There's ALWAYS uses for them around the homestead!

Just make sure they're food grade ❤

The way I see it, the science that's useful is the science that teaches us how to co-exist with nature, not to manipulate it! There is a branch of science that seeks to manipulate it and I don't want to have anything to do with it!

LOL! You need to get a new wife!

Thanks for the idea!

Do you put the frozen food as is in the bin or let it sit to room temp. ? If no egg carton, can make cups out of toilet paper rolls , just thinking out of the box.

That is awesome! A lot of people think the worms like the glue in the corrugated type. I do know that if you need to find more worms to establish a new bin, (when the weather's warm) all you have to do is lay down some sheets of corrugated cardboard on your soil, and you will find plenty of them under it in a short time!

Coffeegrounds is a "green" part of compostingredients, Nitrogen. Cardboard is a brown material, Carbon. In a compostbin we need a balance of C:N = 25:1 But I m not sure if wormbins work the same as a compostbin. Sawdust is a nice brown material.

@@Misterdandamanify Actually... it doesn't work the same, even though the ingredients are mostly the same. You don't want your bin to heat up with the microbiology decomposing your materials, and you usually won't get that because there's not enough mass for it to heat up. From what I've learned, you should only give them enough "green" material for them to fully consume before adding more.

Boxboard that has any gloss to it has lead in it as far as I know. Magazine covers for example. I would stick with cardboard. I am also weary of newpaper ink. Maybe see if you can find out what your particular newspaper ink is made from by contacting the paper itself, or just buddy up to a business and get a carload of cardboard... Blue Dumpsters may be a browngoldmine😅😂! This is what youtube is good for, we are all shooting for the best of the best, and help each other and learn continuously, and not give over all our cash to The Man... Big Ag... Shoddy companies posing and burning suckers like us, with plastic polluted bags of crapp.

​@@LiveOnWhatYouGrowhow long does it take for the worms to move to the 3rd bucket completly

Actually... it wasn't me. It was by research done at the West Texas A and M University. Just remember that they say that that number is under optimal conditions!

Hi Wes, thanks for taking the time to respond. I HATE seeing plastic in my garden/compost just as much as you do! Some towns/municipalities are doing the right thing and recycling food scraps citywide, but there's no way someone is going to sit down and remove the labels off each of the bananas, the way we do! The towns may give it away to their townspeople for free, in which it's better than NO compost for those who don't know how to make their own. Or they may sell it to the highest bidder, who will make it into the "high quality compost" you were talking about and sell it for a lower price than the REAL high quality compost! The only way I judge the quality of compost is by looking at it under my microscope to see if it has all the beneficial fungi, bacteria, protozoa, and beneficial nematodes. If it has the right ratios of all that soil life, plus a nice loose structure and sweet smell, that's all I care about. If the compost meets all those criteria, I can tolerate the plastic which is for the most part inert and will neither help nor hurt my garden soil. What is FAR WORSE is a good looking compost that's either lacking soil life or too high in anaerobic bacteria and too little fungi. Usually, the free municipal compost has the worst of both worlds because the municipal workers are just doing their job, they're not going to go out and turn the piles every other day to ensure enough oxygen is going to get into the heap to prevent the overgrowth of anaerobic bacteria. And they're definitely NOT going to wade through that anaerobic stinky decomposing matter looking for and removing pieces of plastic! For the most part, those workers have no idea how to properly make compost and the town managers can't let the workers take the time to do it properly! On top of that, who knows how many prescription medicines, and other hazardous materials people can throw into their recycling bin! AND get yourself a microscope and learn how to use it. If you buy a bag of bad compost, spread it on your lawn, and use a different brand for your garden! The bottom line... make your own if you can! If you can't, buy compost only from a company you can trust, like Coast of Maine, but always verify with microscopy! But, yes I do... remove EVERY plastic label from EVERY banana and orange! I HATE plastic in my garden!

Never thought I'd see plastic throughout my compost and potting soil until it happened. Store bought was dead to me that day.

Yes, thanks

That's true. Red wigglers do the composting. When I saw him throw in earthworms, I wondered if that was going to be a problem?

@@maryannn.1108 They weren't earthworms, even compost worms can live in the soil, how else could they find and inhabit my compost pile?

