Hehe, yeah the inns can be a bit tricky. I have a feeling that due to the size of your monster inns, it probably gets dryer at the sides and bottom compared to the active center and top as there's so much volume. With the regular inns, as you have to water more (like how kids get colder quicker than adults) and stuff in general is always closer to the top where the moisture is, it doesn't get so much that way. I've gotten those VC nuggets but always at the sides, bottom is always moist.

I've gone the other way, when it was a bit wet and it was a bit compacted and ending up a bit like toothpaste coming out. Have to hit that middle ground hehe. You can also squeeze them to get things flowing, takes quite a bit of strength though. As mine sits low, I put my knee into the side and pull it into that. Once the mass breaks it can really come out in a hurry though lol.

If you have a cloth hatch at the bottom of your inn, you can feel for moisture with your hand without opening it, if you want to try keeping it always a bit moist while the inn is running. Should feel cooler, touch of dampness and always have some give to it.

Happy to hear the home made inns worked out :)

Nice, Tracy.

What do you use as a food source for all those worms?

I add peat moss to help absorb some of the moisture. I don't have a FT yet, still using a plastic rubbermaid type tote. I push the finished compost to one half of the bin and mix with some peat moss. I then add new bedding and pumpkin puree to the other half of the bin to try and attract most of the worms away from the finished compost and peat moss. The peat moss makes the finished compost slightly acidic, which also helps draw the worms to the new bedding. Works pretty well as long as you don't mind using VC with peat moss. Takes about 2 weeks for the worms to migrate to the new bedding. As expected, there's always some worms remaining, but it does help.

compost1311: Do you use shredded newspaper/corr. cardb./cardb. at all?

Jerilynn, I use our own household scraps, plus the green waste from a local cafe that makes sandwiches and fruit cups, as well as from an Indian-Nepalese restaurant. I was also collecting from a cafe that would give me about 10 gallons of used coffee grounds every day, but that was causing issues, so now I'm down to just the two. Between the two of them, I get approximately 25 gallons and 50 pounds of food per day for the worms. These are composed of:

Cafe:
lots and lots of lettuce
tomatoes
onions
melon rinds
strawberry hulls
stale bread
coffee grounds and filters

Indian-Nepalese Restaurant:
lots and lots of onion and garlic peels
carrot peels
cucumber peels and cores
cooked chick peas and lentils
spiced cooked potatoes
cooked rice
bread dough
tomatoes
cilantro
other veggies

WOW! Very nice harvest. With the menu listed, them should be REAL happy worms....they eat better than me ;)

A couple of questions. I have a bunch of vc to dry out. What type of bedding did you mix in? Also, do you precompost all that food prior to feeding it?

Pete

Hi Pete -

The bedding I mixed in was a combination of straw and pine needles that came from the local Christmas tree lot when it closed down in December.

No, I do not compost all that food - I used to freeze all the food before I fed it to the the worms, but at this point my freezer just can't handle the volume. I've found that once a bin really gets going, the food breaks down at an accelerated rate. When I add the food to the bin, though I put it into a "pocket," I layer it or mix it loosely with the existing bin contents. I think (though I have no proof) that it inoculates the food with the microbes faster and so jump-starts the decomposition process.