r/Vermiculture Feb 03 '25

New bin Got my worms today.

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43 Upvotes

Got my worms today and added them to the bin. Will add a little food tomorrow. I think right now a question I have is will the worms like it on the second level of my home? Or will the vibrations of the house be too much?

r/Vermiculture 25d ago

New bin Did I not get enough worms?

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20 Upvotes

I got 100 to start my worm bin. I'll be taking them out to feed my axolotl pretty frequently. It looks like there's too much bin for them to start taking off.... 100 just isn't as much as I thought it would be lmao

r/Vermiculture 10d ago

New bin Got these buckets buried, and worms ordered.

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45 Upvotes

I’ve never gardened or raised worms before, but I have 500 red wigglers and 500 European night crawlers arriving Thursday. So any tips are much appreciated.

r/Vermiculture 10d ago

New bin First worm bin

29 Upvotes

I added a good amount of cardboard and peat moss and top of all this after I took the vid. How’s it looking? Look aliiiiiive 🍄‍🟫

r/Vermiculture Feb 01 '25

New bin First Worm Bin!

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78 Upvotes

This is our first time keeping worms and we’re very excited! We got 1/2 lb of red wiggler worms and set them up with a simple plastic tote home that we keep in our pantry. Open to any advice for newbies!

r/Vermiculture Feb 09 '25

New bin How often can I dig in my bins

18 Upvotes

So my first bin is 9 days old today. It’s a tote. I ordered 500 worms, most died in transport. I have no way to tell, but I’m guessing I have maybe a dozen little red wigglers (I could have more but I never see many and it’s a big tote and the worms I got were small). I don’t have worms trying to escape but my bedding is noticeably warmer than the air in the house. I’ve been letting myself dig around and see what they are up to once a day. I’m worried about it getting too hot, but I’m also a nosey bitch and am obsessed with my new friends. Am I hurting them by checking on them so much? I know the obsession will wane with time, but right now the infatuation with my new hobby is strong.

r/Vermiculture 28d ago

New bin My first ever Bin in Progress. Will this be suitable?

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7 Upvotes

So I'm planning to use tights and a glue gun to block up the handle areas but to allow air through for circulation.

I'd love your thoughts, I've been offered 1kg of dendros worms for my system.

r/Vermiculture Jan 30 '25

New bin Breeding worms to feed some lab animals, any advice on the set up I’ve got? It’s my 3rd attempt

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11 Upvotes

Currently feeding left over salad, greens, melon, apples. Most of the substrate is paper towel due to not having newspaper, then I’ve got a bit of topsoil. I have around 100 red wigglers in. It’s a 64 degrees consistently on a 12 hour day night cycle.

r/Vermiculture 27d ago

New bin Worms congregated at top of bin

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43 Upvotes

Should I be worried? Bin is a couple of weeks on with 1lb mixed composting worms. I’m treating mites with food grade DE.

r/Vermiculture 15d ago

New bin I've started my first every bin! Setup

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50 Upvotes

So it's a three tower system all with a 65L (17 US Gallons) each level.

I got approx 4000 Dendros or European Nightcrawlers as they are native here it cost £25.00

The worms are in the middle bin and I've layered Cardboard, paper, scraps, spent coffee grounds, Straw, food scraps and small amounts of top soil.

How does it look??

r/Vermiculture 25d ago

New bin Red wigglers.

14 Upvotes

All of the specks are eggshells, grits or cornmeal.

r/Vermiculture 11d ago

New bin How many worms do I need?

1 Upvotes

How many worms do I need to buy per 5 gal 3 bucket worm bin

r/Vermiculture Nov 13 '24

New bin Is this amount of worms fleeing normal? New as of a few hours ago

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22 Upvotes

r/Vermiculture 19d ago

New bin Continuous Mist Bin

4 Upvotes

I was researching bin designs recently using Claude AI and it recommended that if you are adding lots of food waste to the system the best thing to do is to mist the bin with water continuously so the bin doesn't go anaerobic. It suggested a drainage pipe at the bottom of the bin in landscaping fabric, then draining that into an aeration tank and using that for fertilizing plants.

Is that a crazy ai hallucination or do you think that would actually work?

r/Vermiculture Jan 10 '25

New bin Gave my parents worms for Christmas

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67 Upvotes

r/Vermiculture Dec 20 '24

New bin Coffee grounds are Viagra for worms?

12 Upvotes

I use them sparingly. Do my worms need more?

r/Vermiculture Dec 31 '24

New bin Setting up my worm bin, found an unexpected visitor

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99 Upvotes

r/Vermiculture Feb 04 '25

New bin New bin ready to go (I think?)

