Vermicomposting: Tips, Tricks, and Wizardry

Indoor Growing Organics
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#1

Worm farms. You know them, you love them, and you might even know what you’re doing with them. You’ve got your browns, you’ve got your greens, and you’ve got a handy GrowFAQ guide on nutrient content of dry organic amendments. It seems like most people have a strategy for their composting, however.

I’m still getting my feet wet, so to speak. I try to keep things at a 60/40 split between browns and greens, dice and freeze greens before feeding to make them nice and mushy. For grit, I use a combination of egg shells, ground oyster shell, pumice, volcanic basalt, and rock dust.

My long-term strategy does not yet exist :grin: I get nervous with dry organic amendments, lest I turn the worm home into a hot pile, but I think I need a bit more diversity… I’m sure I’ve got plenty of potassium and calcium in there, but much less nitrogen, phosphorus, and magnesium.

So. What tasty treats do you give your worms, how much, and why? Any other lessons learned over the years would also be great to hear.

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From SSeeDD to sail.. exploring SSDD, pollen chucks & Bodhi Crosses
#2

Personally i have several pots for vermi composting. Some are for recycling veggie scraps and some are for the garden. In the kitchen I feed my worms whatever I eat basically. Some times i freeze them first to kill any eggs that may be present, or sometimes I throw them into the bokashi bucket first. This lessens the work the worms and microbes have to do to break down the material.

Now for my garden. I feed my pots just like I do my plants. The worm pots are exactly the same as my notill pots except that they get the leftover material that you strained out of teas (unless of course you apply that to your plants). I do topdresses of kelp, neem, malted barley, compost, powdered egg, oyster, and crab shells, and wild foraged plants (which i froze first).

I start my pots the same too! the pots get a little layer of lava rock (doesnt matter if you have trays with air flow underneath the pots) then a thick layer of straw, fill half way with soil, compost, leaf mold, etc. mulch then lightly topdress neem, kelp and malted barley fill rest of the way then mulch and lightly topdress again. now if youre into KNF (Korean Natural Farming) you may have some beneficial bacteria and microbes around like your LAB and IMO. depending on which IMO you have (1-5) you can mix it with your soil, compost, or leaf mold, or just water it in afterwards. the LAB will get watered in after the pot is full. this will help establish a good community of beneficial bacteria and microbes in your pots.

Im not super strict on how much of what i feed usualy. I try to just follow a rough schedule of feedings so my soil doesnt become depleted of nutrients.

PS im impressed i havnt fallen off my couch and had alright spelling during this. i was like “oh this edible i made cant be that strong just eat it all” HAH!! boy was i wrong. shit hit me like a freight train. im about to go back to bedXD :cookie:

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#3

Oatmeal! I’ve recently become fond using this as a soil additive. Put 500 worms in my soil tub. Hoping they’re enjoying it

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#4

Oatmeal brings on the fungi. But without the enzymes. I use malted barley because it has both:) just grind it up in a coffee grinder and the worms go MENTAL

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#5

Does the powdered egg provide protein for the gym bodybuilding worms in the worm bins? LOL

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#6

HaaahXD nah the egg has calcium in it. Worms use grits like that and rock dusts to break down things inside of them.

#7

Oh I thought you were giving them dehydrated eggs like you use for camping, I thought man your treating those wigglers better than I am myself! LOL!:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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#8

Ok boys and girls, time for everyone’s favorite game, “Should I feed this to my worms?”

  • Corrugated cardboard: I hesitate to give this to my worms, as it seems highly processed. There’s glue in there, it smells funny… anyway.
  • Avocado: I have one that turned to mush. It’s a fruitable (vegruit?), but it’s a fatty/creamy one, and fatty/creamy seems like a NOOOO for worms.
  • Quinoa (cooked): Forgotten leftovers. I know starch/carbs “in moderation” is fine, I’ve just been straight-up avoiding them, however.
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#9

Wigglers go ape shit over avocado! I’v also heard somewhere the glue on boxes is also something they like, haven’t tried quinoa, I would have a tendency to stay away from any starchy products however!

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#10

Thought I would share a paragraph from “Teaming with microbes” by jeff Lowenfels
“Vermicastings”
Vermicasting( the name given to worm poop) are 50% higher in organic matter then soil that has not moved through worms . This is an astonishing increase and radical changes the composition of soil ,increasing CEC because the greater amount of charge holding organic surfaces .Other nutrients,therefore, has the ability to attach to the organic matter that has passed through a worm.
The benefits don’t stop there the worms digestive enzymes (or properly those produced by bacteria in the worms intestines) unlock many of the chemical bonds that otherwise tie up nutrients and prevent there being plant available .Thus worm castings are as much as seven times richer in phosphate than soil that has not been through an earthworm. They have 10 times available potash; five times the nitrogen three times the usable magnesium and they are one half times higher in calcium (thanks to the calcium carbonate added during digestion).All these nutrients bind onto organic matter in fecal pellets .

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How do i find out the right npk for my plants?
Let me dust off my mothballed equipment and get glowing
#11

The two last ones are fine. I also dont feed cardboard for this reason. Worms love a place to lay eggs though and the space in carboard is great for them. Personally i mix a mulch in my worm bin for this reason

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#12

I have a whole book on vermiculture in my dropbox link thread. I tried to post the PDF here but the files too large.

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#13

Hey friends,

I’ve recently had an explosion of tiny brown mites in my bin, and my worms are pretty pissed – I’ve found around 100 escapee worm jerky corpses in the past two weeks. The mites seem to favor “browns” with large surface area: my newspaper cover, for example, was completely covered… and so that went to the standard compost pile.

It sounds like cutting back on feeding, letting the bin dry out a bit, and adding some rock dust/eggshells to reduce acidity should help: anyone have any additional recommendations? I’ve already done all of the above for the past two weeks without much change, was thinking of adding some neem meal and compost (biodiversity!) to see if that helps…

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#14

I used neem meal in my big with great and tragic results lol. Great when only adding about 2-3 tsp across the 24x12" surface. Tragic when adding 1-2 tbsp across the same area

Edit: p.s. it’ll make your room smell like neem for a couple days after adding.

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#15

Are you sure that there not predatory mites? The hypoaspis miles variety?

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#16

Was gonna say the same thing… I add them to my soil compost to keep bad bugs at bay

#17

Something else must be going on. Did it get hot or cold? Is it too wet/acidic?

I have tons of those same mites Stratio-S aka H. Miles. They love fungus gnat larva. My worms only get fed coffee grounds, egg shells, sunflower seeds, mulched newspaper, and the dregs from neem, kelp, and barley teas. When I was feeding fruit and veggie scraps it was getting too wet and mushy.

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#18

I am not :grin: I googled a little harder to try and find a pic and came across “orabitid turtle mites”:

That looks to be about the right color, poppyseed-sized. The underside of my newspaper cover was basically a solid sheet of those little buggers.

RH is definitely up in my house (thanks, spring!), so it’s entirely possible that my usual diet (probably about a 2:1 ratio of browns:greens) got things a little too moist. I put a powdered eggshell or two, ground oyster shell, or glacial rock dust in every time I feed, so I hope acidity isn’t an issue.

FWIW, I haven’t had any brave worm astronauts escape from the confines of their habitat since I removed the newspaper cover, but that’s probably because things are drying out a bit… I’ll keep all ya’ll posted if things change one way or the other.

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#19

Is that a google pic or your own?

#20

That pic provided almost looks like the worm cacoons the worms produce!