The earthworms will die if you add them to your red wiggler bins ​@@maryannn.1108

​@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow compost worms only live in soil if you specially feed and mulch them and keep them moist enough

Glad it was helpful!

You're welcome! I did that video back in December, and I haven't fed them once since then! When I pull back the bedding, there are already a LOT of worms now. They're happy to eat the bedding at this point. Once they multiply more I'll start feeding them kitchen scraps that I've frozen first. I do that to kill any fruit fly eggs there may be hiding in my compost!

I'm planning on doing one about that in December. Be sure to subscribe and click the ALL bell so you will get the reminders when I put up the new video!

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow Thank you, I am looking forward to the video

I appreciate that!

I have an old coffee grinder that I got at a garage sale and I grind the eggshells into powder and sprinkle it on top of the dirt

Glad it was helpful!

What I like the best is their portability... so easy to move around, and I can have as many as I wish with varying stages of maturity! That way I don't have it coming in all at once! Once you have several thousand worms it would be great to do this!

The thing I learned about fertility is that it's not minerals and nutrients that make soil fertile, it's the microorganisms! As soon as I learned that and made my garden hospitable to that life, the size of my plants, and my harvests, doubled.

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow so true!, the amount of worms is a good indication of soil health😄

Thanks Jon for bringing the hammerhead worm topic up. Here is one website (among many) that tells you what to do if you see one in your garden: www.bobvila.com/articles/hammerhead-worm/

Glad it was helpful!

So nice of you

I appreciate that very much!

I never open it up that quickly. I had to do it for the video. That doesn't usually happen. BUT you're right!

If we all do this, we can make an impact!

The best part about it is how easy it is to separate the castings from the worms when you're ready to harvest!

Glad it was helpful!

Thanks for commenting. One thing I forgot to say about freezing the food prior to feeding it to the worms is that it will kill any fruit fly eggs that may be on it, especially the banana peels.

Glad it was helpful!

Thanks!

You are so welcome!

Just make sure not to give them too much food at first!

You're Welcome!

You can’t likely buy composting worms at your local bait shop. You can buy red wrigglers on line any time of year.

Do fruit flies kill worms?

@@garthwunsch Hey Garth, not in my climate. Unfortunately, the worms would freeze in the mail.

@@5wisebannerguys I don't think they kill them, but It seems they steal the food and the worms seem to reproduce much slower when there are tons of flies. I think the main reason the worm population went down so much was a few below freezing nights when the electric heater crapped out and I wasn't home. The flies seemed to come back much stronger/faster than the worms. :(

I laughed when hubby bought a pet electric blanket for our worms 🥰

But make sure they're compost worms and not earthworms. Just get them from your compost pile until you know how to identify them. Earthworms won't live in your compost pile!

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow thank you very much. I’m going to have to look them up and see a picture. My compost is very tiny. I’m new to that as well. I also want to try making my own biochar if I can. I have lots of pine trees down from storms. I hope that is good

The next advice I give you will shave 10 years off your learning curve. Make a BIG, as big as you can enclosure out of fencing, shipping pallets, or whatever you have, and make as much compost as you possibly can! Put in fall leaves, grass clippings, hair from haircuts, weeds, brown cardboard, kitchen waste, newspaper, seaweed, etc., and make sure you dump the whole thing onto your garden beds. I use 6 tons in my quarter-acre garden every year. This is the one thing I wish I had known sooner! I have three videos you can watch to see this in action: • kzfaq.info/get/bejne/g9hkeq511pfDZIE.html • kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gJmng9Vlzd23YqM.html • kzfaq.info/get/bejne/arORq7th3s_TeH0.html

Thank you again so much

​@@LiveOnWhatYouGrowif adding that much compost, it's a good idea to get a soil test done. Soil can become too rich. An example of this is on the OYR KZfaq channel.

That's great! Here's an update: I made the bins one month ago, and when I poke around in the litter I can see lots more worms than the 50 I put in each of the two bins!

