question will worms breakdown feather or hair

I bought 1,000 worms a few weeks ago, and they're my precious little babies 💕🪱. I have about 1,250 altogether.

I juice vegetables, so I'll feed them shredded up cabbage. I keep them in Tupperwares in the freezer and use as needed.

I'm thinking of getting another thousand, but I wonder if I'll have enough food...They eat like crazy, especially since it's so finely shredded up for them.

People who have thousands or tens of thousands, how do you keep up with their feeding? What do you feed them personally?

Hello. I've had a fairly big vermicomposting set up for a while. Around 55 cubic feet of bedding. Recently when the house I was renting needed to be sold on short notice from the owner.

During that process, the worm set up I had needed to be dismantled and the worms I saved to seed my new location were left out in an area where they got the full wrath of August/September heat wave.

RIP my second family.

So far I have been unsuccessful in drumming up any native soil friends in the dust bowl back yard where we are currently.

If anyone is nearby to or in Riverside with composting worms to soare I would love to start my hobby back up again and would appreciate you.

TlDr; My worm set up got ruined by a move and heatwave. If anyone near or in Riverside would like to help me restart I would appreciate it. Even if it is just advice on a good place to naturally source them without buying through an online seller.

Roughly 1000 worms/1 lbs is my goal but I don't mind starting small.

So I have a toddler who routinely asks for food and doesn't eat it. This morning for breakfast she wanted a PB&J. Except she didn't want it. The audacity of this kid. Homemade bread, homemade jelly and everything. Anyway, I'd have eaten it myself but she tried to pet the cat with it so now it's covered in cat hair. Can I feed this to my worms?

Thoughts? I'm interested to here how the bin differs from using it vs not using it. I currently don't use it but plan to in the future. For those who do you use it, how thick of a layer do you use?

So, I messed up and left my bins outside on the rain. Lids were on but some water inevitably seeped through and things got very soggy. Fortunately not enough to drown the worms, but many were trying to escape.

I put the escapees back in and added a ton of bedding to absorb the moisture. Is there anything else that can be done to mitigate the situation?

What are some must-have books about vermicomposting? Hopefully something that also contains info about medium and large scale worm farming.

https://www.tricityworms.com/products/vermi-future®-worm-hotel-xl-composting-bag-free-shipping-for-bc-ab

Bought this worm bag and I feel like it dries out quickly , I’m constantly spraying inside. It has a flap at the top that I keep open but wondering if closing it would create less dryness

I live in south Florida so the temperature outside stays fairly hot - 71 -95 degrees.

Any tips ? Should I keep the flap open or closed (says it controls humidity but not quite sure how - assume flap open likely is causing it to dry but in my head flap closed would cause more heat in the bag ).

Hello all !

I'm looking for some tips on how to kill worms and cocoon before (or after) pre-composting my bedding.

I use mostly materials from outside (dead leaves, pre-composted wood chips, horse manure, weeds...), no cardboard nor coco coir and the likes so my bedding contain some worms from those materials.
It's great for my main bins (mixed species) but I'd like to do the same for the mono-specific bins I'm about to start (Euros for fishing).
Ideally I'd prefer to do it before pre-composting to avoid impairing the whole microbiology that grown during pre-composting, if it's only possible afterwards that's fine tho : I'll re-inoculate it (with casting tea and other living but worm-free stuff) and let it sit for a while so the microbes can grow back.

Regarding the critters : I don't really mind them (on contrary I consider them as a valuable part of my vermicomposting system), so I mention them mostly for reference :-)

Oven or microwave cooking are not really an option (because of the volume) but freezing might be (not ideal but feasible), is this good enough ?

Anyone have an idea to avoid unwanted life in bedding made from outdoor collected materials ?

Regards,

So it's been a month, and the ENC bin is doing good i think. No smells, no dead worms, the huge population of 10 worms are happily doing their thing. So i'm definetaly not going to do anything to ruin their home :D Just watering now and then(smol colony, not enough food to water), and now and then throw some banana in there 'caue they like it. I'm not expecting a population boom, they make babbies if they feel like it, but that leads me to my question; Does a bin turn better for worms to live in over time? As in do worms turn their habitat more, well, habitable as time goes along?

Just curious that if the bin is stable, but i'd like to give them a more smexy times suitable home, should i just leave it as is, or will it just stay that way and nothing happens.

Also on that note; would adding more worms be a bad idea? As in is overcrowding only an issue if there's more worms than bin content?

I started an ecosphere for school a couple of months ago, when I put the worm in there, it was big and red like how a worm should look. Now it’s thin, has yellow dots all over, and somewhat of a paler red. I know it has plenty to snack on and the dirt definitely isn’t dry, so I’m not sure what’s happening as I’m assuming this means it’s unwell somehow??? Please help!

My wormy bois have taken up gardening. Can these sprouts be left be out should I take some sort of action? If anyone's wondering I'm pretty sure my kids have them Bell pepper and some seeds got in that way

I'm still pretty new to vermicomposting. Does this look like it's ready for me to migrate the worms out and let dry out a bit to sift?

She’s an expert at bapping any escapees. So far so good!

Do you have any idea what kind of dead worms these are?

They said you can “precompost” bones, citruses and other things with bokashi and then vermicompost them later. You cant!

You dont precompost it, but ferment it with bokashi. This material is then quite bad for your worms. Its super acidic and makes vermicompost super super hot. The smell is legendary.

It killed many brave worms.

But always after adding finished bokashi ferment, mushrooms started to grow from my vermicompost! They were beautiful, interesting and they can compost some things that worms cant

My bin has been plagued by ants lately and as a stop gap measure I sprinkled some earth around to stop the ants. Will these negatively affect the worms in any way? What if it got mixed with the substrate? Google and AI is giving me mixed results.

Used tea leaves, especially herbal tea leaves!

These are the greens that dont attract flies! You dont need to burry them like banana peels. They can never smell. They are already cut into small parts so they can be easily distributed. And they were already threaded with hot water…

My household just doesn’t wind up using enough eggs to have eggshell grit for my worm farms, so I looked online for some alternatives. I bought one bag of oyster shell flour almost a year ago and haven’t even gone through half of it yet. It’s usually the first thing to go when I sprinkle it over the compost, my worms adore the stuff! Just thought I’d give a recommendation for other people who need a good source of calcium for their bins and who don’t cook with egg that often.

Never seen this guy before. In my indoor worm bin.

Old bag that cant be used to make anything, thought about adding to the worm tower in very small amounts, but as it is self raising I guess it will have a little salt and baking soda in it. Should I completely avoid it?