I always put a layer of cardboard on the bottom of my bins. The worms love to crawl inside and they eat it. It absorbs excess moisture,too. When I harvest the bin, I just use a spatula and scoop up any that hasn't been eaten. Hope this helps. Kath

I use old wine corks for bedding on the bottom of my bin. The worms don't eat them ever and harvesting is a cinch. I just dump the whole mess in water. The corks float, the castings dissolve, and I pour the (non-aerobic) tea on my plants.

What are you using as bedding? Coir for example, or sawdust can take longer to break down than paper or cardboard, and glossy paper can be slow as well.
But probably the main culprit in delaying bedding breakdown is lack of air followed by too much moisture at the bottom- do you have plenty of drainage and airholes? If you're afraid of worms escaping, use fabric to line holes.
Also - how long is your bin active? Of course it depends on how many worms you have- but I've found that you're unlikely to get good compost in less than two months, and for a new bi, you can probably safely extend that to three or four months. With good drainage and air in place, there's no reason not to leave the lower bin in place and allow the worms to move between the layers. This also gives them somewhere to escape to if the conditions in the 'active' bin becomes nasty for them. Very important in a smaller system.

Bedding is shredded cardboard and paper.

The bin was active for 7 months. There are still a lot of worms in the lower inch of bedding.

There are air holes in the bottom of the bin. I can't say whether there are enough. The bedding at the bottom is pretty wet.

How deep is your bedding? If it's deeper than 3 or 4 inches, that's probably why the worms haven't processed the lower part. Putting the unprocessed stuff in the new bin will work fine.

Deanna

The bedding was about 8 inches deep. I wouldn't think that would be a problem because the worms have no trouble going down that deep. Right now all the worms in that bin are in the bottom inch or so of the bedding. It seems that is where most of the worms that had not migrated up have been. Everything above that is almost all pure castings.

Most of the time when I fed the worms, I buried the food in the top half of the bin. I'm wondering if that could be the problem. In the new bin the bedding is about 5 inches deep. I try to bury food all the way down to the bottom, but I hate disturbing the worms that much.

That's what happened to my bin too. I've had mine for almost a year and I recently harvested it, and at the bottom of the bin, it's as if the newspaper and cardboard hadn't been touched. For the most part though, most of the binwas thoroughly processed

The worms will hang out where there is still food. The Bedding in the bottom was still feeding them so they wouldn't move.

I got carried away putting newspaper in the bottom of my first flow through. The directions said 8 layers i think i added around 20. When i harvested this spring the bin had been up and running for 10 months. There was still a lot of paper down there with a health community of smallish worms munching on it. The compost a couple inches above the paper was worm free as it was for over a foot above the paper.

When i had totes i did check to the bottom around a couple months into a bin. I just dug down to the bottom each feeding and pulled the paper up a bit. And i ended up drilling larger drain holes 1/2 inch.

Remember that worms don't 'eat' bedding. They wait for it to decompose and then eat the organisms that decomposed it. They do help the process along, of course, by moving through the bedding and spreading those organisms. 'Untouched' newspaper or cardboard at the bottom of the bin would indicate to me that the conditions there were far from ideal- not inviting to worms or composting organisms. Can you imagine leaving a sheet of cardboard in your garden and expecting to find it untouched a year later? Not likely- unless the area was bone dry or sodden wet and under plastic so that the air/ critters couldn't get to it. Review the moisture (too much/ too little) and air at the bottom of your bin and see if you could improve things.
Also, eight inches is actually quite deep for a closed bin. The worms can work there, but they prefer to stay in the top few inches.And to be honest that's where you want them to stay- because that's where they work best.

Has anyone ever used a Tumbleweed Worm Farm Composter? I'm thinking about buying one. Is there a better one out there? Any advice would be very helpful, thanks

Here is a link that might be useful: Tumbleweed Worm Farm Composter

I haven't tried one, but it sounds exactly like my 2 nested shallow plastic storage bins. Why pay the $$$? I drilled LOTS (>40) 1/2 inch holes on the bottom and put a light opaque plastic over the top and don't use the lid. I suppose I could put holes in the lid, but this seems just as good and is easier. When I'm ready, I'm going to put another shallow bin on top and I'll have myself a tiered system like the can-o-worms or guisano or wriggly ranch. (I'm not sure I got those names right.) As far as I can tell, they key is getting LOTS of holes in the bottom large enough so that they don't clog. The other thing is to make sure that air can get to the bottom of the top bin - in other words, don't have an airtight seal between the nesting bins. I put my top bin up on soda cans.

As to the original question, when I start a new flow through bin, I put about 3 sheets of newspaper on the bottom (I don't expect it to be processed), and then 2 or 3 inches of mostly harvested VC. I'm not sure why I thought to do that - perhaps someone else on the web recommended it. It's worked well for me. Just make sure the paper goes a little way up all 4 sides of the bin or you'll get some 'self harvesting' in the beginning from the sides with unwitting passengers in the VC. I have a few desiccated remains to prove that from my first flow through!

What I have decided to do is screen the finished vermicompost the best I can, then break up the undecomposed bedding, which is crowded with worms, and start a second bin. I have some fresh bedding ready to add to the bin to bring the depth up to about 4 inches, and some horse manure for the initial feeding. The only problem is that I don't create enough food scraps to feed two bins. I'm going to have to get friendly with a local horse owner.

I'm very new to this, but am noticing that there are lots of worms down at the wettest part of my coffee-can experiments. I drilled drain holes about an inch up for worm-tea. Trying to maintain a wet-to-dry mix for my small first batch of worms.