The WormFarm Chronicles- Day 49…. Part 1

This past weekend marks an important milestone for us. It's been just over 6 weeks since we started composting kitchen waste products in the WormFarm 360. The menu the worms dine on has been very carefully planned and orchestrated. Selected food types include fruit and vegetable waste, paper, junk mail, fiber, coffee grounds, bread and egg shells. What we don't feed them are meats and fats, bones, bakery, citrus or other rich things and dairy. The other thing I learned is the worms are pretty high maintenance, their environment needs to be very tightly controlled. I share this with you, because we're getting close to harvest our first tray of worm castings which make up a good share of this organically rich compost for our plants, flowers and garden. I read in the instruction manual and it says, "with regular feedings, your worms should eat up to 2 pounds of waste per week and you should be getting the first tray of compost in 6-8 weeks. Personally I didn't believe it would be that quick- a more realistic timeline I thought was around 2-3 months. After which we might be realizing a usable final product. I was wrong, Tray 1 is ready. I have attached a picture below that shows the contents after 4 weeks of decomposition with the rigglers' help. I told myself we'd wait until 6 weeks to actually pull the trigger and just sat and admired my work for two weeks.

We're now ready to remove the contents of our initial processing tray and it occurs to me, I don't know how to do this. I will need to refer to the instruction manual to figure out exactly how to do this. You see, there are over 1000 worms in that compost I want to harvest. So how do you separate the worms and the compost? Must be a trick to it. Well the trick is, the instruction manual doesn't tell you. I googled the question and found a couple useful You-tube videos from people who have been doing it commercially for years. The answer is really pretty clever how you separate the worms and the compost, while not killing your worms and making a mess.

First, take your Worm Farm outside and set up a comfortable place to work in the sun. Next, take the processing tray or the lowest tray, out of your system and set it aside on a sheet of newspaper. Now return the stack of remaining trays into the system in the same order. Note that all trays have moved down one number and one tray closer to the ground. Tray 2 becomes tray 1, tray 3 becomes tray 2 and so on. On the top tray, or your freshest working tray, remove the cover and the moistened newspaper cap exposing the food scraps. Next, place the processing tray that you set aside, on top of the remaining trays exposing the dark muddy looking looking compost to the bright, hot sun. If you remember from an earlier blog post, worms hate light and dry surroundings as they need moisture to breathe and survive. Exposing the compost to then sun and drying it out quickly makes the worms head south almost immediately. Let this just bake in the sun and stir occasionally, which speeds up the process.They retreat to the moist, dark bedding below to escape the new, harsher environment. Give them an hour or so to migrate from the tray. Depending on the conditions it might take more or less time and you can always manually grab the last stragglers.

All for now, stay tuned for Part 2…

For more information and a look at the system with, or without worms, go to:  http://gottabgreen.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=55&products_id=4538