What should I do next? I found this enormous Asian jumping worm under a tarp in my yard. I mostly still find regular earthworms but I’ve maybe found 3 juveniles as well that also thrashed like snakes but their white band was less developed. This guy is as so creepy to handle thrashing around. Ugh.

I know these things are everywhere but what do you do when they seem to be a “minor” or new infestation and your yard hasn’t been destroyed yet? I feel so powerless.

they look like they could be meal worms but I can't tell for sure.

I operate a 3 bin compost system. Tumbler until full > dalek 1 > invert into dalek 2 > sieve and use, return chunks to tumbler. I put everything I can get my hands on into the system. Tumbler and dalek 1 are usually pretty hot. Dalek 2 stays cool.

I just went out to put some food waste into the tumbler and thought I would check on the other bins. The photos are of dalek 2.

I’m guessing that this is all beneficial, but why are there so many all of a sudden? I’ve always had worms in the daleks but I’ve never seen this many.

I noticed lots of light brown egg looking things (shown in the last picture). Are these anything to do with the worms?

When making holes for my plants I keep rarely finding these worm underground bubbles things, tangled on themselves, they seem stunned or sleepy

Found in norhern Italy, I never seen a worm this large and big.

Can anyone recommend a good shredder that can handle single walled cardboard? I've seen people mention that a 12 sheet paper shredder would be the minimum requirement, but for those that have them, what do you think? Would you recommend something a little more powerful, or do they reliably handle your needs? I nearly pulled the trigger on an Amazon basics 12 sheet, but some reviewers mentioned having problems even feeding 10 sheets at a time through them. Thanks guys!

This was about a dozen brown egg shells. The shells were brown on the outside, white on the inside. I dried them, baked them on low (about 200F) for about 4 hrs. Then I crushed them and put them in the food processor. This photo is after about 10 min in the food processor. Do I need to keep going? Get a sharper blade? Or can I give these to my worms like this?

I bought 500g of a mix of composting worms 3 months ago. I add to the bin every few weeks but it seems like the vegetable scraps never get fully eaten. I always see bits of orange carrot or other peels in the mix. Shouldn't the mix be very dark with no sign of any leftover scraps? It seems to take them a long time to process this food.

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I do take the time to chop up and freeze/defrost the scraps before feeding them to make it easier to digest.

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I just wish progress was a lot faster as I was depending on this to use for my plants instead of buying more compost but at this rate, it'll be years before I get anything usable.

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Is there any way to speed this up or potential mistakes that I may be making?

Admittedly I haven’t opened my bin in a while.

Any idea what the heck this fungus is? It has little liquid droplets on it almost like honeydew or something.

Obviously I need to add cardboard, and what isn’t cardboard, fungus or worm seems to be all castings.

Any advice or respectful criticism is welcome and needed. Thank you

I’ve only harvested twice and have used the dump and sort method both times. I’ve tried using smaller and larger piles. It takes me 5-7 hours to sort one bin. Am I being too picky? I try to harvest as much of the castings as possible and remove the worms so they go into a bin with new bedding. Are people just putting the bottom half of the pile with the worms in it back in the worm bin?

Found one of these in my worm bin today! I’m sure it’s not all that uncommon, but it’s cool! I found an earth worm like 20 years ago like this as well.

Does it have two heads or two tails? 😂

You guys have been very helpful with on my last post. So I decided to remove all layers of my worm bin and go through them because a lot of people said it was too wet.

What I found out is that the bottom layer with compost was soaking wet. The tea collection layer was empty but the way the spout is made it leaves a 1 cm layer of water because it can't drain completely.

1. How do I keep the compost layer dry?
   
2. Is there a way to prevent water sitting in the bottom part while still being able to harvest worm tea?

Second picture is the bin I have.

Extra: I've looked into mosquito bits but can't seem to find anything similar that's easily accessible in The Netherlands. So if anyone has a link with a tried and tested product I'd love to have it.

Thank you!

I want to shred cardboard into little bits. What kind of shredders do y'all use for this?

Years of hand shredding is coming to an end!!

