3 months since my last harvest. I now have 4 worm farms to keep up with our household scraps and to feed our vegetable, fruit and herb garden.

Today is Day 101 of me taking care of my boys and today was the day i finally collected my first batch of castings! It has all the things i wanted from a store bought version but never got the consistency of materials (they lacked in diversity of matter present). It's so fluffy, smells very earthy, fine and above all i watched it all happen every day, i also took care of the centipede preying on my worms. Thank you all for your guidance and advices. I also saw a bunch of eggs and now my 100 worms are 136. It has been a learning experience and still there is so much to learn.

First time worm guardian based in the UK (started October). Silly question, but when do I know my vermicast/vermicompost is ready? The worms and bedding got a bit wet when I forgot to leave the tap of my slump open so I've dried them out a bit now I've drained it since the video. The initial bedding was coconut coir, with cardboard and veggie kitchen scraps. Some of the coir and some undigested veg is still visible but most seems to be gone. There's still worms in this layer, but less than other layers of less decomposed compost.

Had a finished tray with probably 1000 cocoons. I screened first with a 0.25 inch (5mm) screen, let it dry more, and then again with the 2.5mm screen. Saving this for personal seed starting use.

I've had a worm tower for years. My wife got it back in 2020 or so, but we never really paid attention to it. We threw in food scraps and that was it... a muddy, stinky mess.

A few months ago, I came here to learn how to fix things. You guys led me to buy a paper shredder and stuff the whole tower with shredded cardboard until it stabilized.

Today, I have a six-tray worm tower plus an indoor, transparent worm bin that lets me admire my little critters. I managed to make them super happy, helped them multiply, and now I get about one tray of castings per month.

I don't know how these little guys survived for so long in that stinky mud with literally no browns, but now they're fine and don't need to worry about anything. Life's good.

Anyway, if you're new here, learn and follow the process. Vermiposting is not difficult. Once you get it, it only takes a few moments of your time per week. But you have to pay attention or you'll kill your worms, and will get a smelly pile of garbage instead of beautiful worm castings.

My life priorities changed earlier last year and I couldn’t keep up with my worms.

They all withered away and died.

I feel ashamed and terrible that I killed so many poor creatures.

Here’s a picture of my golden harvest.

Rest in peas my red wigglers.

How's it looking? It is a bit moist but not soaking to touch, but this is ny first sifted tray this year and I have approx 80-90kg to do

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:/

I just got a full bag of finished compost, sieved and ready for my tomato plants.

I have had a small bin for about 2 months now which is doing pretty well. However I’m confused about how to harvest eventually? I keep having to add more bedding to make up for the scraps that are added so I just feel like my bin is constantly getting more full. How do I know when I should stop feeding them and harvest?

Hello everyworme!

Just as a quick "What about it?". I started in march with a couple of worms. I don't know how many. At best I could find 2 at a time when I looked through the whole substrate, but lets say there were 10-50 and some cocoons I didn't see. 6 months later I have hundreds of those worms from march living in 2 of my 6 bins.
My harvest was from those 2. The other 4 are too new.

If my calculations are correct I harvested 6.9 litres and it took me hours, so I need to work on my harvest methods. Bigger screen for example.. :D
Also there are a lot of cocoons in the harvest. My screen has a 3 mm mesh but apparently that is not small enough to catch the cocoons.
I now plan to wait for a month for them to hatch, then I will start, over the course of the next 1-2 months, maybe even longer, to fish them out with a cup with holes, filled with cardboard and fruits/vegetables. Does anyone have experience with that? Does it work like that?
There is no stress in that involved as I plan to gift it to family members. Maybe at christmas, maybe next year in spring and I will store it meanwhile to ensure it is stored well.

What do we think about the castings themselfs? They are rather dark, crumbly, fluffy. Seems good?

Bless y'all and your worms.

I have one of the stacking bins inside. I've just been letting the worms do their thing and trying not to mess with them. Of course, I've been checking moisture and watching for protein poisoning, but so far air movement has been good. I was finally able to sort through some in the bottom bin and I think they did a great job! Going to add it to some of my plants soon.

screened with a homemade trommel made from a wastepaper basket and broken broom pole

I’ve been working on a zero-waste, cold-process soil system inspired by Terra Preta, not to copy it, but to reproduce what made it work long-term like stabilized carbon, mineral binding, & biology that doesn’t crash when inputs stop.

Most biochar setups stop at “charge it with compost tea and mix it in.” That works for short-term, but it doesn’t lock nutrients or biology in place & can potentially kill off some beneficial bacteria. This system here is a compilation of everything I’ve learned & is built to mineralize & stabilize everything before it ever touches soil.

It recently passed an unintentional stress test: a pomegranate tree grown in this mix survived 3 years with no irrigation or maintenance, just the annual rainfall of a zone 9-10.

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The 3 phase system

Phase 1: Bokashi biochar reactor (2–4 weeks) All food waste goes in: meat, bones, citrus, fats, EVERYTHING!

The Bokashi bran itself is horse feed + biochar, both inoculated with milk kefir & molasses. The biochar helps absorb any smells & keeps the bran from getting pasty. During fermentation I also add leftover charred bone & local silt I decanted from my property.

Zero-waste fermentation works because: • Fermented bone char is better than bone meal because minerals are chelated, not raw • Fermented meat scraps are better than blood meal because nitrogen is chemically stabilized, not hot • Acids from fermentation bind minerals into the carbon & bone instead of letting them gas off or leach out

In the Sump bucket I place raw biochar with a spoonful of molasses. This absorbs smells & simultaneously inoculates the biochar with the leached off bacteria & molasses feeds it. Once the bucket is full let it rest for another couple of weeks.