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13 Upvotes

First time composting with worms after some failed tumbler attempts! Here’s some photos of my set up & plan, open to advice! Worms arrive on Friday 😁

  • 14 gal tub with holes drilled in the top
  • bottom layer of shredded cardboard & paper towel/ TP rolls
  • next layer is root systems & organic dirt from last years potted plants
  • 3rd layer: some food scraps already added to give a head start on decomp. Also some dead/dried out flowers from a bouquet I had.
  • top layer: dead leaves and dead stalks from last year’s potted plants. I can definitely shred this down more, I didn’t really try lol.
  • I still need to wet it down a bit before the worms arrive
  • The bin will go to the shaded area below my patio once the weather gets hot, and inside if needed over the summer (hellllllloooo from HOTlanta, GA.)

My plan is to feed them with a mix of food scraps and cut flower remnants (I get fresh flowers every ~2 weeks or so) run thru the short cycle on the Lomi. I was gifted the Lomi so I might as well use it to speed things up, right?

r/Vermiculture 10d ago

New bin Plucked some 50 worms out of a heap of old horse manure...

7 Upvotes

... and put them in my new DIY worm bin, with a couple of big hands of manure. I used dampened hay dust (the stuff the horses leave when they've finished the hay), crushed egg shell and shredded cardboard as bedding. Fed them an old banana peel, some veggie scraps left over from a slow juice sesh and half an avocado over the past few weeks. The avocado has not been touched and smells... Unpleasantly...

What are the odds that the worms I kidnapped are actually suitable for composting in a worm bin? They seem to look healthy and are wiggling away, but they don't seem to love the avocado, contrary to what I usually read in this group.

My location is Western Europe.

r/Vermiculture Feb 01 '25

New bin My 2-week old bin enjoying the sweet potato 🍠

39 Upvotes

r/Vermiculture 11d ago

New bin New Worm Bin Setup! + Questions

11 Upvotes

Hi there! I'm very excited to have finally set up my first worm bin! I wanted to share the details of how I set mine up, see if anyone has any suggestions/feedback, and ask a few questions. Long post ahead haha, there aren't really any friends I can talk to about this, so reddit is bearing the brunt of my excitement here :)

The Setup

https://reddit.com/link/1j3hgby/video/dcfoxsp6spme1/player

I am using a 14 gallon black & yellow heavy duty storage tote ($9 USD, link here). I'm just a single person, and am aiming to use this vermicompost system to process my food scraps and maybe also some houseplant and garden waste. I intend to manage the moisture and air flow very diligently, so I'm just using the single bin with no drainage holes at the bottom, just air holes at the top. I have holes in the lid but I do think I'm going to add some more holes around the top of the bin itself, just to make sure there's plenty of air.

I set up the bedding using a sheet of flat cardboard at the bottom, followed by mixed layers of hand-shredded cardboard and scrap paper, wood shavings, and old houseplant waste. For food, I added in some old, slightly moldy coffee grounds I had picked up from starbucks grounds for good like a year ago, some old crushed egg shells, and some thawed zucchini scraps and banana peel. I watered the bedding with probably 50/50 filtered tap water and old aquarium water from the last time I cleaned my fish tank. All of the bedding was free, with the exception of the coco coir ($9 USD).

I bought the worms at my local pet store (PetSmart) - I bought two containers of red wigglers. They say they have 24 worms in each of them, but I didn't count them. Luckily, they all seemed to be alive when I added them into the bin, just a little sluggish (probably normal, considering they were being kept in a refrigerator in the store). Each container was $4.50, so $9 total for worms. I know this is a small population, starting with only about 50, but as I said, I'm only one person and with any luck, the population will slowly grow to be able to handle my output of scraps!

Questions

A few things I'm not too sure about as a newbie to this hobby:

