I'm curious about your thoughts on this. The commercial systems count on the worms to crawl up to the food source, so that the castings can be harvested from the bottom tray. One harvesting method, the dump and sort, counts on the worms crawling down, away from the light.

My worms seem to eat wherever the food is, of course.

I have a three layer set-up that I am experimenting with right now, but it seems....upside down. In theory, I could turn the whole bin upside down to harvest, but since winter is coming, that would put any harvesting off until late Feb, early March.

The system is like this: bottom layer, as deep as the length of my finger, is castings, egg carton pieces, some paper, and mostly unrecognizable food. Then I have a piece of plastic craft material - the stuff people use yarn on to build houses, etc. Like Aida cloth, only bigger holes and plastic. Perfect size for worms to crawl through. Next layer is where I feed. On top of that is a another layer of paper scraps, also one finger deep.

In the best of all worlds, I'd harvest that bottommost layer, the second layer would become the bottom, etc. Getting to that bottom layer is messy, though.

I'm wondering if I couldn't use the plastic sheets to either make a tray system (crawls up) or a flow-thru system (castings fall down).

Thoughts?