[Blue Sky]

I looked at the wriggly-wrigglers site a while back but I found a very useful site on how to make your own wormery for about a tenner. (I'll try to drag out the link later)

With regards to the little blighters themselves I first tried with garden worms and failed. Then a very nice chap (on here) called Hedonists sent me the proper stock - yes all the way to France. Very kind indeed. They arrived last week and seem to be doing just fine in their new home. They are struggling a bit with the language tho'

Sorry Hedonists if this overwhelms you with worm requests

[Hedonists]

Haha. Errm, not sure really.

I've learned a lot from reading one or two vermiculture forums.

I built my bin from a plastic dustbin, bought for about six quid. I drilled plenty of small holes in the bottom of the bin, so that excess moisture can escape. And used a drill attachment to make four 2" holes in the walls of the bin for airflow; two at the bottom on one side and two at the top on the other.

I bought a couple of tubs of brandlings (aka red wrigglers) from a local fishing tackle shop and added them to the bin along with some shredded paper. I probably started with no more than a hundred worms, and a year and a bit later there's hundreds and hundreds of the little blighters.

My bin has been going for nearly eighteen months now. For the first nine months I did everything 'by the book' and harvested half a bucket or so of nice dark worm castings. The second nine months I've done everything wrong and ended up with about ten buckets of really thick, heavy brown stuff.

Within the converted plastic dustbin I include a few inches of damp shredded paper at the bottom, for them to nest in (newspaper, used A4, etc but no glossy paper). Followed by household scraps, including tea bags, coffee grouts and all scrap veggies & rice/pasta, plus cardboard inners from toilet rolls etc (the worms seem to like nesting in these also) but no fat, no meat, no dairy. I add a 6" layer of dry shredded paper on top (moisture collects around the rim of the lid, and the worms LOVE to gather there - the dry shredded paper puts em off).

For the first nine months I stuck with this regime. There's only the Duchess and me, so the level of household waste is steady but minimal. The level of material between the bedding and the top layer of shredded paper varied between about six to twelve inches. As I've said, it resulted in about half a bucket of really nice dark brown castings. Not quite "Black gold", but well on the way. I'm confident that if I'd have left the worms in there longer, without feeding them more, the castings would have ended up darker. Worms will quite happily live in and continue to reconsume their own castings. As they do so the quantity of the castings reduces, but the quality improves.

The second nine months I practically filled the bin, with loads of garden waste (grass cuttings, gone-to-seed-lettuces, old pepper plants - they loved the pepper leaves!) layered with damp shredded paper. I now have over half a bin of heavy brown. It doesn't smell until it's given a good stir, and then it gives off a mighty pong! A really strong manure type smell.

From the smell and the look of this stuff, I reckon it'd make a wonderful fertiliser. Although as it looks so raw, perhaps to be dug-in in the autumn, for growing in the spring. However I'm more interested in a longer term experiment and so will probably leave them in this environment, without feeding them further, for the next nine to twelve months.

It's worth noting that I'm only using brandlings (aka red wrigglers) which are what I'd describe as "surface feeders". It may be that the full bin is too deep for them (in fact everyone says it is ). There are other worms that live much deeper in the mix and to combine them with the dragglers would be better suited to my environment. I intend to research this more fully.

At present I have one vermiculture bin, and one 'cold' compost bin. I'm thinking about buying a couple more, so that I can semi-compost material, before feeding it to the worms.
- apparently the worms eat the bacteria which break down the waste.

My bin is kept outside, where it becomes host to many other grubs and flies, plus the occasional slug or snail. Many of these, such as the soldier fly grubs, greatly aid the vermicomposting process. In fact soldier flys can be so veracious as to threaten the worms, but keeping a dry bin (set bin to level 'moist') helps to prevent too many of them.

Someone mentioned earlier that their worms couldn't keep up with the household waste... you don't have enough worms I think this is also part of my problem at the moment. Even though most agree you should start with something like 1000 worms, I started with much, much less. It's only a year or so later that I have this kind of number. Next year I hope to have thousands & thousands of the little bleeders. I don't know how they do it, but worms will vary their popluation numbers according to how much food is available to them.

Bottom Line
---------------
You can get good castings from worms fed on nothing but damp, shredded/ripped newspaper. If you're using only dragglers (the most commonly reccomended worm for vermi-composting) a wider more shallow bin may give better results.

