How to Add Food

When you start your worm system, it is good start slow. It is easy to overload the system if you are not used to it. Also, worms are only one of the many critters that make the process work, and it takes time for these other critters to start working as well. If you have 1lb of worms, add ½ a pound of food every other day for a few weeks. Monitor the food on a daily basis to see how quickly it is decomposing. If it is building up and starting to smell, stop adding food until it is gone.

When adding food, pull some of the castings aside and bury the food under 2 cm of castings and bedding. If you have no castings, make sure you cover the food with damp bedding material. Another technique is to mix the food scraps with damp bedding and wrap it newsprint. Place this food gift into the vermipost bin and cover with more bedding. If you don’t cover your food with castings and bedding, you can end up with a bit of a fruit fly problem.

To harvest the vermipost, stop adding food until the majority of it is in the form of castings. Remove the castings onto a plastic sheet and make fist sized piles. Make sure that the room where you harvest the castings is well lit. Worms hate light, so they will go to the centre of the pile to avoid it. Leave the piles out for 30 minutes to an hour and then start peeling the piles back until you reach the worms. Put the worms into a dark container and once you have them all separated, you can weigh them.

Will Worms Leave my Bin & Take Over my House?

No, if you feed them, they will stay right where the food is.

Will Worms Take Over The World if They Breed so Much?

No, worms cannot survive our winter and such will not take over our soil. An interesting fact about Canadian earthworms is that they are not native either. They were introduced from Europe.