I have three happy little guinea pigs who just love to poop, so I’ve been really meaning to get around to setting up a worm bin to take their weekly manure and our food scraps and make me some castings. Well, the ever opportunistic procrastinator, I was talking with my friend with two guineas and three rabbits. She asks if I want hers to, so obviously I say yes.
Well, long story short, I now 75 gallons of manure, hay, and paper bedding. It’s come to my attention worms really only use like 12” of the bin… so I can’t just use a trash can or something. I can find containers, but I’m strapped for cash until next week and I don’t know that the 1lb of worms that just arrived can wait that long.
My idea is a hole in the yard. It’s free. I wanted a vegetable bed there anyways. But it seems like a waste of worms. What can I do for super cheap that will sustain a 1lb worm colony, ideally while using as much of the manure as I can? Is it just time to start digging?
I’ve been doing Cadman’s trick of making smoothies for the small original bin.
This promotes worm propagation and them I’ve been transferring lots of fat and juicy red wigglers to the large bin in the garage.
Seems to be working well (so far).
Thinking that’s what I’ll do, two of them. I could get a 70 gallon with wheels but… eh, the 50 gallon seems more movable at half the price.
I got the Uncle Jim’s red wrigglers too, good to know they work out well! I think I can just put them in my old soil bin (about 15gal) and let them eat roots. Then dump that in with the manure when I can get to the store.
I ended up with two of these 55 gallon totes. No lids. Because why not?
I dumped the manure, maybe 10gallons of soil, and the worms. Gave it all a good drink. Stacked the other tote on top and zip tied it. I feel like I need to make some drainage holes… I’m not sure about aeration. The bulk of the material is Timothy hay, do it’s really light. With the large 55 gallon lid, do I need to make some air holes? Or is there potentially enough air to pass with a weekly airing out when I feed them?
And most importantly, do I need to add anything else? I’ll be topping it up weekly with more manure, hay, food scraps. I can get newspaper to cover the top, would that help if I decided to say, put half in the other tub and run two of them open top? It’s outside on the SW side of the house, will get a fair amount of sun.
Well, after about three days, here is what has happened. I reached the conclusion I need to wait a lot longer to notice anything. I found one worm doing good, but not any others. I also didn’t really care to dig real deep.
You can see here, about an inch of soil over largely straw and manure. I hope they don’t mind the over feeding, I don’t plan to add more until they are making quite a dent.
Well, I found ONE worm in my bin today. Since I had been cutting this 4’x4’ bed (maybe I should’ve measured) I decided to just dump it out and such. There is white all over the hay, I assume some sort of fungal action? It doesn’t smell like it’s gone anaerobic except maybe a few damp patches. This is a lot of compost, so maybe they are in there, but I don’t think so. I think in the future these bins will be used to store compost before feeding it to bed. I assume worms will come from through the yard and such. Maybe will bury a 5 gal bucket to feed food scraps. I think I’ll be going with more conventional, smaller bins inside for my potted plants. Project- half fail?
What happens when you throw shit in your garden and then leave it? You grow shitty green beans.
I think I had a bad spider mite problem- the underside of some of the nastier leaves had gnats stuck to them. I know I have a rabbit problem. Aside from that it worked surprisingly well. I expected nothing to grow, as I’ve experienced in that location. I don’t know that it’s the best use of the hay/manure mixture but it’s an easy one. Now, if I hadn’t let it sit in a garbage bag for a couple days maybe it would’ve gone better.
I plan to take this weekend some more manure, less hay in this stuff, and make up a batch of soil to compare to EWC. I plan to add some worms to the container though, so I don’t know what I’m testing tbh. But I’m excited to do it.
not at home right now but will post pics later.
went back and read…Going to take pics now lol.