Vermicomposting

The coming of March will mark the first year of owning a make shift worm bin.  I built the bin using an old storage container. I didn't add enough holes and when the worms finally arrived, they immediately tried to crawl out because they couldn't breathe.  This lead to me leaving the lid left ajar slightly but for the most part, I have produced a large amount of vermicompost based on food scraps made by two people with a large garden.

I added the finished material into my regular compost bin outside in hopes to improve my soil in the spring. The only difficulty I have encountered is an explosion of fruitflies once, because I didn't bury the food. By the time I noticed, their population had reached epic proportions. The best solution I could find to get rid of them was to place a ziplock bag on the counter with a ripe banana. Everyday, I simply closed the bag and gleefully crushed them. After about a week, they were gone. 

I threw the worm bin outside into the garage (this occurred at the end of October) and I left it in there until mid December, until the temperatures at night were below freezing. I expect that the flies died once the temperatures were below freezing. I brought the bin back in the house, and have been fruitfly free. It is unclear as to how much this temperature change affected the worms, however, I think moving them into warmer temperatures spurred a massive spike in egg laying. Since the beginning of this month, I can regularly dig out handfuls of baby worms.

I would like to try a specialty bin, however, I'm kinda cheap. And while its kind of a pain to develop a strategic plan on how to move the finished product without removing a ton of worms, I am not producing it at a tremendous rate to make it worth upgrading. Overall, its been a great experiment and I am hoping to split the population between two bins come spring to increase production.