Gardening by Mistake

It’s so hot outside (heat index of 115) that I’m not even worrying about getting out there. Yes, knowing the weeds are there is driving me crazy, but not so crazy that I can’t wait until it’s not 100 degrees outside. In the meantime, I’m harvesting my worm bins.  This is a good time to get it done. In a few weeks, when it’s cooler, I’ll want to be outside finally catching up on weeding, getting more of my WS plants into the ground, spraying my roses, etc. It also works out well because the bins won’t need to be harvested until winter sets in and I have little in the way of gardening tasks.

The question is: is it okay to add pureed food to the worm bin?

The answer is: yes, but…

Pureeing the food before adding it to the worm bin is a double-edged sword. The benefit of doing this is that it helps the food decompose more quickly, becoming worm-ready more quickly. Pureeing the food opens up many times more surface area for the microbes and the worms to begin munching on. The disadvantage to pureeing is that it introduces a lot of liquid moisture at once. It’s no more moisture than the food would contain if put in the bin in an un-pureed form, but that liquid would become freed up from that food at a much slower rate. People who puree the foods before adding them to the bin often do so in conjunction with adding something else that is dry at the same time, to help soak up some of that moisture. For example, adding rolled oats or even newspaper or cardboard shreds. The idea is to keep the liquid from collecting and pooling and turning the bin into a muck. Adding dry materials to suck up that moisture keeps the bin in balance.

There was a time when I did  the pureed food. That was a long time ago. It was a hassle to make it, for one thing, and it did make moisture control a challenge.  If you happen to have food that is already pureed (say, left over baby food or some such), by all means add it to your bin. If you are wondering if it’s worth the effort to puree your scraps before putting them into the bin, well, it may not be. Maybe you’d rather spend your time and energy on something else and let the worms do the work for you.

One other consideration: many people keep worms as part of their efforts to be good stewards of the environment. For these people, it doesn’t make sense to use electricity to puree the food when the worms will do the work on their own slightly slower schedule. They see this as incompatible with being “green.” That might be the case for you, too.

I am experiencing a fruit fly infestation. Don’t think, though, that this is something that will happen to everyone who has a worm bin. It happens to me when I get careless. It can be avoided.

My son put a the remains of a banana into one bin and didn’t get all of it covered. On top of that, I didn’t cover the entire surface of VC with a several-inch thick layer of newspaper shreds. So, the fruit fly eggs on the banana peel hatched and those fruit flies found a great place for further reproduction. When the problem didn’t resolve on its own, I decided I was going to have to take action. Yesterday I filled the entire empty area of the worm bin with newspaper shreds. What isn’t full of vermicompost and material the worms are eating is full of newspaper shreds. This should prevent the adult fruit flies from getting back to the vermicompost and materials from outside the bin. They will have to penetrate a LOT of newspaper shreds, and they just won’t be able to do much of this. So they won’t be able to lay more eggs. And conversely, those eggs already present that do hatch will be prevented from leaving the bin easily. It may take a couple weeks, but the infestation should resolve with these measures. (Of course, if a person with this problem has other sources of fruit flies around a house, then the problems with them will continue until those are fixed, as well).

In addition to making sure scraps are completely covered within the bin, there is another thing you can do to reduce the odds of a fruit fly infestation: freeze your scraps before adding them to the bin. Usually, I freeze my banana skins (and other fruit) for a couple days before adding them to the bin. The freezing kills the fruit fly eggs.  Next time, I’ll tell my son to put the banana skin in the freezer, instead of the worm bin!

I get more questions about roaches than probably any other topic. People want to know if worm bins will attract roaches. On the surface, it seems like worm bins could be ideal environments for roaches. However,  I’ve not heard of anyone ever having a problem with them. The only time I had roaches in a single bin was when I introduced materials that, unbeknownst to me had some roaches already in them. I had some great leaf mold/decaying leaves that I thought the worms would love. Turns out, other critters were already enjoying them, but I didn’t know that until after I added the material to my bin. Oops. What happened? I was fortunate in that it was a small bin and small numbers of roaches. Whenever I took the lid off that bin, I made sure I had something that I could use to squish the roaches. In this case, it was only one or two roaches running around at a time. After doing this several times, the roaches were mostly gone. I would get one here and there as it hatched. But they never had a chance to keep the cycle going. Now, in an environment where roaches are common, it might be different. In an outdoor setting, roaches are going to be in the worm “bin” at least occasionally as will many other critters and that isn’t something that would worry me.

