Hellius

Patience my friend. It sounds as though you have done everything right, or right enough anyway. This is not an exact science. You have provided shelter and food and drainage. Do nothing for the next week. Could you give us a description of your bin?

Dave Nelson

Maybe books should add an aditional step into worm keeping.
The how many worms did I get step.
When worms are removed from the package maybe they should do the whole pyramid sorting thing to get a good look at their worms. A postage scale helps too.

I have no problem with the worms staying all together in
their original bedding material. They should meander on out when they are ready.

A welcome home slice of watermellon rind would be nice.

There's three layers to the entire system. I bought 3 18 gallon plastic Sterlite containers. Bottom is for liquid, and the top two are for the composting material. The top two have holes drilled into the bottoms of the containers for drainage. The very top has a hole cut in the center of the container with a PVC pipe placed through, so I can easily put material into the secondary chamber, and the worms could move down as they wish. Lid on the top has a bunch of tiny holes for air circulation

I cut out centers of the lids of the bottom two containers to allow the system to sit better, and I used plastic I cut out from the lids to separate the material from the drainage holes in the middle container.

Right now the worms are only in the very top bin.

Here's a couple pictures:

pic of the three containers: http://i30.tinypic.com/2yzde9e.jpg

pic of the inside of the top: http://i25.tinypic.com/63ros3.jpg

Couldn't see the pictures but your description sounds real good. Just don't expect too much too fast. I think you will be pleasantly surprised in a couple of weeks.

Dave Nelson

Here are hellius' photos:

Worms take a while to settle.
What kind of worms were they?
Three hundred is not a lot, worm-wise, but they will rapidly multiply. In a few months, if all goes well, you will see scads of them all over your bins. The biggest problem new folks have (and that I still have, being fairly new) is over-feeding. They don't eat nearly as much as the books say they do, at least not at first. Supposedly they eat half their weight every day, but some of that is the bedding that they process, so I figure they eat maybe an eighth of their weight in the stuff I add as food, and the rest in what they think they want to.

Anyway, welcome to the forum, there are wonderful folks here who are very full of worm wisdom, and will guide you well.

Thanks for posting my pictures, antoniab. Sorry if it took heluva long time to load.

Thank you all for the help and thank you for the welcome. I hope to make myself comfortable.

The worms are red wigglers.

Thanks again.

"PVC pipe placed through, so I can easily put material into the secondary chamber" is something unique I have not heard of before. Easier than removing the top bin.

"the worms could move down as they wish" I love this simply because of the thousands of bins that have been sold and instructions writen on the concept of "the worms will move up". I'm not picking on you. I may be picking on them. I will agree that worms move. Which direction, Where and Why I don't know. Why do they crawl out of a bin and onto a cement floor? The microbial activity probably happens under the food material. Harvesting castings is sometimes done by worms moving down through material. I think we should change the direction of all those worm manuals. "Worms you are now instructed to move down." The bins should modified so the food is added at the bottom and harvested from the top. This does seem to be what worms want to do. Thus all the posts about the worms do not want to move out of the castings and up into the new food. I think it was wrong and backwards all along. The moisture the worms want is at the bottom. The dried vermicompost we want is at the top.

What is fantastic is you are a brand new wormer and I'm sort of trying to move in the direction you are already at starting yesterday.

That new roll the vermicomposter around the lawn ball in another post looked interesting too. With holes in it it would be self harvesting. I'm ready to vermicompost in a nanotube aerogel container.