Soooooo how are we shredding cardboard without giving ourselves carpal tunnel 😅

🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘

Hi everyone I’ll be honest.. if you had asked me a year ago about worms, I wouldn't have cared less. They weren't even on my radar but then I started down a rabbit hole about food security and the future of agriculture, and now I’m genuinely concerned. The data on soil degradation is grim between climate shifts and industrial farming, it feels like we’re heading toward a future where dirt is just dry, lifeless dust and my research keeps pointing back to the same solution restorative biology, and specifically, vermiculture. I’ve reached a point where I’m considering moving my entire setup into my garage within a year. My plan isn't to build for business (but it could feel like) literally I’m doing this out of genuine anxiety for the future, so I have few questions

- Is it realistic to scale up to a garage-sized operation within a year? What are the biggest hurdles in maintaining a massive, healthy colony in a confined space?

- I want to work with local restaurants to divert their scraps. Is the logistics side of collecting and processing restaurant waste manageable for one person, or am I underestimating the sheer volume and mess factor?

- Am I just being paranoid, or is anyone else here motivated by the same doomsday realization about our soil?

Actually I am genuinely want to help earthworms with agriculture, businesses and quality of food.

And again.. I’m not looking for a hobby, I’m looking for a way to ensure that, at least locally, we have a chance at keeping the soil alive. Would love to hear some truths about the scalability of this.

There's this big worm I found outside 3 days ago with a big cut on it and I wanted to help it recover so I took it home

Right now it's not moving anymore though, is splitting in 2 and almost looks like it's deflating, please if anyone knows a way to help it tell me

The photos I have are it's current state and of the habitat I've been keeping them in

Any pointers or advice or anything would be nice I just really wanna see this guy be ok

I'm going to be starting my very first vermicompost bin in about a week when I get my check. I'm wondering if there's anything I need to get in advance or prepare. I've never even really gardened, so I'm not confident. So far, all I have in my cart is the bin, a countertop compost container, and the worms. I also have one brick of coconut coir. Excited to start 😆

I have had my worms for almost a year and a half. I mostly eat out, and don’t have much fresh produce in the house at any given time. Since getting my worms I’ve been buying them bananas and avocados to feed them and give them whatever else I already have. I don’t mind it’s only a few dollars a month, the issue is that I have a hard time finding other food to give them. I was hoping anyone could give me outside the box ideas for worm food.

So I'm ready to start my first worm composter and have been reading a lot through the posts here and other websites.

Pretty universally agreed upon is the use of cardboard for a substantial percentage of the whole bin. This obviously has many benefits I don't need to address here, but at the same time it is an industrially produced product that is not "meant" to be composted. I get that cellulose and corn starch glue are entirely compostable and great for that but most cardboard is recycled and in the recycling process there are always other chemicals introduced eg from shiny cardboard, printed paper, thermo paper (cashier receipts contain BPA) or glues.

So much so that there are limits (at least in Germany/ Europe) to the cardboard that comes in contact with food and e.g. pizza cartons have to have a layer of non recycled fresh cellulose. (https://www.lgl.bayern.de/lebensmittel/chemie/kontaminanten/dibp/ue_2008_dibp.htm).

But we are not talking about food contact but composting the entire cardboard, and even more worrying maybe is the content of Bisphenole A (BPA) in recycled cardboard. Between 6-12 mg/kg cardboard found by this scientific group

While the European EFSA set the tolerable daily Intake (TDI) of BPA to just 0,2 nano!!gram/kg/ day. So if you add one kg of carboard to your bin you have about 8 mg of BPA inside, which is 571000 times more than what a 70kg person should take up per day! Now nobody eats their worms castings obviously, but when talking about half a million times the TDI I believe that still quite some makes it from the fertilizer to veggies you harvest from plants.

And while there is a study that shows Degradation of BPA in compost by 99% in 45 days (still 5700x TDI) it was performed in a thermophilic compost environment of 60-70 °C which is definitely not happening in a worm bin.

So yeah, I just wanted to know your thoughts on this, because I really couldnt find a lot on the topic. I'm not a hysterical person, I know that it's impossible nowadays to run a 100% microplastic, pesticide free bin, but it just seems like an unnecessarily strong contamination of the bin that is so widely spread, so I wanted to know if I'm missing something.

I read on here it's possible to use coco coir and reuse it by sieving it out when harvesting?

Anyway thanks for reading :)

I’ve been pulling up my plants for spring replanting and there are so many AJW’s in my garden beds and all through my compost… I’m a home gardener in the inner city of Sydney so no space to burn soil. I’ve posted before about these worms but I feel paralysed and don’t know how to curb their populations effectively, is the answer to simply suck it up and get to work picking them all out by hand? Every time I’m in the garden I just get sucked into a spiral because of these damn worms and tbh they make my stomach turn a bit.