This website has information on some common roaches and pictures of the egg cases. If you do have roaches in your worm bin, you can start to fight the problem by keeping on the lookout for egg cases. If you see any, remove and destroy them immediately.

A lot of people visit this blog, worried about mold and fungus in their bins, so I thought I’d address this. First of all, whether you see it or not, there is mold and fungus in your bins. Over the years I’ve had mushrooms sprout in the bins (only once or twice, but quite a surprise at the time) and once I even had a slime mold make an appearance. Yuck! Those are fascinating, but I’d just as soon not look at them. A commonplace mold in the bin is on breads.

Molds and fungi are just part of the decomposition process. But it’s the mold and fungus that people see which concern them, particularly the fluffy white stuff which can take over a bin.

I’ve had this more than once. It almost looks like cotton candy sometimes. I have only had it when I’ve used a shredded newspaper bedding.  The first time I opened the bin and saw a mass of white cotton-candy stuff, I was alarmed. I “stirred” the bedding around, to break up the mass. That didn’t eliminate the problem, though. So what I ended up doing after that was simply removing that bedding any time I found it.

I ended up setting up what I called my “fuzzy” worm bin. That was a bin containing nothing but the fuzzy bedding and whatever worms were in that at the time I removed it. My original reason for doing this was to see how the worms did in an environment where there was nothing but the newspaper and the fuzzy stuff for food. I wanted to know if it was harmful in the regular worm bin. As it turns out, the worms did just fine. Their population grew, although not nearly as fast as in a bin full of a variety of foods. (Newspaper by itself is a pretty lean diet for worms and I don’t know how much the fuzzies added). But the population did grow, so it clearly didn’t hurt them. Once I saw this, I just removed the bedding any time I found it getting fuzzy and tossed it into my fuzzy worm bin. I don’t believe there would have been a problem if I’d left that bedding in my bins; I don’t think it would have harmed things. I just didn’t like looking at it, so I put it in its own bin where I left it alone for long, long periods of time.

Eventually, I no longer ended up with bedding that got fuzzy. I don’t know what was different about it. I did move more to leaves as bedding, and that must have had a role. That is something you might try. I think the shreds got compacted in places and that is what led to the fuzzies forming. So, fluffing newspaper shreds and making sure they don’t clump and compact will likely help, as well.  Mixing with leaves would help prevent the clumping and compacting.

My husband told me he wasn’t sure what to get me for Mother’s Day but suggested we go to one of the big nurseries and I could browse and pick something out. I wasn’t particularly interested in that, but last night I ordered my gift and then thanked my husband for being so thoughtful.

What did I order? African nightcrawlers. What mom wouldn’t want worms for her special day? Ha! At any rate, I was feeding all my worms this evening and got to wishing (again) that I still had some Africans. I decided to quit wishing and get some. I ordered only a pound. We’ll see how it goes.

What’s so special about the Africans? From what I saw during that time I had them they produce castings at a much higher rate than the EFs. Since I have more garden than I have vermicompost for, I need all the castings production I can get!

(Incidentally, for Mother’s Day my wonderful daughter gave me a great card that came with coupons. One of the coupons was for a cup of worms she’d collect in the back yard! What a kid!)

I’ve posted about the worm bin that got an entire and huge pumpkin about Thanksgiving time and how it turned the bin into a swamp with a sewer smell. I never posted the outcome to that, however.

I think I mentioned that I was working on drying it out. First, that involved draining a lot of liquid from the bin since pumpkins are mostly water. That left me with the muddy muck and that smelled horrible.  For about two weeks, I’d take the lid off the bin just long enough to turn over some of the vermicompost and then I’d slam the lid back on before the smell of sewage could fill the room. Turning the VC like that helped a lot. That sewage smell is indicative of anaerobic conditions. The only way to improve it is to get oxygen to the source. Those microbes don’t do well in an oxygenated environment and they cease to be a problem.  After that I took the lid off altogether and left the bin open to the air for several weeks. That helped dry it out considerably.