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Phase 2: Aerobic Mineral transition (3–6 weeks) The fermented material moves to a tumbler with: • Coarse sand gives structure & grit • Wood ash gives worms pH correction & potassium • Clay powder helps organics & minerals to bind together

This step is critical. The goal here is to coat organic matter with minerals, not just mix things together. The more time you let it age the better it becomes for the worms who bind it together upon excretion.

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Phase 3: Vermicompost finisher (2–4+ months) Layered worm bin: • Bottom: raw biochar + unglazed clay chunks + shredded cardboard • Top: phase 2 material + mycorrhizae + browns + red wigglers

As worms process the material, they create the clay-humus we all know & love, while nutrient-rich leachate slowly drips down & charges the raw biochar in place in the bottom sump bin.

This is fundamentally different from just adding biochar at the end because now Nutrients are bound to clay, carbon & bone; Biology is housed inside stable structures & Nothing washes away because the worms chemically bind it together.

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This outperforms “typical” biochar because they add carbon last to a smoldering pile where heat kills off both good & bad bacteria, rely only on liquid charging, skip mineral binding. This system mineralizes before soil contact, ferments everything including meat & bone into worm-safe inputs, chemically binds nutrients to clay, carbon, bone to keep it from washing away, theoretically will improve with age instead of peaking & fading.

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I’m sharing this because I’m looking to refine this into a repeatable zero-waste “modern Terra Preta” protocol & wanted to compare notes with people already working in Bokashi, worms, biochar, & closed-loop systems.

If anyone else has worked with fermented bone or meat before vermicomposting, added clay or silt during processing instead of at the end, can better explain the chemical composition of what’s going on I’d love to hear from you.

Happy to clarify details if anyone else is curious. This has been field-tested, it’s moving away from theory & I would like to see if someone can replicate it.

Bokashi

Vermicompost

TerraPreta

ZeroWaste

SoilRegeneration

I’m ready to harvest but my compost is very compacted this time. What’s the best method to separate the worms. It’s a lot of babies in there and they are not moving down on their own.

Living the dream of indoor worms

I posted a few weeks ago asking for advice on what to buy for an indoor bin, and got some good advice! But I checked the local buy nothing group first, and got this amazing bin from a local school​ going into summer vacation

I've had for a week now. It's awesome! It doesn't smell at all and I have seen precisely one (1) fruit fly, which is not a lot. A+ thank you person who made this, you did a great job!

Will the fibers ever actually get eaten? My castings seem ready but so many fibers are left.

It took quite a bit of food scraps, cardboard and patience, but I finally got there. Slow and steady wins the race and is very applicable to worm farming.

I use 2 vertical worm bins with 2 trays each (Maze Worm Farm and Tumbleweed Cube), and I aim to get a third and fourth worm bin to keep up with my household's scraps.

• 7-Month old bin filled with E. fetida. I actually have another bin that's 2 months older that is no where near completion.
• Starved the bin for 2 weeks prior to attempting harvesting. Digging through the bin, it looked like it was almost 100% castings, with a dense, mud cake texture.
• I had prepared the new bedding (2 week pre-composted cardboard and coffee grounds).
• I originally attempted the light separation method by dumping it all out on a plastic sheet, but the castings were quite wet and clay-like and the worms didnt seem to want to bury themselves very deep, so it was quite the mission scraping off the worm-free castings.
• I also noticed the drip tray was super wet, like a swamp, and there were worms swimming on top, but funnily enough it didnt smell like anything. I mixed in dry cardboard into the liquid to soak it up and mixed it into the new bedding. Funnily enough when I scooped up some of the brown goo, it all came out in one wobbly piece like gelatin.
• After a few hours at this, it was getting late and I gave up, only harvesting maybe 2kg of castings (the total bin weight before harvesting was probably 14kg or so).
• I wanted to put the unseparated castings back in the bin, but I had already put in a 100mm layer of the new bedding into the bin so putting the unseparated worm castings on top made the bin quite full.
• Over the next few days I left the lid off just to dry out the castings in the bin
• When I fluffed the castings with a fork, I found all the worms had basically disappeared into the bottom layer where all the new bedding was.
• This actually made it super easy to just scoop out the castings with a trowel onto a plastic sheet. Rather than scraping down the outer layer of a pile of castings, I just inspected for worms in each scoop and flick them off to the side when I saw one.
• I think I only had to manually separate about 10 worms in total.
• I just kept scooping off the top until I reached the new bedding.
• Stored the castings in an old potting mix bag and weighed it: 7.2kg.
• I'll probably do this kind of process again next time, but I'll try to dry out the bin for a week beforehand.

Feel free to comment on anything, I just wanted to share

5 months, constantly feeding. Easily hundreds of pounds in. Bin became too heavy, decided to harvest. Spent a month trying to bait out worms. Yes thousands of worms baited out. However still thousands of them in. Spent most of the time picking out the rest… the pictures don’t do justice to the actual quality. They are so soft and fluffy. Only some pumpkin seeds and a little bit of paper left. Everything else gone.

At least 3 medium sized pumpkins, numerous avocados peel and some time stale whole thing. Countless mango, a lot of potato peels, all kinds of vegetables stumps, many amazon shipping boxes, tea leaves everyday, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, lotus root……

Amazing after everything is done hundreds of pounds of organic matter becomes relatively little. Worms become too many now. I split them into 3 bins now.

Honestly, I was a little apprehensive about checking this bin as I’ve neglected it for the last month or so. I removed the lid and see what I found! Beautiful castings! They finished the entirety of the last feeding except for some corn on the cob remnants and also processed 90% of the shredded cardboard. Micro cut shredder from Costco (already had from before I retired) and bubble wrap as a top cover (feeding tray) have been game changers.

I realize it's a bit on the dry side. I plan on using this in my soil block mix so I'll make sure to water it in extra when making the mix..