The little buggers adapt to pretty much any environment (which IMO is why they're so great). Search Google for how vermiculture is helping people in India to compost sewage.

Am afraid I can't give any advice on any of the commercially available bins, as I think 60+ quid for something to keep worms in, is a bit steep.

I've heard of people building wormeries underneath chicken coops or rabbit hutches. If anyone has any experience of this I'd love to hear it. I understand you shouldn't feed the chicken-pooh worms to the chickens, but it's ok to give them the rabbit-pooh ones. I'm very interested in breeding rabbits for my pot, and think this is garden-geek cool

Apologies, if this all seems a bit rambling.

You haven't lived until you've harvested worm eggs

[Blue Sky]

You will have to stop giving them all away then

But seriousely, thanks very much for that post. Very helpful to me and I am sure many others well find it useful also.

The home made bin gets my vote of approval. No sense wasting money eh?

[Hedonists]

Worms LOVE moisture, to the extent that they'll happily(?) drown themselves, even when there's a good supply of bedding and food nearby. I've often wondered about this in relation to bins that include a reservoir for the lecheate. The only way I can see of stopping the worms from diving to their doom, would be by using some kind of a screen. But as baby worms are quite tiny, I'm not sure even this would be succesful.

[Bugs]

Total nightmare keeping track of the names, too. And the vets bills must be sky high.

[Hedonists]

If you think that's bad, try coming up with several hundred Christmas pressies, each thoughfully purchased (or made) to reflect their individual personalities).

wellington womble, ever since this thread started I've been wondering about just how viable vermicomposting is at home. (And this from someone who stands firmly in the pro-vermi camp )

I think a large part of the problem lies with comparisons to intensive systems and how much and how quickly the worms can compost. I don't think the comparisons are particularly obvious, partly coming from surreptitious advertising on behalf of worm bin manufacturers. Plus a few years ago there was a scam running in the US, with people investing in small(ish) scale vermicomposting equipment,. The conmen made great claims regarding the amount of compost they could produce and the returns available (sadly the only ones that made any money were those flogging the equipment).

The large scale systems are normally made up of stacks of trays, each of which is several feet wide but only a couple of inches deep. Though IIRC the worms don't wriggle from one tray to another. Each tray contains thousands and thousands of worms, amongst an absolute minimum of material. Their feed is ground up before they receive it, so has a much greater surface area and starts to rot down much more quickly.

Compare that to most of the bins people have at home (whether shop bought or home made). Most are either too deep and/or too narrow to successfully host anywhere near the amount of worms needed to keep up with the waste output of an average houshold. At best, their feed is chopped up, so it rots more slowly, and there are fewer bateria available for the worms to feed on.

The few home systems I've seen that claimed to really work well, were extremely simple. Made of long trenches or troughs, no more than 12 inches deep containing far more worms than I suspect you or I have. Although the feed in these systems isn't ground up, it is spread out over a greater distance and doesn't become compacted.

That said, vermicomposting at home is good fun, educational and far better than sending all that waste to landfill.

...and the look on people's faces when you tell them you have a worm bin, (only the bravest proclaim "I have worms!") is worth all the sleepless nights worrying whether they'll like their pressies.

[Bugs]

No, nor even with a large outdoor wormery (yet!) but I think councils and composting "organisations" do recommend them (perhaps certain models) for flats. It might be worth phoning those Wiggly people, as I think they are about the main supplier, and asking what they'd recommend then having a check to see if you can find anyone's experiences indoors with a particular model.

Are you in the HDRA? If not I'll have a look on their website for you later in case they have anything, they sent a whole booklet on worm composting when I joined them so they might have stuff to encourage people with small spaces.

[Blue Sky]

Ours are still going strong also. As per WW I only put waste in there about once a month, usually fruit and veg peelings (not citrus). I have not put any shredded paper in there to date. Maybe I should, it is rather wet. On the positive side the worms seem to have multiplied at least ten-fold in the past 10 months of keeping them.

Not taken anything out yet and it doesn't look as if I will be doing so for quite some time. The worms are still residing in the lower box and not showing much sign of moving on up. It's cold here. I keep the wormery in the cellar which doesn't go below zero.

Further updates when the weather has warmed up.

[HG]

No, can't say I know what the HDRA is, but google shalt be my saviour!
Thanks for all of that - will speak to the wiggly mob and get some more info