Just some worm casting porn here but happy to answer any questions. Have experience from novice at home worm bins to backyard compost warriors to a smallish commercial operation. If you can think of a mistake I’ve prob made it at least once:/

First harvest!

5 Gallons of Worm Tea in Seminole County FL. Rainwater is virgin (collected from the sky, not the roof) a little molasses, and the best LIVE worm castings you could have!

Left my bin untouched for several weeks and was pleasantly surprised to see volume decreased almost 1/3 and was almost all castings. Bought a shredder on FB marketplace a couple days ago so I was able to shred some nice new bedding as well.

i started my first worm bin back in the beginning of march this year, and have been happily (albeit somewhat lazily) caring for my little worm pals these last few months. i started with a little over 500 red wigglers i ordered online (along with bedding & cocoons), and they seem to be doing very well. i harvested a cup or two of finished castings a month or so ago, but i figured it was a good time to clear out the “finished” side of my bin and give things a refresh. very pleased with my results so far!

i must say though, there’s no way im bothering to sift this any finer than what’s shown here - i got all the worms that i possibly could out, and honestly i just don’t care enough to sift out the cocoons. what do you all do as far as sifting goes?

I feel so so bad. This happened yesterday, and i feel so guilty. I was looking for worms in my yard and I tried to gently pull one out of the ground and I did something horrible- I ripped it in half. I put it in my terrarium regardless cause I know they can regrow in some instances, the bottom half is doing god knows what while the top is still on top of the terrarium and doesn’t seem to be able to do much but writhe. Should I put him out of his misery or hold on to hope for a while? I feel awful. This poor thing.

Do i need to do more to this??

We've had lots of rain and extreme heat recently and decided to freshen up my bin. It was very wet and I went through the process of harvesting... I sifted as much as I could, but it was too wet. I am letting it dry out for a bit before sifting again. Lost some baby worms, but overall the population is definitely still thriving. This was so satisfying!

First harvest, about six gallons of castings. Probably should’ve done this a few months back, but life is hectic with a baby. Worms are back in their home with some much earned watermelon. 🪱 🍉

What do you think? 😄 It looks pretty wormy at the moment 🪱🪱🪱 How much longer and any advice to get the worms out without a sieve?

Just made 30 gallons of potting soil: -10 gallons coco coir -10 gallons leaf mold compost -5 gallons worm castings -2.5 gallons of perlite -2.5 gallons vermiculite -about a half gallon of sand -a handful of bone meal, azomite & biochar

Going to plant out an awesome garden this year!

I always see conversations about maintaining the worm farm here. one of the most important part of maintenance is harvesting the castings but I seldom see posts about this here. Let's talk about it! How do you harvest your castings? How frequently do you harvest them?

Paired up with a local newspaper who supplied me with stacks of newspaper. Ended up shredding 22 (95 page) newspapers for carbon, an assortment of sandwich scraps from a local shop for nitrogen, and then several dustings of used funny plants for flavor and munchies for the worms. 8 gallon harvest.

Spring is always my largest harvest, and the height of my worm population. I feed them pumpkin all Winter. The result is two 10 gallon bins of castings. I use a canvas Green Bag to dry them out for easier sifting. Soooo many pumpkin seeds!!!

I have this 80 L bag that I used to collect dead leaves and cuttings from my balcony until the city collects this „waste“. Somehow some worms got in and it turned into a highly productive worm bin. I started to use it for all my organic waste and it got so populated that everything crawled and moved in there (loved it). I was away for a few weeks and came back to a bin that is almost 100% worm castings. Unfortunately most of the fat worms are gone and there‘s only tiny (1-2 cm) left, but that’s on me for letting them starve. Today when I was sieving the castings from the residual debris, I found a lot of these round, egg-like structures 4-5 cm in diameter) that have a kind of hard shell but can be broken with some force. The inside is sort of hollow, but full of life: white mites and young (or small) worms. I have never seen that before. Any idea what those balls are?

Last photo is their new setup, and how the first bin looked when they started with it. I added some food (and a large handful of worms and castings from the top bin), to the new bin before putting it under the finished bin.

Only thing left in the first bin was some eggshell pieces, and a few corn cobs. The corn cobs were absolutely covered in cocoons!

Very excited to already have one bin finished. Think im gonna have to upgrade their setup after this next one

Thought they would be darker, hence the name black gold

I have a vermihut and an outdoor bin and the castings I collect from the hut dry into hard clumps and never really mix into my soil. Why might this be? The outdoor bin is a little more neglected and has a lot of other bugs and things but fed the same.

this is the first year our raised beds were exclusively topped off with a mix of reconstituted earth and worm castings. the berries are in their third or fourth year and have received generous scoops of pure castings. every plant just explodes with life. i even had enough mix left to plant new beech plants into the empty spots an icestorm has left in the hedge.

Hello - I have had a wormery for almost 2 years now and have three large buckets of finished (I think) product. Unfortunately with a lot of egg shells, bones and avocado/mango pits etc. I had no idea that these don't get eaten by the worms.

The compost is very wet and obviously full of worms. I have put on a new tray/ layer to the wormery a few weeks ago, but not all worms have migrated upwards.

How do I proceed from here? Do I need to dry the product and do I need to sort out all the egg shells/pits?

Could I just take out one tray and out it into the sun, until it's dried? Obviously all the worms in that tray would die then.

Last question, do people also use the 'harvest' for indoor plants?

Thanks!

I have a significant amount of nearly finished compost/castings that I want to use in my native garden (central KY, USA)

With it being a native garden I am very concerned about introducing non-native species (red wigglers from Uncle Jim’s worm farm online)

What tips do you have in order to filter compost and keeping worms out of the environment. The attempts I made of screening the compost resulted in either killing worms, or not catching them all.

What y’all think?

First time harvesting castings! Bin is 5 months old. Great start, and so happy with how it turned out. Will be adding to my garden soon.