~Harvesting worm castings~
When to harvest?
In my bins, the finished worm castings are actually dark
brown muddy paste. There are no other visible decomposer
insects present, and the worm population also has usually
started to decrease in size, imho. This happens usually
one or two months after I stop adding more food in the
bin. Note that I am talking about non-juiced/ground foods
here.
How do I/you/we harvest castings? - god shave the
queen
There is the
Scoop-Off-Thin-Surface-Layer-While-The-Worms-Head-Downwards-In-The-Bin-technique.
A handy one, especially for harvesting worms, is the
Lure-The-Pink-Wriggly-Workhorses-Into-A-Disposable-Plastic-Box-With-Sum-Fresh-Banana-Peels-tech,
this takes 2 or 3 rounds before basically all over 2 week
old worms are harvested.
The first one above is ok for small bins. The second one
will work with larger ones, but you will need to add more
plastic-box-trap-containers if the bin is large.
For big jobs, its best to use a worm harvester made of
stainless steel screen. Its basically slightly tilted
rotating cylinder made of screen with a 'solid wall' end
that you gradually dump the bin contents into. The
processed caste falls to the collecting box under the
harvester, while the worms roll downhill inside the
cylinder into the solid-walled 'collector'.
Is there any way to get everybody out of the castings
before they're harvested? -Lumbo
Yes, in my opinion there is. Food lures! The worms will
go after moist white bread or banana peels like a rasta
for ganja!!
As worms can use their sense of smell to track down
worm-treats, and move actively after foods, using food
lures works very well, especially so in a mature bin
where fresh food availability is low.
Combined with some kind of simple mechanical trap this
works very well, and very few worms will stay
behind.
A wormer by the og name of 'Aprilfool' introduced this
simple concept:
The methodology that I use for seperating worm from
the bin is something I call worm wrangling. When
the bin is about two months old I don't feed them
for a week or two then place a slice of bread on
top. In a day there are hundreds of worms under
the bread that are easily scooped with a trowel
and placed in a new bin. I do this for a week.
Then I leave the rest of the worms to finish the
food that left in that bin. In about another two
months there are few worms and all castings, in
that bin.
I have four bins.
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From the following thread:
http://www.how-to-grow-cannabis.info/grow/edge/showthread.php?s=andthreadid=477384
In a tray system, or a box-in-a-box type of worm bins
(where the outer box acts as a leachate-juice tray) one
can simply add the food lure in a empty tray and after
some days most of the worms will be in that tray, and can
be collected. Repeat once or twice and you should have
helped almost all hatched worms in the bin to
emigrate.
Or one can simply bury some kind of empty container so
that its mouth is flush with the worm castings surface
and drop a worm treat in the container - since the worms
have easy access to a fresh food source they will
congregate in the container.
Remember to keep things moist so that worms and their
food lures wont dry up.
There are other ways - like you mentioned, drying the
vermicaste will motivate the worms to find more hydrated
surroundings. I guess one could use citrus peels as a
repellent to drive them out.
Of course, getting the cocoons (the worm eggs) out would
require hand sorting or a mechanical cocoon separation
machine.
I wonder how long the new generation would survive in
pure castings. maybe you could let it sit until they
die-off. - SatGhost
Well, many worm farming guides and companies say that the
worms will eventually die in 'finished' worm
castings.
I have not seen this happening in 'finished' worm
castings. Also Mary Appelhoff, 'The Worm Woman', US worm
movement 'spokesperson' says that worms will survive
indefinitely in worm castings. I think that well made
worm castings will always contain at least few worms,
unless separated mechanically or otherwise.
