Hi renowormgirl, welcome to the forum!

I would guess you have stackable bin systems with a drainage bin at the bottom. Generally, you should strive to have little or no leatchate. This is accomplished by adding LOTS of dry bedding with your feedings.

There are mixed opinions on using leachate on your garden. Some dilute it and use, and some dump it. Many others add dry bedding to the catch-basin to absorb the moisture. This damp bedding is then added to the top bin and the process is repeated.

Your leachate will not be so "toxic" that it needs to go down the toilet! The problem with it is that it can vary in composition depending feedstocks. It will also go anaerobic stored in a jar.

For your hydroponic system, how about brewing fresh aerobic vermicompost tea out of your castings? Some people combine their worm system and their hydroponic system to create a vermiponics system.

Good luck with your worm adventure! Pete

During spring and summer, I make aerated compost tea in a 55 gallon drum and use it to water the garden. I get some leachate from time to time and will most likely dump it into the drum. This year I will be using some of the vermicompost as well. All the left over sludge will go on the compost pile and then back to the worms. I add a cup of sugar and a handful of dry cat food to the ACT drum to feed the wee beasties. It brews for a day or two until it's good and foamy. A pump and a hose get it to the garden. This has been working for a couple of years now with no problems that I have seen. This year I will have a couple hundred pounds of VC to spread around as well. I really don't know if my science is all correct, I just keep adding to the system and so far it is working. But, back to the leachate. I believe that my aerated drum will take care of any anaerobic problems and still multiply any good organisms in a small amount of leachate. Like the rest of my system, I'll find out eventually. Live and learn!

renowormgirl you originally posted your question by accident in the Cocoa Shells & Vermicomposting thread.

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/verm/msg0211524225725.html?31820

Could you go edit that post to say something like oops. You'll see the "NEW! Edit Post" link near the top of your post.

Thanks

Definitely no freezing. It will just kill whatever good it may contain. I do not use leachate for my indoor plants, but use it for outdoors, either diluted or not, around my Rhododendron bushes away from the stem. My thinking, they are establish plants and not easy to kill if there is anything wrong with it, rather than tossing it down the toilet.

I have one flow-through bin and 1 15 year old bin that's a rubber horse watering trough, tilted about 2 or 3 degrees with a hose bib on the lower end.
I have it high enough so a 5 gallon bucket sits under the hose bib. I use a aquarium pump to aerate the leachate that drains out of the bin, which I water heavily quite often, and it kills all the anaerobic bacteria in the leachate.
I sprinkle blood meal and bone meal on top of the bin and always keep 6" of shredded cardboard on top. I then empty the 5 gallon bucket into a 55 gallon drum and aerate it as well. Add a little fish emulsion with nitrogen and some 0-5-5 fish fertilizer.
This is excellent for spraying the leaves of ailing plants if you add clear dish soap and it makes a great straight fertilizer.
I also add all of my organic kitchen waste to each bin.
The flow-through bin has a 45 degree tilted board under the bottom where the flow through VC and some worms come through. It has a deep enough border of 2 X 6's that I drain with a 1" PVC pipe that leads to the 5 gallon bucket. I water this quite heavily and the finished CV slides down the board and stays wet enough to harbor any worms that may come through the bottom mesh and I keep the area around the pipe clean and a screen over the top of the 5 gal bucket and leave the worms pretty much alone.
Every 6 months I empty the 1/2 the rubber bin, then spread what's left on the bottom and start over again.
Worm bins are a great place to propagate seeds and plants as well.

Leachate is a good thing to put on plants. It is basically watered-down, benign vermi-matter and composting materials that are teeming with bacterial activity....all good...that will absolutely NOT harm anything you put it on.

It is basically a pretty mild tea concoction that will benefit your plants.

Chuckiebtoo