realize that the worms are going to take as long as they take the temperature changes the moisture changes the population changes and honestly you just have to roll with it and there's to a degree nothing you can do about it so it doesn't do you any good to get frustrated or concerned about it like your worms aren't harmed in any way but basically you have to be patient so the person who just harvested too early all right so what we're going to do now is I'm going to completely overhaul this and uh try and get the air completely mixed in here so these things will dry a little bit more evenly I did not do this last time I just did kind of a partial fluffing last time and then I put these red wiggler castings on top and well that didn't actually help anything cuz now I've got stuff that is wetter on top and stuff that is drier on the bottom so this all needs to get mixed up so that I can get to uh having a a better harvest the next time this time of year if it was summer I might put a fan down here and get that blowing but this time of year I do not want to tempt fate and put any kind of a uh situation down here that is going to increase the drying so we're just going to take this uh slow and let this dry out on its own as it does naturally but I probably will only have one half of the bin covered with plastic now the furnace must not be going off quite as bad as it did in previous Decembers that's usually my part you know when it gets to be December that's when I know with the furnace that I have problems keeping the worms hydrated in or the bins hydrated anyway anyway so that comes to my next Point as far as how to be successful with worm farms moisture for the most part worms are 90% moisture and if you can't get that right you're going to have problems you're going to have problems with the worms being healthy you're going to have problems with them digesting the food the ecosystem of the bin is not going to be happy um so the more you can keep the moisture at ideal condition where you're trying to feed the worms and are expecting them to breed that's where you really need to focus all of your efforts on your your moisture control like right here in this part here near the tape I am trying to dry this out a little bit so I can get a harvest the goal is to get these worms to leave so if they're not comfortable then they will leave and go down here where there's better moisture and better food which brings me to the uh other half of the moisture where you want to keep it wetter uh according to the books and I have links below to the books or some of the books that I've read that are available on Amazon and basically worms like to if they're breeding they like to have it at like 80% moisture which is pretty high it's it's not quite mud ball but it's it's kind of a little wetter than this so if you're really trying to kick breeding into high gear making sure that there is more than enough moisture for them is going to be key so depending on what you're trying to do is what you're trying to control the moisture for so at this end of the bin I'm trying to dry things out to make the worms leave on their own and then when we're getting down to this end then we're trying to keep it at a higher moisture so that the worms continue to breed and also um their metabolism is such that they want to eat more food so right now this moisture here in the middle is really darn good which is why the worms are not leaving so I will probably quit babying this end of the B and uh let this dry out a little bit more naturally but I am going to continue my efforts to maintain the moisture in the part of the bin where I feed so everything smells really good and one of the reasons that it smells just nice like uh a forest or potting soil or your garden after a rain is because of oxygen and that's the uh the next point that I wanted to get to as far as things that will make your life easier reduce your frustration a lot of people don't agree with my fluffing here they're saying I'm being rough on the worms and they're not going to like it but this is an artificial ecosystem and these worms um you know they don't have all the benefits that you know wild worms have as far as choices they're stuck in here so I have to help them out in any way that I can and making sure that there is enough air in between the particles of the bedding and the semi-finish castings the better the worms will be because they breathe air just like we do only they do it through their skin so that combination of air plus moisture is what helps the worms and it also helps the microbes in the bin the good microbes that we want for the worm bin are aerobic organisms that means they need oxygen so if I let this bin sit and settle and compact it could become anerobic meaning without oxy oxygen and so the bacteria and the fungi and the worms and all of the mites and springtails um potor worms Oh my uh they wouldn't be very happy they would leave or die okay here we are at the second half of the bin and at this point we're going to expect to see much more moisture and lots more worms so going with that same you know idea that we want to keep air in all of the areas here I'm going to continue fluffing and moving things down so per the wedge method and I'll put some diagrams up there for you um but per the wedge method everything's moving all the time every time I come in here I am taking things that were fed two or 3 months ago and I'm moving them down here so that the worms and their friends can finish up and then also it can start drying out and get to you know a moisture that can be possibly sifted in two or 3 months now I was in here I think four weeks ago and one of the people asked me in the comments they're like do we have to wait four weeks no for me that is the preferred interval for my bin and my personal schedule has really very little to do with the worms it has more to do with me and my life and what I have time for so I feed every four weeks or 3 weeks depending and in order to make that work for the worms I have to feed them a combination of slow food and fast food so when you think of fast food for people you're just thinking hamburgers and french fries and slow Food for People is you know pot roast and homemade soup and things like that that takes hours and hours well in our case in the worm's case fast food means something that is ready to roll they can pretty much get into it as soon as it's fed it doesn't need to be pre- broke down by bacteria little worm ball good worms doesn't need to be pre- broke down a whole bunch just needs uh the worms to go by and slurp it up so you're talking like things like cucumbers and pumpkin and melon those sorts of things are already super squishy full of water and if you've ever left any of that out on the cabinet after it's been cut open you know they mold very fast so that is what we're talking about fast food for the worms things that they can get into very quickly without help then when you're talking about slower food you know you could be talking about apples