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow I started with 2 cups of worms from a bait shop few years ago now have a small composting business got into it because I got tired of paying for worms for fishing but now I've started using them to compost lot's of boxes and food scraps and yard waste and I have few rabbits so my worm's get the rabbit droppings also I don't use the bucket setup anymore but was just letting you know that the yellow tidy cat cat litter buckets stack perfectly and do not get a air sealed and lock together so you can pull them apart with no problem

@@joshslackslack8115 That is fantastic! And it beautifully illustrates the principle of starting out small, learning the basics, and then scaling it up to whatever fits your needs! I hope people are reading these comments!

I add egg shells in my coffee pot. Just break them up. Shells react to the acids in coffee. Then shells go in garden.

@@markblix6880started doing that a while back as well. Also add, cinnamon, powdered ginger some whole cloves with some tumeric, you can also add just a bit of the MCT oil. Just start easy.. not too much and build up from there to the perfect balance for yourself. We are all willing to share and learn from one another, I love it!🙏🏼

Hello Johnny, I microwave or Bake my eggshells to kill any salmonella bacteria that could be present, especially since We consume the powder. I presently don't add anything to the bins except the eggshell powder. I will consider what you said about the springtails and dwarf white isopods, but I don't know anything about them at all! But please subscribe and select notifications so we can have an ongoing dialog. Thanks for your help!

Thank you as well. I just found a bag of pulverized lime stone in my garage and it is a combination of calcite and dolomite as well as a very fine powder. That is a good substitute for egg shells without any concern for salmonella or even worse camplobacter which is arguably more common and just as bad as salmonella. Here's another idea for a tweak on your 3 bucket method which is an improvement on the 3 bucket methods of others. Yours is very insightful and logical. How about for the lid use an old tee shirt or other cloth material to cover the exposed top bucket? You can always cut the center out of the lid and just use the ring for securing the cloth from sagging or falling in if that's a concern. It can be wet directly for retaining moisture as well.

About springtails and dwarf white isopods, they can be culture in pure culture very easily. Springtails do best on calcium bearing clay in a rectangular Tupperware container and kept very moist and fed yeast. Either nutritional, powder or baking yeast, doesn't matter. So people culture them on wet lump charcoal but the population density is much greater on clay. You'll have 10s of thousands in a month or so. I'd recommend temporate springtails rather than a tropical species. For dwarf white isopods, parthenogenic so in theory you only need one to start a colony. Same Tupperware container in a bedding of coir and oak leaf litter, boil first if collected, and feed them supplemental veggies or a little dog or cat food for protein, one or two kibbles only. Don't worry about mold since they eat that as well. I'm sure they will compete with the worms for organic matter but they don't eat much but they will address any mold/fungus problems as well. I've never shipped them before but I've received them via the mail and can offer you a starter culture if you like. They're also available through numerous online vendors. I also have plenty of the clay and coir and oak leaf litter, although I'm sure you do as well. I'm not sure how I can have you contact me, but if you think it's safe I can post my cell number or email address in this thread. Just lmk. I've also added about a half cup of play sand to my worm bedding since as. You point out very correctly, worms have gizzards and perhaps the lime stone isn't hard enough or lasts well for grinding and quartz stone maybe better. Anyway it's in there so I'll leave the choice up to the worms to make. I sell these products I mentioned wholesale to pet shops I work with for bioactive terrariums for dart frogs and some lizards. Most of this information comes from dart frog hobby websites and chat boards. I'm sure that you can Google all the information I've mentioned here. I'm raising red wiggers as reptile food but after learning from you I'll be saving my worm castings and tea for my lawn and garden and I'm sure that my banana trees will love it! Again thank you for your information and if there's anything I can help you with please don't hesitate. John

That's a great start! I have about a thousand in my bucket since last winter when I started it. You should have WAY more than that if you take care of them over the winter! I consolidated both of my bins into a single bucket and I got quite a bit of castings from it already. You'll know when you have too many for the bucket when it's just a mass of worms. One cup of worms is about a thousand, so when you get to about 2,000 you should consider dividing them further. In addition to feeding them food scraps, you do have to keep the soil moist. I may give them a stir once in a while if it seems to be too soggy, but mostly I don't. I'll probably do a one-year follow-up video in December. Please visit Worm Ohana in my recommended channels. Worms is all she does and I consider her to be the expert I look to! www.youtube.com/@wormohana

I don't. There are plenty so if some get into my potting soil I don't mind!

