Thanks for the tag @CrunchBerries . I do hydroponic type things, but this has piqued my interest for the outside vegetable garden.
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Anyone want a smoothie? Feed the hogs today and added in some Neem and Karanja for good measure. Topped off with some pulverized eggshell. Hmm! Just like mom used to make!
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I actually have something a little weirder than a worm bin. I use rolly-polys.
They are not an insect. They are actually a prehistoric shrimp that lives on land. They are a beneficial decomposer and soil aerator, and their tunneling improves drainage and water retention.
I started doing this because my organic indoor grow was hatching millions of them, so many that they were beginning to eat my plants. So I started relocating them to a dedicated compost bin, and it’s been very succesful. I haven’t actually used any of the castings yet, but they have a good healthy and stable habitat and they compost plant matter very quickly.
The setup is very simple- a #5 or #7 smart pot inside a rubbermaid bin. The pot is about one third full of light aerated potting soil at the bottom for their habitat. I feed them vegetable peels and fruit cores.
For me the advantage over a worm bin is that the habitat is dry except for the moisture content of the green matter that I feed them. This makes it much less hospitable for pests and gnats than a worm bin.
The rolly-pollys are very amusing and inoffensive creatures. They are completely harmless, they just roam around blindly and cluster together. I find them kind of cute. They are a very simple mechanism with a very simple biological niche. Some of these rolly-polys are huge, like an inch long and shiny black. Others are so small they are barely visible to the human eye, with a translucent pink/grey color.
The bin looks bizarre with thousands of them all meandering around in there. It’s definitely a really weird thing to have in your house. I’ll post a photo or video, it’s quite odd.
They produce a lot of castings and light loamy / gritty soil.
I still need to come up with a good way to use the castings. I probably need to upgrade to a bin with a screen like worm bins use to separate the castings.
I’ll be following along here to learn more about standard vermicompost methods and setups.
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That’s pretty cool. Apparently there are even designer isopods that sell for big money. Check some of them out on rubberduckyisopods.com
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Hey @zephyr glad you can join us and thank you for sharing!! I would love to see what that many Roly-polys looks like. Vermicomposting includes many species, the most weird in my opinion would be cockroaches 🪳
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@DanzaKuduro had a couple funny posts about composting with giant florida palmetto bugs:
a little extreme for me, but whatever gets the job done haha
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I ended up putting all my worms in the compost bin, they seem to love it. I used to make smoothies for them. Put a bunch of spoonfuls on a cookie sheet like cookies, then freeze them for wormy snacks later. We can get beginning to rot fruit and veggies at our food coop for some nice variety.
I love them too, they mingle with the worms, and never try to escape or cause trouble! I didn’t they would eat the plants… I’m going to have to check their breath. 
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That link has some crazy bugs!! And expensive.
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that’s very amusing. the first ones that hatched in my indoor grow came from native clay 3 feet below the topsoil, and they were a bright salmon pink/orange color a lot like some of these expensive ones.
I think they cross bred over several generations with normal looking dark grey ones. I still occasionally see a pink one, or one that’s both pink and grey. Most of the big ones develop white speckles or stripes too.
It might be fun to introduce some of those designer varieties and see what happens, but the local ones perform so well I wouldn’t want to mess with their genepool. the garden variety works fine, so the price seems a bit silly.
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they don’t do much damage, just munch on the lower leaves. They only eat cannabis if the population density is extremely high, and they only go after certain strains. It’s really funny. They love to eat bodhi’s guava hashplant, but leave almost everything else in the indoor garden alone.
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@CrunchBerries sorry to leave you hanging for a minute, here is my worm bin using a 37 gallon storage tote. I haven’t fed the worms much in the last few weeks as I have been harvesting castings, probably close to 10 gallons of vermicompost (and some worms) to add to a new mini fruit tree orchard on my property.
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Anyone have any ideas on what’s up with this worm? I’ve seen several with this pointy shape, not sure if it’s a ball of paper they’re digesting or an egg/cocoon.
A quick web search for “pregnant worm” mostly showed parasites and pregnant women.
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“That’s normal” 
but I can’t say why 
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Maybe it’s just happy to see me.
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Pretty sure I can see a cocoon in there, she’s pregnant.
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I took this pot in from the yard and put a few wigglers in. Looks like time to water and feed. Low 40’s at night so they remain indoors
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Top of the same pot, workin hard from top to bottom turning a rootball into gold
Poop porn
Volunteers
Keep it vermy
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Just transferred to this water tank witha a rusted bottom a few months ago…it has been indoors and kept all winter. Lots of babies too.
I’m also trying a 55 gallon bucket. I put leaves in the bottom about 20 worms and some potting soil then a bunch of horse shit on top. I figured in time it will have lots of new worms and they can get the job done.
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Quick question… if I’m growing in a 15 gallon fabric pot, is there benefit to putting worms in them?
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