2000 worms in my kitchen

Well the wormies have arrived! And since it was cold as "hello" today then Savannah and myself worked in the kitchen floor today building the worm farm! Well this reminds me I need to see if they are rehydrating nicely?

Yes, the wormies arrived today, yay!

As I'm holding the box I have a "girl" moment remembering I'm holding 2000 worms in this unopened box

It was too cold to work outside, so we made our worm farm in our kitchen!

 Supplies: Clear rubbermaid bin for demonstration purposes. You really need to use a dark one, red wigglers don't like light! And they do they're eating in an upwards direction. But I took the clear bin and put it into the dark blue bin after we put it together. We have cardboard, left over grocery paper bags, a bag of leaves that are in our leaf compost pile, the orange bucket has composted cow manure, a cocoa coir brick soaking in water, a bowl of kitchen compost scraps to feed the worms, and a picture of water to dampen the layers (NOT SOAK THEM). Oh and a big bag of shredded paper from my office shredder behind Savannah. I don't have newspaper so I'm using shredded paper from my office.

Placed the cardboard and brown grocery bags first. I WILL drill holes tomorrow for drainage, but today in the kitchen that would be TOO messy. The purpose of this is to keep the solids in the bin and the worm casting liquid (which you use to pour or spray on your vegetables as compost tea) will fall down past the holes for collection.

I took 1 cocoa coir brick that I ordered off of Amazon.com for $6 dollars and soaked it in water.

As you can see it starts to expand, no watch what happens in the next photo once this compressed brick is soaked in water.

Yep that's one brick. I just use my hands to fluff it up after it's water logged.

I layered a heap of shredded office paper because that's what I had. Which I had newspaper, but most people don't get them anymore, so I had to substitute. I made sure no staples, or plastic or anything.

We then took our hands and mixed the wet (not dripping wet) cocoa coir in with the shredded paper for the worm bedding. She LOVED this whole process!

Okay at this point I read the Worm Advisory that basically is telling you that the worms are pretty dehydrated from being packed in dry cocoa coir to keep them warm through their winter travels. It can take up to 48 hours until they're all re-saturated and squirming around. If not you call them and they ship you out another shipment for free as replacement. And to open this bag of worms... I used to scream the whole time, but this time I knew how to do it and not touch the worms! I'm such a girl sometimes, LOL

They're they are. Really skinny right now, but they'll plump up. I saw SOME wiggling, but they were pretty dried out. I added about 1/2 cup of water to help start saturating them. 

Here they are in the dead center. I placed their food over to one side which is what everyone says to do. They'll go to it, don't dump it on top of them and give them a chance to re-hydrated and get to moving around. Then on the right that's literately just a big piece of weeds with some sod that was in my compost pile from a few days ago. I just felt like it gave them more of a "real environment", plus the greens will die and they can eat that too! 

Okay, after the step prior I layered about 3 inches of composted cow manuer on top. I read something about it adds some microbial life to the process, so that's what I did! And you can see where we started a layer of brown leaves from the leaf compost pile.

I wet this layer down to (not drenched), but moistened. For now this is the top layer, but I will put another layer of manure for a green layer sometimes this weekend.

Here's what it looks like from the side. You can see the layers of greens & browns. Kinda like if it was outside in the soil under a tree where leaves had fallen. The wormies will eat all through this and I'll have SUPER veggies this year! Organically! 

Don't forget to put a newspaper or paper bag layer on top that is really wet. I read it helps retain the moisture. I've got this under my kitchen light encouraging the worms to stay deep tonight where they're food is and tomorrow the lid will go on and out to the garage they'll go. And I'll just keep adding compost from the kitchen into the bin to keep them fed. In the next month or so I'll have some AWESOME worm castings & worm compost tea I'll start harvesting!

Hope this helps explain what I do to get my worms started. In the spring when it warms this bin will be tossed into a much larger worm farm and I'll start more worms in here and keep it close to the kitchen. I read that worms can reproduce in numbers quickly within a 90 day period. So consider that when deciding how many wormies you start off with. You can also buy need little worm bins right off of Amazon.com which is what I did the first time. But I just have too much kitchen compost to use one of the multiple tray systems. But they're handy dandy.

ijustwannagrow