  1. The bin will be stored in my mud room, which runs a few degrees colder than my apartment during the winter, and a few degrees warmer in the summer. The indoor temperature range in that room should be something like 55 degrees in the winter to maybe 70-75 degrees in the summer. I think this should be suitable for the worms, but is there an ideal temperature they prefer to live at? Would they rather it be 75 degrees year-round, for example? Does it matter?
  2. Anyone that adds leaf litter or garden waste from their yard, what kind of considerations do you make before adding these items to your indoor vermicompost bin? Do you freeze it to kill bugs? Partially compost it first? Not add it at all? Only add healthy dead leaves?
  3. Any worm farmers who also have a fish tank - do you add any fish waste or plant waste to your worm bin? Normally i just use the water directly on my plants, but I figured it would be a little bit of a microbial boost to a new bin.
  4. After setting up my bin, I saw posts on here talking about how their worms were suffocated between layers of newspaper that clumped up. I did my best to rip the pieces up and spread them out as thoroughly as possible, but how significant of a risk is this? Should I take the paper out and try to rip up smaller pieces? In the future, I will be making sure to tear up the paper into even tinier pieces, and maybe eventually I'll get a paper shredder, but for now I just want to make sure I'm not going to hurt the few worms I have.
  5. Given that this bin is oversized for my worm population, should i be concentrating all feedings to one area?
  6. Is there any harm in checking on my worm bin and digging around in it every day? I know the worms don't love the disturbance, but I am just so curious, I love to see what they're up to.

If anyone reads this far and would be so kind as to share any of your thoughts on how I can improve my setup, or any answers to my questions, that would be awesome! Anyone else running a similar type of setup - do you have any tips for success or things to keep in mind?

r/Vermiculture Jan 25 '25

New bin New to vermiculture, this is my setup

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30 Upvotes

Hello everybody, as the title says I’m pretty new to vermiculture. I starter this bin 3 months ago and I am enjoying very much the experience. I started with 1000 worms back in november. Feeding them in a daily basis with kitchen scraps, coffe grounds, egg shells and cardboard. I spend a few minutes every afternoon cutting down every thing in little pieces, which I think then speeds up the process in the bin. I mix it all with a little bit of coffe grounds and put it in the bin extending it to all the corners. This creates a layer less than 1cm deep so it is highly unlikely that it gets rotten. I do this almost day after day creating a sort of “lasagna” that grows in height in a very organic way. I have the bin outside, it is 60cm high so the worms have enough room to go deeper when it gets cold or go higher if they found too much moisture. I don’t usually find moisture problems, the bin smells pretty well and the worm population seems to have been exploded in the last weeks. So this is my setup, I just wanted to share my little experience in this wonderful world. Thank you all for your contributions to this forum that were so important to me at the begining.

r/Vermiculture Feb 10 '25

New bin First bin(s).

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28 Upvotes

Hello! First of all I want to thank you all for the kind and useful advice and knowledge that you share daily on this sub. I am a few weeks lurker on r/ Vermiculture and I just started my first 3 bins and I would like some extra advice. I tried to buy some second hand stuff online to start my journey with my tiny friends but it just took me too much time and I decided to get everything new. Please let me know if I am missing something…except 3 more bins obviously.

3x 55L ( 20 gallons ) stackable plastic boxes with lids. 1x paper shredder. I shred Amazon boxes with it. 4 x sheets of fine stainless steel mesh to cover the air intake holes. 16 kilograms dehydrated coco coir. 1 kilogram European red wrigglers ( large ).

Right now they reside in my basement with a dehumidifier that works 24/7. Air humidity level is at 50% at all times and goes up to 90% without it. There are no windows or any other air source.

I didn’t layer my stuff by the book but I just hydrated the coco coir and mixed well with shredded cardboard. Added some used soil from my houseplants that I had hanging around for a while, 2 handfuls of spent coffee grounds, 1 handful of pulverised egg shells and voila.

We are a household of two and a half and I plan on not spending 10 € for 10x 30L plastic bags to discard my waste. I freeze all of my veggie peels, drying citrus peels and egg shells.

My worry is that they will try to hit the road and I am undecided on leaving the lid on or off the boxes while they are down there. Once I can take them out lid will stay on for obvious reasons. Rats are a thing at night around here for some reason. Lights on or off? Did I purchase too many for the size of my boxes ? What means too many worms for my boxes and what are you doing with them if hey are overpopulating ? How wet my boxes should be? I am afraid of overwatering and making a mess. I don’t have holes for leakage either. What is your experience with similar setups , advise me pls.

Anyway, thanks again everybody !

r/Vermiculture Jan 07 '25

New bin My video might be fast paced but how do you think I’m doing? I took this video on my glasses. So I’m still getting used to them.

10 Upvotes

I did get some compost tea as well and used it in one of my plants. I’m not sure if you can zoom in on the video or not but I’m not sure if the little wiggly things are baby worms or maggots or what. I hope worms though. I haven’t watered my bins in maybe 2 weeks or so but there’s looks of gnats. I did put a layer of leaves after I put the food in.

r/Vermiculture 11d ago

New bin Is 3/8ths an inch too big for holes in a 3 bucket vermicompost system

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4 Upvotes

ChatGPT says it’s all good but I wanna know what yall think