Update on my worm bin -

I have kept my tiny population of red wiggler composting worms alive & reproducing for... idk, 12 weeks so far? https://twitter.com/Beccabluesky/status/1217903712066310144

Under ideal conditions, their population can double every 6 weeks until they run out of room to increase (the habitat is the top 4" of surface area), at which point the population stabilizes.

I doubt I've hit on the right balance of conditions for ideal worm habitat straight out of the gate, but they're definitely busy in there.

I got my worms from a friend of my boyfriend's, who has a large & somewhat haphazard set of bins. He filled 2 red Solo cups from his bins - handfuls of worms, castings, food scraps.

He feeds... large amounts, infrequently. So there were rotting food scraps & a sour odour. It doesn't have to be that way; you can feed your worm bin smaller amounts and check frequently to see if you need to feed more, and then there's no smell.

When I started my bin, I lined the bottom of the bin with newspaper (to keep worms & castings from falling out the drainage holes in the bottom of the bin), then put the worms & their "residual habitat" into their new home, then heaped strips of newspaper over top of them.

The shredded newspaper mimics leaf litter, which shields the worms from predators a bit, shields them from light coming in from the ventilation holes at the top of the bin, and helps keep the worms in the humid environment they need.

I mean, there are no predators in the bin, but your *worms* don't know that, and they will eat & poop & reproduce more if they have an unstressful habitat.

The thick layer of shredded newspaper also acts as a bit of a carbon filter/odour absorber, but despite that, the contents of our friend's 2 measly red Solo cups of stinky worm habitat left occasional wafts of sour odour for the first week.

By week 2, the odour was only detectable when I lifted the lid of the bin to check on the new colony, and by week 3 there was only "garden earth" smell even if I lifted the shredded paper to peek.

2 red Solo cups partially filled with worms is a tiny starter colony! They eat their own body weight of veggie scraps every week, but when the colony is tiny, that's... still a small amount of food each week.

So I feed them a partial handful of veggie peels on one side of the bin, then check back later that week to see what I can see. If I mostly can't see many identifiable pieces of vegetable matter, I give them another partial handful on the opposite side of the bin.

As the weeks have progressed, I've increased how much I feed them to "a full handful" since that seems to last them a week. It's important that I not start thinking "thats what they eat per week" -

- they'll stabilize their population to food availability before they Max out the space, if I don't keep gradually increasing their "ration" to assure them they can keep reproducing.

At the end of week 1, we had a 10 day fruit fly outbreak, but keeping a bowl of apple cider vinegar mixed with a drop of dish detergent dealt with them (I presume the worms gradually eating the rotting food scraps helped).

At the end of week *2* we had a *weird* fruit fly outbreak - these were extra large flies (but nowhere near even small housefly size; they came & went without problem from the 1/8" ventilation holes in the worm bins) and I've never seen anything like them around before.

That lasted about 10 days too, but again, a bowl of apple cider vinegar with a bit of dish detergent mixed in, next to the worm bin, hastened the end of their ability to maintain a life cycle.

I have no way of knowing for sure, but I'm guessing it wasn't a coincidence that there have been *zero* flies of any kind in our vinegar fly traps since ~week 3 or whenever the 2nd flies disappeared...

... at about the same time as the worms caught up to the food that had come along with them from their former home, and the last of the four smell disappeared from their habitat.

*sour smell.

So now, we happily coexist, the worms eating more & more of my raw fruit & vegetable (& eggshell) waste every week, turning it into more & more worm castings for the garden.

In another month or 2 I'll split the colony and quickly have a 2nd bin full (remember, they double in population every 6 weeks if they have sufficient food & space... You know what that looks like from the pandemic's exponential growth curve)

And mayyyybe I'll split both bins again after that since they'll be able to go outside for the summer (so long as you keep them from overheating) because

a) there's no such thing as too much worm castings for a 25' x 50' garden plus other growing areas and

b) My ultimate intent is to convince my boyfriend we can put bunches of worm bins in his crawl space to not only churn out castings but also to feed to the chickens over the winter as a source of nutrition.

We'll see. I'm getting ahead of myself here ;)

First, I have to successfully get the initial colony to fill "one* bin.

But I have big dreams, and I'll keep you updated :)

/end.