Thinking of making a worm bin, any suggestions?

As the title says, I'm thinking of making a worm bin to have a stab at making my own EWC. Anyone have any suggestions on where to start? I want it to be big enough to be able to supplement my soil mixing needs. Something like 15-30lbs a month. Any suggestions?

dont no about making 30lb a month of vermicomposting, egg boxes make a great bedding material for starting of a bin. they prefare fruit to veg, avoid dairy meat oninons chillies and citrus. use a small amount of egg shells say once a month. I put mine in the oven for 10mins then cruch them fine the worms need grit to digest.

subscribe to worm farming secerts they have some interesting articals

Shred and moisten some old newspapers, lay them as bedding in the container you have. Throw in some old leaves and dirt for grit. Add your worms and cover with a cut out cardboard piece. Should be that easy.

this set-up netted me enough to brew my teas. it contains about 5,000 red wigglers. after screening i netted about 30 lbs. of castings...........for the season. 30 lbs a month would be a big set-up. i use my worms as my fertilizer makers. your worm poop will be better than commercial because of what you will feed them. they fatten worms on leaves and cardboard. mine eat my compost of manures, coffee, tea, and kitchen wastes.

I just made one myself. There are 3 main designs you can use. The stackable system, flow through system, or a horizontal box. I chose the stackable system because of its compact desine and ease of harvesting. What you need to make a stackable vermiculture is 3 trays with holes in the bottom. Fill the first with bedding and worms, feed, and then when the bedding is mostly composted add another tray on top with bedding and begin feeding there. The worms will travel up into the new tray on their own in search of food and you will be left with a tray full of worm casting! I just posted a thread about my system that I put together using 5 gallon jugs cut in half, you might find it helpfull, heres the link: https://www.rollitup.org/organics/519575-low-budget-stackable-vermiculture-make.html

Sent you a PM.

It's easy, but does take time, like everything in organics.

Wet

Coffee grounds are fine, a main part of my worms diet.

Worms don't actually *eat* anything, no real mouth or teeth. Nothing solid anyway.

What they do is sorta slurp the bacterial slime that is breaking the 'food' down and poop out castings. Gotta have good rotting action going on in your bins with lots of bacteria.

Wet

I got really lucky and found some moldy coffee grounds in my girlfriends room mates coffee machine. I know theres a lot of bacteria going on in there! On the note of worms actually eating the bacteria and not the actual food. One thing that I do to help the worms get more bacteria in their food is instead of chopping up the food and putting it directly into the bin, I chop up the food and mix it into a "waiting container" with my older food scraps. I keep about a weeks worth of food scraps pre saved in this container and just remove 1/7th of it for each days feeding. This way my food scraps have about a week mixed in with other rotting food to get a strong bacterial population before they go into the worm bin. So the scraps get nice and soft and have lots of food for the worms before going into the bin. Just a idea to increase the production of your worm bin!

Get some rabbits.they love rabbit poop.

Nice little read guys, great information here.

Naturalist thank you for providing that thread link!

F2H.

Appreciate the input guys. Thanks.

I started worm-composting last fall, it actually turned out to be a lot of fun for me. I started off with just a basic DIY bin set-up, which is pretty much just a shallow storage bin or similar container with small holes drilled in the top and bottom, lined with a thin layer of newspaper. Then you can shred paper scraps, or cardboard scraps and mix it with a little coco coir and wet it all down pretty good, but don't drench it. Then you just add food and worms. You'll want to start off with at least a pound of red wigglers.....
...HOWEVER..I also aim for large amounts of worm compost so that I can use it for teas in addition to using it in my soilless mixes...so if you want have a good amount of compost to use FRESH on a regular basis...buy one of these http://www.unclejimswormfarm.com/index.php/Outdoor-Composters/The-Worm-Factory-360-Free-Shipping/flypage.tpl.html

It's wayyyy easier to use...and you don't ever have to really sort through the worms because they just keep working their way up to the next bin every time you add a new one, and they leave the finished compost on the bottom. It also has a system so that the extra juices that leech out of it drip down to the bottom and can be drained by a spigot into your compost tea bucket. It's actually really cool, and really easy to set up and use. Now ALL of my food waste gets composted.

I think however, that you are under the impression as I was that what you are going to be collecting is similar to the worm castings that you buy in a 20lb bag for about $20..and it's not, it's actual compost and VERY biological. I don't use as much of it in my soilless mix as I do with regular worm castings. And I'm having much better results with my teas than I was when I was using worm castings as opposed to worm compost.