I have no good advice since I am pretty much a newbie but wanted to say that I'm sorry! What a mess to deal with. Hopefully, that was the only mess that Alex left you with!

When I harvest a bin, I always save the unprocessed stuff and other "junk" in a plastic shoe box. Somehow there's always worms in it. I left one outside without a lid on and it rained. I thought they had all died because it was full of water. I dumped out the water, and there they were, just fine. I hope this happens for you.

Kath

I have an experiment running now with just 4" of cut cardboard in the Tote with worms. This gets water harvested every other day, meaning that I dump 5 gallons of water into this tote and the resulting tea is saved and dumped repeatedly. These worms (approx. 2 pounds) are fat and happy at this time. This new experiment is based on 'The Worm Book' by Nancarrow and Taylor. I do not think that a dunking in oxygenated water hurts composting worms at all. In fact, with temps here in NC in the high 90Âs, I think these washed worms are the coolest and happiest of all my worms.

Steamyb, interesting! How often do you water harvest the worms? Daily?

These worms are water harvested every other day, which means 4-5 gallons of microbe enriched water floods the tote. After about 4 rinses, the water is a rich brown tea color and then used on my bonsai or to water the big box or the flow-thru. So far I have not added any more cardboard, but I have added more worms. Any worms that go walk-about into the bottom of the flow-thru, I have added to the Water Harvest Tote. The VC that falls from the flow-thru wins another trip thru the flow-thru.

Makes me want to start a new thread.

"Are Your Worms Cooler Than My Worms?" :-)

Worms and Water are where it is happening now.

Certainly oxygen rich water does not hurt worms.

The concept of a bin being too wet is in the attic now.

Much research to do in this area.

steamyb: I have a small vermicomposting system not ready for the world wide web yet but I need a worm system design somebody, or a few somebodies, to look at it first and advise me.

~ WormThumb@hotmail.com
Please and Thank You.

thanks to all the well wishers~ you ended up being correct, a great many of my EF's came thru, and in fact one of the largest EF's I have ever seen was in the bin when I went to feed them. I have to do a count, as I have a bunch of fruit peelings (from an organic tree) as well as some blackberries which were too long in the fridge. It seems it's mostly fruit this month, with a few onion peelings and a lemon throw in.

But I have pounds of these, and only a pound plus a bit of worms, so will have to figure out how to prepare and freeze the peelings. We have had such humid weather it's kept the temps down, too, but we are now entering a 98F+ period, I think for August, so I know I can freeze the peelings after pureeing them, right?

Anyway, the colony is living large, and all the paper stuff has gone, and I now have to make more.

this wormherding is hard, ain't it?

I've said it before and I'll say it again:
Moisture levels for EF's are 50%-90%.
I raise in two rubbermaid-type bins without drainage holes. My bins are consistently...very wet, and I've never regretted it.
Even, the last time I harvested the castings and when I got to the bottom, there was an inch of standing water with bunches of worms in it, and they all came out fine.
I'm sure this may rile some people, but the concept of the 'too wet worm bin' is a myth that should be put to bed once and for all.

Shaul

"They" say wrung-out sponge wet, but my mental image of the right amount of wetness is a sponge as full of water as it can be without dripping. This level works best for me. Wet is good, just not so wet that there are no capillaries in the soil for air.

I'm glad to hear that "wet is good". I'm new to vermicomposting, and although I've read everwhere about the "wet sponge" test, all of the pictures I've seen of worm bins look much wetter than a wrung out sponge. I think alabamanicole's image fits better.

I think all that wet sponge stuff came about for use with normal compost heaps. Same with the homage paid to carbon/nitrogen ratio.

Our worms prefer a wetter environment and don't pay a lot of attention to the C/N ratio, their maths skills aren't great as they don't have fingers to count on.

Yes to the sponge full of water side as opposed to wrung out sponge.

Glad about the C/N non critical.

Fermentation is what we are trying to avoid.

Because... ________ . (fill in the blank)

Because we don't want the worms to get drunk?

"Our worms prefer a wetter environment and don't pay a lot of attention to the C/N ratio, their maths skills aren't great as they don't have fingers to count on."

Yeah and without eyes, they haven't read the books on how they are 'supposed' to respond.

My guess is that fermentation changes the ph.

A few years ago I fed worms Bokashi directly from fermentation. Every thing was great for about 10 days. The fermented food scraps would magicly disapear in what seemed like hours.

I was very careful not to overfeed them this new food but soon there was trouble. Many worms began to die with String Of Pearls. My thinking is the change of ph did them in.

I've read where people feed bokashi to worms, but never have I read if/how they treat the bokashi first. I'd love to feed bokashi to them again. There are many hungry mouths here making many scraps and the speed in which the bokashi was devoured shocked me. Really cool.

Anita