um apples often take three or four months especially if they haven't been Frozen and uh I'm looking at what is some wheat kernels or wheat berries and it looks like they've eaten everything else but these wheat berries are there I'm going to call those a long-term food they've been in there a month and they honestly don't look like they have uh changed at all we put in some of those dried grains and and that is apparently going to take them a good long time I did come by and follow up with kind of a u a wet feeding where I put some squash on top of the uh the berries off camera I think a couple weeks ago to try and help with the moisture because as things mold it pulls the moisture out and so keeping dry food like grain or rice or cereal whoa whoa whoa holy cow uh Houston we may have a global worm ball it just isn't stopping look at that yeah wow and even though I added a whole bunch of extra moisture for this grain they're still not finished with it they're still working looks like they've spent more time working on the paper than they did this grain and the grain does smell a little fermente so what I'm going to do is I'm going to break it up I had fed it and kind of a layer um it's kind of one of those things you have to live and learn with every kind of new food that you feed and there was coffee beans and wheat berries hadn't fed that before so I didn't really know what to expect they're certainly enjoying it though look at that being good for the camera so that's one of the the kind of getting to the next Point here is that in the event that that you do feed super slow foods like wheat berries apparently you really need to offset that with a huge amount of bedding which I do generally whatever I feed the worms I feed twice as much if not more of my prepared bedding or dry bedding if it's a super wet feeding so continuing to flip over this last feeding and so if you're noticing I'm at this central line here this is where the old food goes to get finished up and I'm going to do my best to mix that in with some castings so yeah there is uh lot of long-term food so back to my point the longterm food is what's going to sustain them over the course of longer periods of time so what whether you're like me and you have become very very busy and you can't get down here every week to feed all four of your worm bins then you know giving them a mix of fast food and slow food is what's going to help the worms be happy and healthy in between so the worms have eaten all of pretty much all the tomatoes and the peppers and I don't even remember what this was but they've got one tomato left here and that's probably because I didn't break it they're done with the corn but you can see there's mycelium in here that's totally fine if you see mold in your worm bin that's a Helper but yeah I'm just going to whoa I broke up a worm ball sorry guys um but I'm going to break up all this food and make sure that it gets good contact with castings might even back fill a little bit here and then now we have our room at this end right down here for our new food and new bedding so first things first I'm going to put all of those uh leftovers from the the siftings down here in the bottom that's all nice and wet then I'm going to put a two gallon bucket of dryish paper in there this does still have coconut quar and a little bit of sand but this should be a good base for the food I'm going to give them today okay so what they're getting is tomatoes again let me break that so they can get into it looks like some pizza crust some onion some orange some lime tea bags and uh so this is what we're talking about fast and slow food these oranges will take a good long time Tomatoes will be gone pretty fast pizza crust will definitely be a long-term food um I don't avocado pit maybe um or two those have all been frozen and thawed again some sweet potato so not a really big feeding this time but we are going to give them a little bit of CC sprinkle and uh put that on the top and then give them some more bedding all right so not going to do as much as I did last time I think I gave them two scoops of this maybe put some below where there's water that way maybe it won't cluster together and poof up as much okay then they're going to get four gallons or just two of these little buckets on top of this so that is a a good good amount of paper to put on top of there and then because there is so much food here I'm going to actually give them some more bedding on top of this before I cover it if there's anything left I can always scrape this off later but it has been my experience that when they have a lot of food left over when I move things over they do need a bit of a buffer in the way of betting so okay and this is the five things that will make your life with your worm bin much less frustrating number one manage your moisture whether you're doing it with your food or your bedding make sure that the business any of your worm bin is like 70 to 80% moisture and that will make the worms happy and be able to eat as well as breed the second thing make sure that your ratio of bedding is correct it is much better to have way too much bedding than not enough always air on the side of more bedding it's actually food too so if the food is not available the worms always have their bedding to eat number three make sure that there is a mix of fast food and slow food so that there's something immediately available for the worms and their buddies to eat that doesn't require a lot of breakdown and then also some slower food like apples or seeds and nuts or grain that's going to take a good long time and will be there for them when the microbes have pre- broke it down for them number four air basically you need to make sure that all of your aerobic organisms are not being exposed to an anerobic environment so fluffing up the bin always a good idea and then lastly manage your expectations um I've showed you that I am a very impatient worm farmer I tend to harvest a little bit early but then I put things back but you just need to make sure that you're being patient with the worms and patient with yourself if things don't exactly go out planned all right guys well if you like the 55-gallon bin I have a playlist that I can put right over there and if you've already seen that then over there on the other side YouTube is going to put up a video it thinks you will like what to watch next all right guys thanks for hanging out with me and my worms and everybody have a good day

Channel: Plant Obsessed

Views: 5,420

Keywords: 55 GALLON BARREL WORM BIN, vermiculture, worm farming, worms, compost worms bedding, how often to feed worms, worms bin moisture, worm composting, vermicomposting worm bin, Worm castings, Worm composting at home, Worm farming, new worm farmers, feeding worm bin, worm fertilizer, cheap worm bin, red wigglers, blue worms, worm castings, worms eat mold, worm compost castings, Worm castings storage, asmr, listenable, dy worm bin

Id: Xctl03EkTUs

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 17 2023