If you end up with a bin that smells like this, know that it is fixable. Just make sure you start getting lots of air to the VC. And, of course, you’ll need to figure out what it is that you’ve done or been dong that led to the situation in the first place so you can change your method. In my case, I will never again be tempted against my better judgment to toss an entire pumpkin into a worm bin so I don’t have to feed it for a while.

I’ve seen many vermicomposting newbies ask what cocoons look like. As I’m in the middle of harvesting a couple bins, I thought I’d take the opportunity to get some pictures of the cocoons.

This first picture shows the cocoons in the VC inside a container:

This next picture shows many cocoons. Cocoons start out a color like a young corn kernel and then they darken to a reddish brown to dark brown when they are ready to hatch.

The bottom three circled cocoons were recently cast. You can see what a light color they are. At the top, I’ve circled two cocoons which are much closer to hatching.

One thing to note: often times the cocoons are coated in a layer of VC and it looks like a small lump of ball of VC. If you gently rub it with a finger, the VC will come off, leaving the cocoon visible. In fact, you can see this to some extent with two cocoons to the right up and up a bit (on a leaf) from those circled in the middle. Those are partially coated in VC.

Back in early January I posted about the mistake I made with one of my worm bins when I put an entire, huge pumpkin in the bin. (The pumpkin was so large, I had to have DH bash it into pieces that would fit. That should have clued me in, but I blithely continued in my plan). The results were predictable: goopy, wet, gunk in the worm bin instead of nice vermicompost. Sewage smell instead of that lovely fresh dirt smell. I really screwed up on that one. I suppose everyone has to prove it to themselves once. I’d never done something like this to a bin before.

At any rate, in January I decided that there was no way I was going to be able to add enough dry materials (bedding and food like dried horse manure) to soak up the liquid there. I drained as much liquid as I could and then I started the process of drying the bin out by airing it. Once the surface of the bin was relatively dry, I turned it over and exposed some of the still sodden vermicompost. I’d quickly slam the bin lid back on, though, because the sewage smell was awful. (The first time it was so bad I ended up opening windows in the house while there was snow on the ground!)

I only turned it over a few times a couple days apart before leaving it to sit. I was absolutely astonished last night when I opened the bin and saw the entire surface of it covered in fluffy castings and almost all of the bedding gone! Wow! I’m going to have to finally feed that bin. When I dug down I could still find a nasty section, but only a small one and that is now airing. In just 24 hours, I expect that smell has already disappeared as the aerobic bacteria regain control. The main thing I need to do now is just continue to let the castings in the bin dry out. I’ll do that by leaving the lid off for the foreseeable future. I have to say that I have seen a lot of healthy looking worms in that bin. It’s not the recommended method for vermicomposting, but it doesn’t seemed to have hurt the herd any.

Last summer I ordered some Africans (Eudrilus eugeniae) because I was curious about how they’d compare to the 3 kinds of worms I already had. One thing that was clear from the beginning was that these weren’t your “red wigglers” (eisenia fetida). These suckers were huge —about 3 times as long as an EF—and they did NOT take kindly to being bothered. Their reputation for stampeding is well deserved. I found some that traveled the entire length of my house—on carpet! I have no idea how they made it that far before drying out and turning to crispies. They are an impressive worm.

I did my usual when I got my worms: divided them into 2 bins. That’s my insurance in case of catastrophic loss of a bin, although I’d never had that problem before. That way I still have some worms left with which to build a new herd. For a variety of reasons, I ended up with two decimated herds after a couple months. I combined the two into one bin and left them alone. This time I fed them, but I tried to disturb them as little as possible; I didn’t want to cause what was left of my herd to stampede. So, for a couple months now they’ve been left alone except for food.

Today when I fed them I decided to see how they were doing. They are, in fact, GONE!  Oh, there are worms in there, probably the worms I’d caught glimpses of when adding food. But they aren’t EEs. They are EFs. There’s nothing wrong with EFs, but I did want to have the EEs, too. The EEs can produce vermicompost like mad. I just can’t figure out how the darn EFs got into that bin to begin with!  Like orphan socks in the laundry, I doubt I’ll ever know what happened.