Vermiculture – Harvesting and Cleaning Your Worm Bin

Ahh, the art of composting in your kitchen! All year long for those who live in colder climates, you can compost kitchen scraps without even leaving the house. Red wigglers devour veggie scraps and the resulting worm poop makes some of the best houseplant food you can get. Beyond that, you have a colony of little red wigglers to pass off to friends so they can start their own vermiculture project as well. Oh yeah, and for you fisherman out there…..red wigglers are one of the best trout worms you can come by!

Lets get started than, shall we?

Have these materials on hand to clean your vermicomposting bin

• Container filled with moistened newspaper
• 2 Containers half the size of your worm bin
• A coarse screen
• Shredded newspaper
• Plastic sheet

How To Clean Your Wormbin

• Remove the dry layer of newspaper from the worm bin If you allow your bin to dry out for a couple of days previous to this step it will make it easier to remove the majority of the dry newspaper right off the top. If possible throw all of your old newspaper into your out door composter this way any missed worms can do a little work for you in there.
  
• Use a screen to remove the remaining newspaper bits In this case we used a plastic plant tray which worked great.
  
• You will end up with a soil mixture and all of the worms which will fall through the screen.
  
• Place the worms in the container full of moistened newspaper and cover
  
• Place soil on a flat surface in several small piles This step must be done either outside on a sunny day or indoors under a bright light. The idea is to get the worms to the bottoms of the piles
  
• Separate the remaining worms from the soil After waiting about 10 or 20 min it should be time to start separating. I found it easier to spread the piles out as opposed to scooping off the top. You will see that the worms have clumped in the middle of the piles and can be easily picked up.
  
• Fill the bin with fresh shredded newspaper
  
• Moisten the newspaper with water ensure that all off the newspaper is moistened and there is not a big puddle in the bottom of the bin. This can be easily achieved by flipping and mixing the newspaper. I add a 1/3 of the bag at a time.
  
• Rip the newspaper apart and shred it up a little more
• Repeat until you have used and moistened all 5lbs of shredded newspaper
• Dig down and place your worms in the bin
  

  

• Add some worm food
• Revel in the beauty of your home made organic soil! After removing all of the worms I screened the soil again twice to remove even more of the newspaper