I’m very pleased with how the worms are coming along. After the fruit fly scares, we’ve had no major problems with bugs, just lots of slow white mites.
A couple of weeks ago, I started noticing earwigs hanging out near the worm bin. While earwigs don’t fly (after researching I discovered they can fly, but they rarely do) and they don’t multiply as quickly as fruit flies and fungus gnats, I still didn’t want any problems with them. They kind of gross me out with those menacing pincers. (I know they can’t pinch humans, but still…gross.)
So finally I decided, enough is enough. I invested in a Worm Inn. Worm Inns are amazing contraptions, sold through Bentley Christie’s Red Worm Composting website. Bentley’s site has taught me basically everything I know about worm composting. So if these posts intrigue you and you’re thinking about starting a worm farm yourself, definitely check his site out.
Anyway, I bought the Worm Inn (pictured below) and got it set up today. It is amazing. Very easy to set up, holds all of our worms, and takes up less space while looking more attractive than our old Rubbermaid tub with mosquito netting taped around it. Plus, the compost that comes out is supposed to be much better quality, not so soupy and mushy like the kind produced in the Rubbermaid tub.
As I transferred the worms, I saw tons of baby worms and worm cocoons, so they seem to be quite happy. If anything, they were probably hungry since I stopped feeding them so often to decrease the fruit fly threat. Matthew chopped up lots of food for them, and they should be quite content in their new home.
The old Rubbermaid worm bin. I taped mosquito netting around it to keep pests out.
The new Worm Inn, available at http://www.redwormcomposting.com. I had to get some PVC pipes cut at Ace Hardware to make the stand, but it was super cheap, like $5 or less. And VERY easy to put together, even for the technically challenged
The top view of the Worm Inn. The extra oxygen flowing through makes the compost better quality, but the mesh top also keeps the bugs out.
There are drawstrings included with the Worm Inn, but I made it a little more secure by tying some clothes line around. So far nothing is leaking and no worms have escaped.
The Worm Inn came with zip ties, but I thought clothes line knots would be more secure.
The empty Rubbermaid bin after I successfuly transferred all the worms to their new home. We had some interesting white mold growing in there that I'd never seen before. I think it came because of some moldy coconut remains that Matt's mom gave us. Hopefully the ventilation in the Worm Inn will stop it from spreading.
But we were inspired yesterday by our lovely friend, Steph Lee, to get back into a regular blogging schedule. Okay, so we’ve never had a regular blogging schedule on this blog to speak of, but we’re going to start. We’ll even write it down on our calendar.
We’re learning a lot of things about web design at work, so we’ll implement some cool new things here soon too.
May is turning out to be way busier than anticipated, but great to see long-lost friends like Steph, Chuck, Bob, Jacob, Jasko, Butz, and Kate!
Also great to catch up with friends who aren’t so long-lost, but who we still love hanging out with (Yay, Karen!)
Our worms are doing well, we think. There was a lot of undigested food in their bin, so we decided to leave them for about a month without even checking on them. So far none have tried to escape, so we think they’re pretty happy.
I don’t even remember if we’ve talked about our worms on here yet. If not, we started a worm composting bin a few months ago. Things were going pretty well until we had a massive infestation of gnats. At first, it was kind of annoying, but we thought we’d just live with it.
Then when it got to the point that these gnats were so overrunning the house that they would fly into our faces in every room, land on my cheek when I was putting on moisturizer, and land in a pan we were cooking in, we decided something needed to be done.
After lots of research and help from the Red Worm Composting site and other online forums, we started freezing all of our compost scraps (to prevent new eggs from coming in), putting fly tape on the top of our bins to kill some of the adults, and putting this natural bacterial larvacide in our bin that kills fungus gnat larva but not worms.
We had been leaving the worm bin outside so our apartment could be gnat free while we waited for the gnats to die. Two weeks later, there were still a lot of gnats in the bin and we were going out of town for the weekend to visit family for Easter. It was supposed to snow that weekend, so we couldn’t leave the worms outside while we were gone. We really didn’t feel like having a host of gnats living inside again, so I told Matt, “It’s do or die time. We have to empty out the whole bin and clean the gnats out, rinse off the worms in case there are any eggs on them, and start over with fresh, clean compost.” Kind of ironic to have clean compost. But that’s what we needed.
Also I had read about others with gnat infestations cleaning out their worm bins, including rinsing their worms off to get rid of any eggs, and their worms turned out fine. So it didn’t feel that weird to me. Just a lot of time and hassle.
It was pretty amazing. We saw baby worms, worm cocoons, and discovered that some of the worms kind of have personalities. Some are pretty crafty and good at finding hiding places. One of them reminded us of PS because it liked to burrow in a piece of corrugated cardboard and wouldn’t come out until we dismantled its hiding place.
So anyway, after hours of cleaning out the worm bin and washing off the worms, their new gnat-free home was set up.
We left for the weekend, came home, and found half of our worms shriveled up and dead on the kitchen floor. They had crawled out of the bin and died in a large circle around the bin. It was pretty tragic.
Turns out we had left their new home too dry, so they escaped looking for the promised land. Unfortunately, their promised land was nowhere to be found, so they just died.
We added some water and some more food and managed to save the rest of our worms who are still thriving today. Whew.
So now we’re paranoid about getting more gnats or flies in the bin after all that work and death. A few weeks ago we found some fruit flies and their pupae in the bin. Fortunately, I don’t think they were able to find enough food to survive (we now cover the compost/food section with a big layer of cardboard to make it more difficult for flies/gnats to breed…seems to be working well so far). We realized that in our paranoia about losing the rest of our worm population, we had overfed them and needed to leave them alone for awhile so they could catch up with the food we had given them. So that’s where we stand now. Happy, eating worms. Hopefully no flies/gnats.
Here are some videos:
A baby worm I found while rinsing off the worms.
Evil pupae! We discovered these a few weeks after cleaning out the worm bin…but pretty sure they the flies weren’t able to multiply. We only found a couple of them and haven’t seen any in several weeks.
