On Sunday, it was time for me to add the third bin to my Worm Factory 360. I have had this bin up and running for the past 3 months. The picture to the left is my bottom tray aka the processing tray. One of the reasons I bought the Worm Factory 360 was because it’s supposed to be easy to harvest the vermicompost when it’s ready to be used. The worms are supposed to migrate to the higher bins where the food scraps are being put. This would mean there are no worms in the processing tray and I could just take the compost and use it easily…but this is not the case in my tray. As you can see in the photo, there are quite a few worms in there. I have read online that the way to harvest is to put the processing tray on top of the working tray (top tray), and then scrap the compost into piles which will ‘force’ the worms to move down in the bin and allow us to collect the compost. 
I tried doing this but was limited in time so I only took out half a gallon or so of compost. You can see my attempt in the picture on the right. I will add another post when I do the full harvest and show you what i mean. One exciting thing that I noticed while doing this was that there are tons of worm cocoons which means the worms are comfortable enough in this environment to be able to reproduce. I have also noticed that the worms are much bigger than when I initially purchased them. Read More
So it has been WAY too long since I last posted about my worm factory 360 bin on my patio. After I added my second tray, I learned that I was putting too much water into the bin. To wet the bedding, I was pouring water from my watering can into the worm bin. This was adding way to much water in the bottom tray and the drainage reservoir. I was pouring out tons of leachate from the spigot which isn’t supposed to happen. I lifted the bottom tray and noticed that I had a pool of water there. So I drained the leachate into jars and have been diluting it and using as a fertilizer. I have read mixed opinions online about whether or not to use this. Anyone have an opinion? Leave a comment and let me know. Read More
It’s been a while since I last posted about the new second bin on my Worm Factory 360, sorry. It took 3 days for the first worms to move up into the new tray. This might have been because there was still a good amount of food in the tray below that was still getting processed. When I opened the tray on the 3rd day, there were quite a few fruit flies in there. I think this is because I didn’t cover the food with enough bedding. The picture on the left is what it looked like on Sunday. Most of the food was gone and worms were in the bedding. Read More
This past Saturday, I decided that it was time to add a second tray to my Worm Factory 360. The first tray was pretty full since I received so much worm bedding when I purchased my worms. It is fairly straight forward to add a second tray, the DVD that came with my worm factory has a special section on how to do this. I started by taking some of the compost from the first tray and added it to the new tray. Read More
I used to chop up my food scraps with a knife on an old cutting board to make it easier for the worms to process the food. After chopping the food up, I would put the pieces in a 1 gallon freezer bag and freeze it. This also helps the worms out since freezing it makes the food softer when thawed. Next to the food processor is my food bin that I keep in the kitchen and throw the food scraps in. I would wait til it was full, then chop up the food. Sometimes this could take me up to a half hour depending on how much food and what type of food I had to chop. I finally got sick of this and decided to look for a cheap food processor on craigslist. I found this one for 15 bucks and it looks good and works. Read More
I had seen worms (red wigglers) for sale at my local nursery, Walter Andersen Nursery, and had heard that worms were good for the garden so I bought some two years ago to throw in. The worm castings are some of the best fertilizer you can use. Compared to topsoil, tests have show that worm castings are 5 times richer in nitrogen content, 7 times richer in phosphate content, and 11 times richer in potassium content. Read More