Thanks for letting us know. The supermarkets still are an option in the bakery dept. but they've not been wanting to donate them lately! I use the smaller ones from cake frosting to use as my double cup for my large pots, like the ones I'm growing my potted peppers in!

I also have Heavy clay soil. So I like the chunky shells for added aggregate in the garden beds.

Thanks for the comment. I personally only use the Water Soluble Calcium (WCA) as a foliar spray during the flowering time because I prefer it NOT to be water soluble when I add it to the soil. When you make WCA with vinegar, the acetic acid neutralizes the ALKALIZING EFFECT of the calcium in the shells. I want the eggshell powder to neutralize the acids IN MY SOIL instead of the acids IN THE VINEGAR. So I get the best of both worlds by doing it this way: I add calcium to my soil AND reduce soil acidity. When you use WCA in your soil, you've already used up the alkalizing effect on the vinegar, and it no longer can reduce soil acidity. The bottom line: if your soil is acidic, your acid soil will do the same thing (without the added work) and give you both benefits: additional calcium AND reduced acidity. This only applies if your soil is acidic like mine in the Eastern US. Here is an interesting study from the University of Illinois talking about the effectiveness of eggshell powder in your soil: extension.illinois.edu/blogs/good-growing/2018-03-28-using-eggshells-garden-and-compost

You're welcome! Make sure to subscribe and hit the All Notifications bell, so you will get notifications when new videos go up. I've got some really important ones coming that will help to understand how soil life IS the engine of your garden, and easy ways to make sure you have it!

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow definitely 👍

Great!

Thank you too!

Hi, thanks for posting. I normally let the glue completely cure before putting it on the bin to allow all the outgassing from the adhesives to complete. After that, the glue doesn't come in contact with anything in the bucket. It's just there to let air in and keep out any fruit flies.

On ebay they sell circular silicon disk/mats for round dehydrators..... they fit these buckets perfectly! I discovered this when making a water filter

Noted!

There's no right way or wrong way to do this. Whatever works, works. If you can figure out a way to keep the screen covering the air holes so the worms can't get out and the flies can't get in, great! The stone on the bottom to keep the buckets from sticking to each other is a great idea!

They will!

Hi Robyn, there are lots of different worms living in your soil and you just have to learn to recognize them. You're right that earthworms don't live in your compost bin. However, both earthworms and compost worms live in the soil. Otherwise, the compost worms wouldn't eventually get into your compost. They can't magically appear! The best way to learn to recognize them is to dig around in a compost or manure pile and pick those for your bin, After a while you'll learn to recognize them easily!

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow Thank you, it’s looking like a great day to get out there and do just that. Great idea, and great day to learn more about exactly what I have out there.

You're welcome!

Glad you liked it!

Actually, a better way to attach screens is to use metal screening, stainless is best, and use a wood burner with a flattened top to embed the screen into the plastic. That way the screen can't fall off at a later time when the caulking supersets from the plastic, and it will eventually.

@@randallwithee2189Thanks, that's a great tip. I'll do it that way from now on!

@@randallwithee2189That’s interesting! I’m going to try that!

That won't work as there are screens covering the holes on the bottom of the original bucket where the worms are residing. Take a third bucket with holes on the bottom, but without screens covering the holes. Put new bedding and food in that bucket and put it ON TOP of the original bucket which will now be in the middle. The worms will leave the middle bucket, (that you stopped feeding), and migrate up to the top bucket leaving nothing but their castings (mostly) in the middle bucket.

You're welcome! Let us know how it works out for you.

My pleasure!

Dump that bucket into the one with the screens after you empty the castings out. Sorry, I failed to say that.

Glad it was helpful!

Happy to help! You can also put a stone in the bottom bucket to keep them from getting stuck.

You're welcome

The material (in my buckets at least) is about an eighth of an inch thick, so no light passes through! Maybe... if the sun were shining directly on them!

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow That's good to know. Many thanks again for the knowledge. Btw, the bolts in the side of the bucket trick is something I wish I'd seen a long time ago.

That's something I learned off a KZfaq video. I wish I could find it again, but, then again, he probably learned it from someone else! So who do you give the credit to?

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow I'll be giving you ALL the credit! It's going to make things much easier for me with my self watering bucket containers. Trying to separate the two buckets that have been stuck together after an entire growing season can be a royal PITA.

I'm thinking about just putting a rock in the bottom bucket instead of bolts. What do think about that?

Keep in touch, and let us know your results!

I don't think so, if they could pass through the screens, you would see them in the lower bucket, and to date, I haven't seen any.

1) Put new bedding and food into bucket #3 and stop feeding bucket #2. 2) Put bucket #3 resting on top of the castings in bucket #2 3) The worms will migrate up through the holes in bucket #3 in search of food leaving bucket #2 free of worms.

Glad you enjoyed!

You're welcome!

Hello Sandy, welcome. You just have to wait longer after stopping feeding in the lower bin because it really isn't ready yet, there's still undigested matter in the bin, so you WANT them to finish their work. This is especially true if you have coffee grounds in there because they look like worm castings, so just let them finish their work. That will give you higher-quality castings When there's NO more food, they will leave. They have to, to survive. The best way to entice them up is to put a piece of rotting fruit, like a banana, on the very top of the top bin and they will migrate up to it!

Worms.... Fertile Mrytle... Abundant Harvest!

The gray plastic tub is just an example of another way to house them, and I just water them just enough to keep it damp all the time.

Sometimes the fruit fly eggs are already on the food scraps that you're feeding the worms as well! Thanks for the suggestions!

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow I have been thinking a lot about the moisture problem I have had, and think that it was more of a condensation problem from the heat created by the decomposing food and the external temperatures. The bedding with the buckets has never been saturated but every day I would check the buckets the sides would be wet and the would be castings and bedding all over the sides of the buckets. I am going to be modifying another lid to have a much larger screened in area to see if just having a larger surface area helps regulate things... After that I am going to run a small fan to draw the moist air out, and pull fresh air into the buckets. The one other thing I may try doing is setting the fan up so it has to blow that air through a baking soda filter to see if it can cut down the odor some...

@@chngdbygrace I may be wrong, but it sounds like you're putting in WAAAAY too much food scraps. That would account for the smell and the heating up of the buckets. You don't want ANY decomposition taking place, but rather the worms to eat the food matter. The heat is what makes the worms want to leave.

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow that's kind of where I am at. Trying to learn that balance and how to anticipate how much to give, and in some part over estimating the worms ability to eat... In the end it would be better to start with less and then just feed more frequently.

@@chngdbygrace I agree. What I would suggest is to add lots of bedding like shredded newspaper or cardboard to help bring it back into balance.

You're welcome!

I am working on it, but I've presently got it on the back burner! There are a few difficulties of growing organically with hydroponics, and I'm making some progress, but it's not a priority for me right now! Make sure to subscribe, AND hit the notify button, so you'll be notified when I put my results up!

I have some gutter grow kratky boxes. I'm wanting to not have to use fertilizer in them if possible. Well , fertilizer, just not the type I have to order. Stuff I can make or source locally. But I don't want them to stink either since there's no aeration lol

I believe they are, but it really doesn't matter much what they're called because they were living in my compost, in my soil, so they're the right kind for my microculture, rather than purchasing what are called the "right" kind from somewhere 3,000 miles away! I don't usually search for them under pots and logs. I usually put a banana at the top of my compost bin during warmer weather and all the worms I need will be attracted to it. I only did it that way because it was in December!

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow Eisenia Fetida seem to be the best worms for this purpose.

Thanks!

Let us know how it works out for you!

You're welcome!

Appreciate that!

Only use the screens on the middle bucket to keep the worms from falling into the lower one. But when it's time for the worms to migrate into the third bucket so you can harvest the castings, there can't be any screens covering the holes.

That's a great idea for an experiment! You can also gather hundreds of them in warm weather in a separate bin for your vermicomposting needs. Just put an over-ripe banana lightly covered on to of your compost bin, and you'll have hundreds of them in no time... if they're already in the pile! Keep us posted on how it turns out!

@@LiveOnWhatYouGrow I’ll definitely let you know. My worms don’t seem to populate very fast. I do enjoy them.

I've never had them escape that way, but you could cut a length of rope and stuff it into the crack.

Thanks for not mentioning it!

I just go by the way they look, and am not sure of how many there are! If there are so many worms they look like spaghetti in a big clump, like about a quarts worth, then I'll separate them into three separate bins.